Tessa Dare
Any Duchess Will Do
Avon / May 28, 2013 / $5.99 print, $4.99 digital
What's a duke to do, when the girl who's perfectly wrong becomes the woman he can't live without?
Griffin York, the Duke of Halford, has no desire to wed this season—or any season—but his diabolical mother abducts him to “Spinster Cove” and insists he select a bride from the ladies in residence. Griff decides to teach her a lesson that will end the marriage debate forever. He chooses the serving girl.
Overworked and struggling, Pauline Simms doesn't dream about dukes. All she wants is to hang up her barmaid apron and open a bookshop. That dream becomes a possibility when an arrogant, sinfully attractive duke offers her a small fortune for a week's employment. Her duties are simple: submit to his mother's “duchess training”... and fail miserably.
But in London, Pauline isn't a miserable failure. She's a brave, quick-witted, beguiling failure—a woman who ignites Griff's desire and soothes the darkness in his soul. Keeping Pauline by his side won't be easy. Even if Society could accept a serving girl duchess—can a roguish duke convince a serving girl to trust him with her heart?
Romances based on fairy tales have enjoyed a new surge of popularity recently, but in her fourth Spindle Cove novel, Tessa Dare gives readers an anti-fairy tale romance in which hard work and self-respect are the route to happiness, and love is the only magic anyone needs. Pauline Simms is no passive Cinderella sitting amid the cinders waiting for a prince to rescue her. She is a “mud-spattered, sugar-dusted, smart-mouthed serving girl” wearing not rags but “drab linsey-woolsey.” Instead of a wicked stepmother and an absent father, Pauline has an apathetic mother and a brute of a father who is willing to sell her for less than five pounds. Instead of shallow, selfish stepsisters, Paulina has Daniela, a loving sister with special needs.









My love affair with the novella began when as an undergrad I discovered I much preferred “Bartleby the Scrivener” to Moby Dick and “The Dead” to Ulysses. Part of the attraction of the literary novellas was the length, of course, but as I branched out into novellas in romance fiction, I found other advantages. Not only could I read a complete novella while waiting for soccer practice to end or while my students were doing their department-mandated in-class writing, but I could also try new writers with a minimum investment of time. I reserved a special shelf for keeper anthologies and expanded my auto-buy list with authors I first fell in love with through novellas.
On July 20, 2013, at the Awards Ceremony of the 33rd annual conference of the Romance Writers of America, 
Try changing the point of view from first person to third person in the opening of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and you will understand the power a first-person narrative can have. I doubt that the opening sentence would be among the most famous in American literature had Melville written “His name is Ishmael” rather than “Call me Ishmael.” Or imagine Jane Eyre without the pervasive presence of Jane’s consciousness. The reader’s understanding not only of who Jane is but also of Rochester and other characters would be quite different if the story had been told in a different point of view, as Jean Rhys shows in Wide Sargasso Sea, her deconstruction of Charlotte Brontë’s classic text.
We all know how important clothing is in real life. It functions as a primary means of nonverbal communication to inform a watching world about who we are. Clothing can reveal—or sometimes conceal—gender, class, occupation, age, economic status, and group affiliation among other things. How often have you heard people define themselves or others in terms of their clothing? An actress describes herself as a “jeans and tee shirt kind of girl,” and the public understands a great deal about how she sees herself, or at least how she wants the public to believe she sees herself. One man mocks another for being a “Brooks Brothers type,” and we draw conclusions about both the mocker and the object of his mockery.
Alison Kent
Susan Mallery
When offered the chance to propose a “core curriculum” for historical romance, I eagerly accepted, knowing full well the problems I would have narrowing the list to a reasonable length. After long consideration, I have a list (in chronological order)—not of my favorites (although some are books I cherish) but rather twelve books (thanks to a gracious editor who allowed me to include two beyond the desired maximum) that seem to me to be “foundational;” that is, they either illustrate a convention or trope fundamental to historical romance (representative book) or mark a significant change in the subgenre (unique contribution), and they all provide rich material for discussion on key issues.
Vicars appear regularly in romance fiction as secondary characters. Who can forget Jane Austen’s clergymen—the obsequious Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, the vain and greedy Philip Elton in Emma, the admirable Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park? Less memorable is the worthy vicar in Georgette Heyer’s Arabella whose character is best revealed in the values he has imparted to his daughter. Heyer set the precedent here as in so many ways; vicars in popular romance are most commonly fathers or, somewhat less often, deceased husbands of the heroines. A quick count of just my personal catalog yielded more than seventy historical romances that feature a vicar’s daughter or a vicar’s widow.
In the spring of 2008, I received a rare you-must-read-this email from my friend PJ. The book she was urging me to read was The Duke of Shadows by 
If I could fill a Christmas basket for each of you with my favorite Christmas historical romances of 2012, I’d include a book for each day of Christmas week: four new releases and three reissues.
If I were headed for a desert island and were allowed to take only one Christmas romance, I’d take one by
One of the first new Christmas books I read this year was Mischief and Mistletoe, an anthology that includes stories by eight romance authors who blog together as the Word Wenches. They are (in the order in which they are listed on the cover) Mary Jo Putney, Jo Beverley, Joanna Bourne, Nicola Cornick, Anne Gracie, Patricia Rice, Cara Elliott, and Susan King. It’s an interesting collection on several counts, not least because this is a gifted group of writers. Among them, the Wenches have written 231 novels and 74 novellas, made every bestseller list in the genre, and amassed a string of awards that include several RITAs and one RWA Hall of Fame inductee (Jo Beverley). 










