Biblio Reviews

It was sometime in the last seven to ten years that I first read Jane Austen's Persuasion  (1818). It was during the summer, I think, after I fully acknowledged and accepted the charm and greatness of her stories.You would think that as an English major I would have been familiar and enthralled with her and her work, but truth be told, I had abstained from reading many of the "classics" which tend to be very Eurocentric.  In regards to Austen, in particular, I was required to read Pride and Prejudice (1813) for the first time my freshman year in college. The professor was certainly a fan of Austen and the novel and gave away everything. My professor, however, analyzed the novel for us to the point that I didn't even have to read it to write a major essay on it. In fact, the introductory paragraph to that essay remains one of my best and favorite to date. (I don't remember the details, just that the first sentence was beautifully phrased and encapsulated Austen...

I think I should approach cheap romances available on Amazon written by new-to-me authors with "Lowered Expectations" (cue music from said segment from In Living Color) . Had I taken that approach, I wouldn't have felt as cheated as I did after reading J. Sterling's 10 Years Later  (2015) which I expected to be a sentimental second-chance romance about first love lost and found after having read the sample chapters downloaded on my Kindle. 10 Years Later  started off promisingly enough with the alternating first person perspectives of Cammie (a radio producer) and Dalton (an undercover cop), high school sweethearts who lost contact after a fallout at the end of their senior year but who had been pining for each other ever since. Ten years later, their high school reunion provides them with the opportunity to reconnect. The story was interesting up to the point when they reconnected at their reunion. Everything after that point is irrelevant because there is NO PLO...