May old friends be forgot? We don't think so! We're celebrating our favorite reads with five days of the Best of 2012. We asked our bloggers for their favorite recommendations of 2012, with one stipulation, they had to be new to them and not necessarily new to 2012. We know we got a few recommendations to add to our to be read piles and it's a great way to feed those readers!
Don't miss out on the shopping list for these great recommendations once you finish reading, and check out the recommendations from Day One, Day Two, Day Three, and Day Four, too! Click here to view the Day Five shopping list.
The Renegade Angels series by Sylvia Day.
A dark and dangerous world where vampires are fallen angels, and lycans and vampires rebel against the elite Special Ops unit of the seraphim as each race struggles for power over one another.
For far too long, Beau Brummel's cravat has held a stranglehold on historical romance! Yes, we dip our toes in books set twenty or thirty years on either side of the Regency, and some even—daringly—dabble in medievals or Westerns, but when you think of Historical Romance, you tend to think of books set in that tiny sliver of a setting known as Regency England. But no more! With the successes of Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire, and even Mad Men, and perhaps our march into the 21st century, readers are tentatively interested in romance novels filled with motorcars, electricity, telephones, short hemlines, and speakeasies. Granted, I do have a personal stake in this new trend, since I write 20th century-set romance novels <eg>, but I believe this setting is just as romantic as all of those books filled with Empire waists, scandalous waltzes, dandies, rum smugglers, and curricle races.
The opportunities welcomed by self-publishing e-books has opened the doors not only for authors who color just slightly beyond the lines, but for veteran authors to dust off their out-of-print (OOP) and/or hard-to-find (HTF) books, digitize them, spruce them up with a new cover, and upload them to any number of direct publishing programs. The list of authors self-publishing their backlists is substantial and growing by the day, but here is a short but sweet list of books I personally recommend you rediscover.
Night Hawk
As we gear up for Downton Abbey Season 2, starting to air in the U.K. this Sunday, we thought we’d offer some historical perspective on what the Downton Abbey community is facing with the onset of World War I. Let’s just say, it’s more than tea parties, social class scuffles, and finding the right eligible man to marry!
Most of the jabs directed at the romance genre by non-romance readers have to do with sex—romance writers are frustrated housewives, romance readers are sex-crazed, the books create unrealistic expectations, et cetera et cetera. In turn, most of us have been largely conditioned to hide our clinch covers, splay our fingers across such titles as Bedded by the Sheikh or The Prince’s Virgin Seduction, and passionately argue that the blurb focusing on the hero’s lusty ways and the heroine’s quivering loins are not the sole focus of the book—we’re reading them for, well, the romance!
One of the elements that draws me to the romance genre is the heroine’s story. When catch my first glimpse of a new release, my interest sharpens if the cover features a woman—or if the heroine is in a prominent position—and is further piqued if the blurb promises an intriguing heroine with a meaty conflict. In turn, I give my heroines greater leeway for unsympathetic behavior than I do my heroes, and nothing turns me off a book quicker than the deterioration of a heroine’s strength, character, and story once the hero appears on the scene.
