Nicole Jordan 'To Seduce a Bride'

With genre fiction it's my experience that if you fall out of the lovely suspension-of-disbelief bubble more than once or twice, the book becomes open to regular book criticisms and will fail miserably. This can happen due to bad writing, crazy plot twists, poor characterization, etc. I think this is what makes reviewing romance novels more prone to personal opinion than reviewing non-genre fiction. What keeps you in that bubble can be very idiosyncratic.

Anyway, To Seduce A Bride was terrible. I'm a sucker for the feisty independent heroine who rides and shoots and likes books. But Heath Griffin is so unbelievably condescending and smug, yikes. He tries to convince Lily to marry him for the entire book and when he finally figures out that he can't force her to TRUST him (emphasis mine) his last ditch effort is to publish his betrothal to a female friend to jolt Lily into coming after him. NICE! I lost interest way before this point, the endless telling, instead of showing, how wonderful these two were just wore me down.

There is a relatively uninteresting subplot concerning the demi-monde of Regency London. I think the author was very excited to discover all the different terms Regency Britain had for this group.

Historical Romance 2008: 2 of 5 Cyprians.

image by Greg Tucker stolen from Salon.com

Nicole Jordan 'To Bed a Beauty'

My five year old is starting to read and while looking at the front of this book said, "Too Bad a Beauty? What book is that Mommy?" All mom romance readers must come to this point where they wonder if having all these trashy books around the house with half dressed people on the covers is really a good idea for impressionable small people. I'm not even going to touch the idea of those small people finally finding my blog, yikes.

This is one of those very decent but not special kind of books. It's heavy on the sex, light on the plot, but with a heroine who was consistently smart. At each point where the typical romance heroine would misconstrue the hero's intent or where she would typically lie to protect herself emotionally, she was refreshingly smart and honest, making me like her immensely. I didn't love the hero but I didn't dislike him which is sometimes enough.

I did have the annoying feeling that these two would not have been able to spend so much time together unchaperoned. This certainly makes the hanky panky easier to pull off but left me with that vague 'not so historically accurate' feeling which I can usually suppress. In the end the book was well written, had a terrific heroine, was an enjoyable read, but failed to jump out of the crowd for a higher rating.

Historical Romance 2008: 4 out of 5 rakish dukes.