Jane Litte's Blog, page 48

REVIEW: Artfully Yours by Joanna Lowell (x2)

Dear Joanna Lowell,

This is the second time we are reviewing your most recent romance here at DA. Layla reviewed Artfully Yours back in February. She told me it was her favorite of your four most recent romances and what can I say, even though I thought Dark Season was middling and couldn’t finish The Runaway Duchess, hope springs eternal and I checked Artfully Yours out of the library, hoping it would be as good as The Duke Undone, at least. Well, I agree with Layla: it was better.

Alan De’Ath...

REVIEW: A Dangerous Education by Megan Chance

Dear Megan Chance:

I first became a fan of your work with your unusual and dark romances written in the 1990s. Since you’ve transitioned to historical fiction, I have read a couple of your books, and appreciated the different settings and subject matter in each one. You certainly don’t write the same book twice!

I was drawn to the blurb for A Dangerous Education right away:

A reformist teacher. A dangerous student clique. A powerful novel about secrets and redemption set in the shadows of McCar...

REVIEW: In the Lives of Puppets by T. J. Klune

In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots—fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They’re a family, hidden and safe.

The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled “HAP,” he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio–a past spent hunting humans.

When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio’s for...

Review: Station Eternity (The Midsolar Murders #1) by Mur Lafferty

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At f...

REVIEW: The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.

Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousan...

REVIEW: The Baker’s Daughter by D.E. Stevenson

Review

This is – as one ought to say when one is in an art gallery – interesting. But despite the fact that there is a happy ending to the romance, it’s not all that romantic. No, it’s more a character study of a small Scottish village and some of the people in it in 1938 told via vignettes. It may be a small village but it has some drama and secrets. Things are hinted at and clues are provided but Stevenson left the reader to decide on what truth to believe about these secrets.    

A stranger ...

REVIEW: The Frog Earl by Carola Dunn

Escaping into the countryside to nurse his wounded pride and heart, Simon Hurst encounters the lovely but eccentric Mimi (half English, half Indian and all mischief) who promises him three favors—then only grudgingly doles them out. If he can capture that last one—that kiss—before she learns the truth about his identity, he should transform into an earl once again.

Dear Ms. Dunn, 

I got this book, first published in 1992, unaware that it has a few issues that some readers might find unappeali...

REVIEW: A Bulletproof Ground Sloth by Pat Spain

“This is the scene everyone will remember,” is how the director described the bullet-ant ceremony moments before Pat Spain took his place in the line of initiates. If online views, memes, family parties, and talk-show mentions are the measure, he wasn’t wrong. The Tucandeira ceremony of the Sateré-Mawé is known as the most extreme ritual in the world, and Pat agrees with that assessment wholeheartedly. After hosting hundreds of hours of wildlife-adventure TV programs, Pat is no stranger to the...

REVIEW: Honey for Tea by Elizabeth Cadell

Jendy Marsh was worried about her sister Nancy. Six weeks before her wedding day, Nancy had broken off her engagement to Allen Harvey and gone away to Spain. Nancy and Allen were the two people Jendy loved most in the world, and there was so little she could do to help them except wait until she was needed. Delightful tale of romance and heartache, and happiness at last in an English village and under Spanish skies, with as engaging an assortment of characters as you could hope to meet.

Revie...

REVIEW: Untethered Sky (x2) by Fonda Lee

Dear Fonda Lee,

Your novella, Untethered Sky, begins when its main character, Ester, a would be-rukher (handler of rocs), is given one of the huge and powerful birds with incredible hunting capabilities. Ester is successful in training Zahra and once the bird completes her first kill of a manticore, she is officially made a rukher. The monstrous manticores prey on humans and nothing but a roc can kill a manticore. Therefore the bond between a roc and a human is crucial.

Each roc is bonded with...