First, I’d better explain what a keeper is. I remember how the little stack of paperback novels in my bedroom as a teenager slowly began to be a bookcase worth of books, and then another, and then another. Even though I am a lifelong library patron (currently a proud carrier of cards from five library  … Read more

Several months ago, someone praised us on this blog for publishing romances between characters who are not merely blandly typical white Americans. The praise was a little more than we deserve, perhaps. We haven’t gone out of our way to produce edgy romantic pairings, for instance. But it’s true that we’ve featured a number of  … Read more

There is a typical romance scene that appears in ranch romances and in some historical romances, too. The heroine takes a nude dip in the old swimming hole. And the hero comes by and catches her. He either embarrasses her and makes her beg for her clothes, or he joins her and seduces her on  … Read more

Sixteen years ago, I acquired a romance by a favorite author, Linda Howard, and put it on my bookshelf. Yesterday, I finally read it. What the heck happened? I’ve got one American classic, Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, that has been on my to-be-read shelf at five addresses in four states. But that’s a book  … Read more

Allow me to gush. I finally finished watching the last season of “Sex and the City” on DVD, and then headed out for the cineplex to see the movie of the same name. Since I was there nearly two months after the well-hyped opening, I saw it in a theater that had two other women  … Read more

I just read the prettiest, sweetest book. It was a Harlequin Ginger Blossom manga, an adaptation of a Debbie Macomber novel that first appeared in the US as part of their Silhouette Romance series, their sweetest and least overtly sexy line of romances. Such sweetness and lack of sexual detail has become so unpopular in  … Read more

I finally broke down and watched the British miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. On romance blogs, people are always sighing over Colin Firth, the actor who played Mr. Darcy in the series. Of course, my own prior knowledge of Colin Firth comes from seeing him wear that hideous Christmas  … Read more

Maybe you think that the romances we all consume are completely without any agenda other than boy meets girl. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are plenty of social messages in romances. Probably the most visible message in recent years is about women who are in abusive relationships or running from them. Wife-beating,  … Read more

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the romance world about the current fashion of publishing romances with titles like “The Millionaire’s Pregnant Mistress” or “The Greek Tycoon’s Revenge,” or “Bought by the Sheik.” In fact, these titles are so distinctive yet repetitive that I may be quoting real ones here or fake ones.  … Read more

Here’s something I bet you never realized. Romances with happy ever after endings are a very modern concept. There has been a lot of discussion in romance land lately about how boring and stultifying it is to always have a happy ever after ending. But romances didn’t always end happily and they didn’t always get  … Read more