Biblio Reviews

My latest attempt at falling in love with a romance came with reading Sophia Nash's  The Once and Future Duchess  (2014). I'm sorry to say I did not fall in love and will need to court more authors.  The Once and Future Duchess  tells the story of Isabelle Tremont, the Duchess of March, and James Fitzroy, the Duke of Candover, who are among a special group in the realm who have received missives from the Prince Regent to get married. While James (30) intends to disregard Princy's demands, Isabelle (18) uses it as an opportunity to propose marriage to James, whom she has been in love with since her preteen years.  Problem is, James isn't keen on marrying Isabelle because of their age difference and a promise he had made to her dying father. The story of how these two end up together is filled with other characters and back stories that make this story, for me, a hot mess. To make sense of  The Once and Future Duchess , it seems like the reader needs to h...

Found in nearly every corner occupied by a sitting or lounging furniture in my apartment are small stacks of paperback historical romance novels. Though they are still prominent in my living space, they represent a seemingly long lost period for me, one in which romance novels offered escape into an idealized, long-gone era and presented a world inhabited by sophisticated and gallant heroes and unconventional heroines. So what if the heroes and heroines were bound by strict societal norms and habiliments? Their chemistry and love for each other would help them overcome! There was a time when I would and could binge-read historical romances at the expense of developing conversational skills. In every purse was a novel that served as a buffer against idle chit chat. I would spend no more than a couple of days reading them, so voracious was I in reading these historical romances. It comes as a surprise, then, that I cannot remember when my consumption of these books stopped. Maybe it was...