Jane Litte's Blog, page 8

REVIEW: Buried Too Deep by Karen Rose

Dear Karen Rose,

Cora Jane Winslow’s father disappeared when she was nearly five years old, 23 years ago. She, her brother and her mother, believed that he had run off with another woman. Cora had been receiving letters from her dad on and off for years. But two weeks before the book begins, Cora’s father’s remains were found in the foundations of an old building. He’d been shot and killed 23 years earlier. But… who were the letters from and, who broke into her house and what were they looking fo...

REVIEW: The Thing About My Uncle by Peter J. Stavros

The thing about my uncle was that I hardly knew him. Uncle Theo kept to himself, some would say he was a recluse, and by all accounts, that was how he preferred it. I couldn’t precisely recall when I had seen him last in the flesh. I just had a foggy recollection from when I was little, like a grainy home movie with cracks and skips and frames missing…

Although ten years have passed, Rhett Littlefield has always blamed himself for his father abandoning him and his family. When the troubled fou...

Trope Actually, the 2024 Romance Writers of Australia conference

The Annual Romance Writers Australia** conference was held in my home town of Adelaide over the weekend of 17 and 18 August. So I had to go. It’s the rules.

(**Romance Writers of Australia uses the acronym RWA over here. Of course, RWA in the US means something different, so for ease of understanding, I will refer to Romance Writers of Australia here as RWAus and (the late) Romance Writers of America as RWA (US).)

I’m not an author and it is a writer’s conference so a lot of the presentations ...

REVIEW: Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail

A captivating reimagining of the intrepid woman who – 8 months pregnant and with a toddler in tow – braved violent earthquakes and treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River and redefine America.

It’s a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt—daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a...

Review: The Mars House by Natasha Pulley

A compulsively readable queer sci-fi novel about a marriage of convenience between a Mars politician and an Earth refugee.In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. There, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger-a person whose body is not adjusted to lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, ho...

REVIEW: Road Trip Rivalry by Mona Shroff

The road to romance begins with…one wrong turn.

Researcher Poorvi Gupta is desperate to reach her medical conference in Dublin on time to secure grant funding with her presentation. But when her flight is diverted due to bad weather, Poorvi agrees to share a rental car with a fellow passenger—a man as hot as Madras curry…and just as vexing.

Ophthalmologist Kavan Shashane is traveling to Dublin to head off a researcher whose study puts his family’s practice at risk. Until then, he’s content to...

REVIEW: Holding Out For A Gyro by Mary Ann Marlowe

If you’re really lucky, you have a best friend who pushes you to do the stuff that scares you. We have this whole thing where we challenge each other to take some (calculated) risks and do everything we’re terrified to do. Of course, when you avoid love at all costs, that means doing the unthinkable: being vulnerable.

So for one night, I’m going to be completely and brutally real about who I am…to a complete stranger, whose mischievous and ridiculously dark eyes promise all kinds of trouble. I’ll...

REVIEW: Shadow Fox by Carlie Sorosiak

A beautiful story of loss and belonging, all told through the eyes of a wild, affectionate, prickly fox who has a love of collecting shoes and not a small amount of magic. From the bestselling author of I, Cosmo.

Bee’s family runs a lakeside inn, offering rest and sustenance to weary travellers. Bee’s Nan has gone missing, possibly drowned, but Bee knows that can’t be true. And so does the hungry fox that her grandmother was feeding. Shadow is cross that her supply of fish has dried up and is ...

REVIEW: Viscount in Love by Eloisa James

I have not regularly read historical romance, for the past, oh, several years (probably more years than I realize, to be honest). My book log shows that I read eight historical romances in 2020 (this once would have been a paltry number), and since then I’ve only read one or two a year; this reading has consisted entirely of one series by Julie Ann Long.

So, I started Viscount in Love with a little trepidation – would the issues that drove me away from a subgenre that I once loved rise up to an...

REVIEW: The Game Changer by Embassie Susberry

Sometimes making history means breaking some rules…

This is a gripping historical fiction novel about bravery, hard work, the quest for success and two women’s stand against prejudice in all its forms.

New York, 1950. Ambitious journalist Hettie Carlin is reeling from a scandal and desperate for a scoop to salvage her career. When her boss tasks her with covering the meteoric rise of Althea Gibson, the tennis world’s newest star, there’s just two problems: Hettie knows nothing about tennis....