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are taken from books I myself love, and heartily recommend you should read. Every month readers discuss the current review on the Bulletin Board -  it's my own Book Club! Please feel free to join in or comment here. And do check the archives!
~ Eloisa

 

 

Loving a Lost Lord by Mary Jo Putney

July 2009

Mary Jo Putney is a brilliant, original writer. She doesn’t stick to the beaten track, rehashing the clichéd plots that we’ve all heard a millions times before. Instead, she tackles the hard stuff of life – alcoholism, spousal abuse, prejudice – all those things that ignorant readers of Literature think you can’t find in a romance novel. When I encounter one of those skeptics, the ones who think that romances are nothing more than bedroom farces, I hand them Mary Jo’s The Rake or The Spiral Path.

I was so delighted to find she was writing a new historical series! Loving a Lost Lord is absolutely wonderful. It is the first in a series about English lords who all grew up at the same boarding house due to their reckless, unconventional ways. Perfect! I love them already.

But while the premise is terrific, this book goes far beyond the promise of a rakish hero. Adam, Duke of Ashton, was torn away from India as a child, and brought to England to train for his position as duke. Now, years later, he’s become the perfect duke – until he loses his memory in an accident and wakes up in a strange house.

That house belongs to Miss Mariah Clarke, a young lady in desperate need of a husband. So when Adam wakes up, she promptly tells him that they’re married. The rest of the novel is enchanting and incredibly romantic. Adam is torn between his first culture, that of India, and his second, that of England. Never truly at home anywhere, it isn’t until Mariah begins unfolding the complexities of his personality that he is able to find peace in himself.

But once his memory is recovered it turns out he’s engaged to a proper young lady. And Mariah takes a look at the grand ducal mansion and realizes that she’s not duchess material.

They have to fight, not only to be together, but to bring Adam’s worlds into balance - and they win when Adam realizes that “he felt as if he had come home for the first time in his life.”

This novel will leave you with a lump in your throat and a smile on your face. It’s utterly wonderful and not to be missed!

~buy this book~

By Eloisa Posted in Historical Comments (0)

 

It Had To Be You by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

May 2009

 

I’m always being asked which novel is my favorite. For goodness’ sake, people, that’s like asking me which of my two children is my favorite! The only possible answer is: the book that isn’t whining at me at the moment – i.e., any novel that’s out of my computer, out of copyedits, out of proofs, and safely on the shelves. I have huge fondness for all my printed heroes and heroines. I miss them, especially the heroines. By the time a book is finished, each of my heroines has become my girlfriend. She talks to me in the middle of the night. She says all the snappy, funny things that I would like to say but never remember in time. She tames her husbands! OK, enough said there.

It’s a lot easier to say which book written by someone else is my favorite. It Had to Be You is my hands-down favorite of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s books. I adore this novel, from the moment it opens (when Phoebe Somerville’s poodle pees on her father’s coffin) to the moment it closes (when Phoebe realizes that she’s just engaged in an intimate act squarely on the 50-yard line of a huge Sports Dome).

The novel takes place in Chicago, starting when Phoebe has to come back from New York for her father’s funeral. She brings with her a nervous poodle (see above) and a gorgeous Hungarian lover. Everyone is outraged – and that outrage only grows when it turns out that her father has left her his football team, the Chicago Stars. No one is more annoyed that the Stars’ head coach, Dan Calebro. He’s just the sexist, big type of man whom Phoebe loathes, and the feeling is mutual. Dan has been spending his time looking for the perfect wife, and he thinks he’s found her in a sweet-faced kindergarten teacher. He’s got no time to waste on someone like Phoebe, a woman with “a bad girl’s body, the sort of body that…could just as well have been displayed with a staple through the navel as hanging on a museum wall.”

But this novel isn’t a standard Opposites-Attract novel. Both characters have deep and complex personalities, rife with complexities and problems. Phillips unfurls each person with such adroit care, amid flurries of hilarious dialogue, that the reader hardly notices before she’s utterly fascinated by Dan and Phoebe. This is a brilliant, deeply romantic, deeply felt, deeply sexy book. Do not waste a moment if you haven’t read it – you have such a treat in store for you!

~buy this book~

By Eloisa Posted in Contemporary Comments (2)

 

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

April 2009

~buy this book~ 

I still remember discovering Susan Elizabeth Phillips – which happened to me, oddly enough, through an English bookstore in Florence, Italy. This was years ago. It was early evening and hot as the blazes (that was before my husband and I succumbed to installing air conditioning in his mother’s Italian apartment). So I was lying on a hot couch, drinking a gin-and-tonic, and reading SEP. And laughing. I laughed so hard that I fell off the couch and my husband accused me of drinking too much, thereby instigating a marital quarrel…

He was so wrong! I was drunk on one-liners and It Had to Be You. It’s still my sentimental favorite, but I have to say that plot-wise, Nobody’s Baby but Mine is the best. The heroine is a genius physics professor, Dr. Jane Darlington, who desperately wants a baby – but she absolutely does not want that baby to end up a genius like herself (as she spent her childhood and adolescence left out of children’s games and viewed as a weirdo). Now my take on this is that if I were a genius, I would roll with the punches… but hey, obviously this is one of those “don’t grouch until you’ve walked a mile in her shoes” kind of thing. So Jane decides to get pregnant – with someone stupid. That’s right: stupid.

Here’s where pop culture and genius collide: from the point of view of academics (and as an academic myself, I can assure you that this is pretty much true), where does one find a population of men who exhibit reckless disregard for life and limb, thereby signaling a marked lack of intelligence? On the football field, of course!

So Jane ends up a “special present” to Cal Bonner, the Chicago Stars’ top quarterback. At first things don’t exactly work out. Cal thinks Jane is (ahem) a good-time girl, and Jane’s skills in that area aren’t exactly top-notch. But one thing leads to another, and Jane gets exactly what she wants.

You’d think a genius would know that life is never easy. That actions have consequences, etc. But no… anyway, Jane and Cal end up together, fighting and making love. It’s hard for Jane to accept Cal’s degrees, once she learns of them…even harder for Cal to accept Jane’s stubborn, brilliant nature.

This is a wildly funny novel – don’t miss it! Make yourself a gin-and-tonic, warn your husband beforehand, and throw yourself on a couch.

By Eloisa Posted in Contemporary Comments (8)

 

 

 

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