Biblio Reviews

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...

Catherine Coulter's Night Storm  (1990) was my first. I was a freshman in high school, and it happened in Civics class. "Girl, you gotta read this!" a classmate exclaimed. She  grinned as she beckoned  me to read a sizzling passage from the novel. Fourteen and innocent, I could not believe that such eroticism existed in the pages of books that were readily available at my local library.  After such temptation, I could not wait until she  finished the book to lend to me, so after school, I walked down to my local library to get my copy. I consumed it within a couple of days, read the other two books in the Night  series, and began my love affair with reading romance novels, in particular, and reading, in general. Membership into the Harlequin book club quickly followed. (How I found the money to retain my membership remains a wonder to me because I did not work throughout high school.) I spent every waking hour reading the  Harlequin  Pre...