Summary: A nice regency romance available as a $.99 e-book.
Shattered Dreams, by Laura Landon, tells two love stories set vaguely in Regency-era England, with a little action near the end for spice. The first love story is of a perfect man (handsome, charming, titled, rich, well-adjusted, etc.) and a flawed woman (beautiful, vivacious, and titled, but also dealing a disability and accompanying emotional issues). The second is of two former lovers who were separated by a misunderstanding.
The book is worth reading if you regency romances, but it's not so great that I'll accost random strangers on my way to work and force them to read the book. I'm not that sort of person, after all. I think where it fails for me is that there are four main characters, but only one of them has any real complexity. The others are fun to read, but shallow, which ends up making the book a bit fun-but-shallow also.
My Favorite Romances with Differently Abled Leads
Reading this book did get me thinking about my what romance books I enjoyed that have a lead dealing with a disability of some sort. Here's my top 5:
Miles in Love
by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's my favorite series in general. You should really start earlier in the series, but this is the core romance part of it. It's a far future science fiction with a a brittle-boned, hyperactive, little person genius protagonist. Imagine all possible good things you can say about a book and you can assume they apply here. Yay!
Candle in the Window
by Christina Dodd. Medieval romance with a blind heroine. Actually, the hero is blind, too, now that I think about it. Well-deserved RITA award winner.
Seeing Eye by Patricia Briggs in the Strange Brew Anthology. Short story paranormal romance/adventure between a blind witch and scarred werewolf. Set in Seattle, it features secondary characters from her Alpha and Omega series
Nothing to Commend Her by Jo Barrett. Hero is severely disfigured from burns, set in Regency England. Warning, it's a bit corny, so don't come here expecting an award winner. But I really like the characters and find myself rereading on occasion to recapture the happy feeling it gives me.
Summary: $.99 e-book price and high reviews made this a tempting read, but I just couldn't get into it enough to finish the book. Meh.
Irish Moon, by Amber Scott, is a romance set in an alternate dark age Ireland where druid magic really works. I feel like I should like it more than I do. I went back to check on the Amazon reviews afterward to figure out what other people saw in it (because it has an average review of 4.5 and the only two negative reviews both said they thought the story was nice) and I still didn't get it.
So, maybe it's just me. Maybe it's a really great book but I'm just in a bad mood or not the intended audience or something. I don't know. But I did notice how just about everyone commented on how much they loved the Irish setting. So, if ancient Ireland+romance+magic is your thing, then this may be a good book for you.
Summary: Sanderson's Warbreaker manages to give a complex, epic feel to a fantasy story with a relatively modest scale. He has a deft hand with plot twists and and character development and a wildly imaginative magic/religion system. It's like he channeled the sweet love child of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Bujold's Curse of Chalion while high. I recommend it for fantasy fans. If you don't like epics then you might be turned off by the somewhat uneven and slower pace of the book's middle, but the last third of the book redeems it.
Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson, is...uhm...interesting. And good.
AND Sanderson has a free pdf download of Warbreaker available on his web site. Score!
OK, so here's the basics. Although a few characters start off in a nearby kingdom, the story is pretty much entirely set in the capital city of Hallandren. There are three main POV characters and story arcs, Vivenna, Siri, and Lightsong.
Summary: Bodyguard, a short story in the "Shifter's Unbound" universe, is a fun and sexy paranormal romance read at a great price.
Bodyguard, by Jennifer Ashley, follows sometime between the second and third book in Shifter's Unbound. I like the first two and recommend them, but if you want to use this short story to try out her writing cheaply, then you can start here without needing any of the plot from the previous books.
The setting is one where Fae (who mostly live in their own world) created canine, lupine, and bear shifters many centuries ago and enslaved them, but the shifters broke free and lived in hiding in our world since then. Shifters are clannish, long-lived, and don't mix with humans as a rule. About thirty years, they were discovered by the human world, which didn't react well to the news. In the US, where this is set, that meant they were rounded up, put in government-created shifter towns, and are treated to prejudice and discrimination by most people, laws, and businesses. They are also all required to where magic collars developed by the Fae that shock shifters when they get violent.
Summary: The first in the Elder Races series, Dragon Bound takes a supernatural type that I usually hate and makes it totally work. It's a funny, sexy, well-paced, emotionally true romance set in a well-imagined, creative alternate reality and spiced up with great action and rich secondary characters. Five stars *plus* a purple heart-shaped rhinestone spangle sticker. I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats! I'd read it again.
Dragon Bound, by Thea Harrison, kept popping up in my recommended list on Amazon. It was highly-rated, but by an author I'd never heard of, charging full-price, and had a premise (dragon finds soul mate) that seemed destined for gag-inducing cheesiness. It didn't seem worth the risk. But like an infestation of mold, it wouldn't go away. So eventually I tried out the "Click to Look Inside" and started reading and got totally hooked. Because it's just that good.
It starts with Pia (heroine) going on the run after she steals from Drago (hero), the dragon shapeshifter. He soon catches up to her, but he finds himself intrigued and decided to keep her instead of killing her outright. They get caught up a series of adventures while they fall in love. HEA.
The story is has no real weakness and many strengths, but what really bowled me over was that it has a dragon shapeshifter as the main character and it was completely authentic. OK, here's a little interlude with
My Theory on Paranormal Romances
As a broad generalization, paranormal romances can be split into a categories based on they male lead's supernatural species and its real-life analog.
Werewolves and other shapeshifters are muscle-bound, physical, loyal, (usually family-oriented) but with a real wild side. Essentially, they're extreme versions of bad boys from the wrong side of town.
Vampire and demons are selfish, decadent, ancient, sensual, and baaaaad. Usually the heroine is their redemption. Basically they're a souped up version of the amoral celebrity/rich townie, which tells you why vampires and werewolves rarely get along.
Elves and other fae are magical, powerful, and pretty. They're either idealized metrosexuals Prince Charmings, complete with hunky sauce and rainbow sprinkles.
Immortal warriors are devoted to fighting for a cause. They're mystical SEALs with swords. Yum.
Humans don't stay that way for long - at some point they sprout fangs or get injected with mutant virus or something. They start off as well-trained demon-slayers and true-love-to-supernatural-woman types, but basically this fills the underdog/everyman role which is usually not what you're looking for when you read paranormals. So a book or so in, they morph into something else or are are superceded by another character.
Angels are definition-of-good authority figures with occasional punish-wrong-doers duties. I'm not saying "daddy-issues", but I'm just saying.
Writing likable, authentic point-of-view characters takes skill. Doing so when the characters are supernaturals is tougher, because it shouldn't feel the same to be inside their head as it does to be inside a human's head. Someone, for example, who has been eating people for the past 250 years is going to have unusual emotional reactions to things. And that's why I think dragon shape-shifters are particularly prone to feeling unbelievable.
Dragons. They're what you get when you want someone wilder than a werewolf, more ancient than a vampire, more magical than an elf, and more alpha and a better fighter than all of them put together.
Because they're even more everything than all the other supernatural types put together, they're that much harder to make believable. But Thea Harrison, the genius, pulls it off. And she doesn't cheat by calling them dragons but then ignoring the things that make dragons dragon-y. No. HER dragon is as old as the solar system, a secretive, solitary, carnivore who hoards treasure, flies, and breathes fire. Shazam! She make's Pia's race work too, but telling you what that is is a spoiler (albeit one that you'll guess before Dragos does), so you'll just have to wait to see.
More in the Series
Dragon Bound
Storm's Heart: A thunderbird shapeshifter and a 300 year old dark fae princess - she makes them work too!
Serpent's Kiss: An immortal gryphon shapeshifter and the 1,000 year old Vampire Sorceress Queen - and it works too!
Oracle's Moon: A djinn demon prince and the oracle - not out yet, but I have it on pre-order
Summary: A decent suspense romance at a great e-book price.
Run Among Thorns, by Louise Lucia, is in the espionage thriller end of the romance spectrum. The premise is that before the book begins, Jenny (heroine) is in a hostage situation that starts to turn ugly. She springs into action and kills all the attackers handily.
A government agency assumes she's some sort of super spy, but can't find any info on her, so they call in a specialist interrogator Kier (hero) to break her down and find out her secrets. His method involves whisking her away to a remote location and spending a lot of up-close-and-personal time with her, which is where the romance part of the suspense romance kicks in. Of course, she's not a spy, so although he starts out with his campaign of breaking her down emotionally, it doesn't go according to plan.
Summary: In their third "Edge" series book, Ilona Andrews delivers another well-crafted contemporary fantasy romance story with clever world-building and wonderful characters surrounding around sweet-and-chewy center of Happily Ever After. *Sigh*. If you like this genre, then read this series and this book. They don't disappoint.
In case you haven't read Ilona Andrew's Edge series, then the premise is that there are three analogous worlds side-by-side. The Broken is the contemporary no-magic real world we live in. The Weird is a sophisticated, high-magic world with an alternate history resulting in countries like Old Gaul and the Democracy of California. Connecting the two is a patchwork of lawless, lower-magic lands called the Edge. The first two books were set mainly in the Edge in Appalachia and the Mire (Louisiana swamplands) respectively, but this one is a bit different in that the characters travel through multiple areas, mostly on the West Coast, so the setting lends a little less texture to the prose than in the other two books.
by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's my favorite series in general. You should really start earlier in the series, but this is the core romance part of it. It's a far future science fiction with a a brittle-boned, hyperactive, little person genius protagonist. Imagine all possible good things you can say about a book and you can assume they apply here. Yay!
by Jennifer Ashley. OMG, autism spectrum disorders never sounded so sexy as in this regency.
by Christina Dodd. Medieval romance with a blind heroine. Actually, the hero is blind, too, now that I think about it. Well-deserved RITA award winner.
Anthology. Short story paranormal romance/adventure between a blind witch and scarred werewolf. Set in Seattle, it features secondary characters from her Alpha and Omega series
by Jo Barrett. Hero is severely disfigured from burns, set in Regency England. Warning, it's a bit corny, so don't come here expecting an award winner. But I really like the characters and find myself rereading on occasion to recapture the happy feeling it gives me.
: A thunderbird shapeshifter and a 300 year old dark fae princess - she makes them work too!
: An immortal gryphon shapeshifter and the 1,000 year old Vampire Sorceress Queen - and it works too!
: A djinn demon prince and the oracle - not out yet, but I have it on pre-order