Billionaire Heir

Tradition can be a comfort and help run a functional and mainly happy family. And it can be disruptive and lead to a highly dysfunctional family when circumstances conspire against it. This is the scope of conflict Lucy Monroe is exploring in The Maharajah's Billionaire Heir. This modern romance is off topic, entertaining, and not what you expect at all.

Alaskan Heatwave

Join me in an excursion to Alaska to follow the shenanigans of Lucy Monroe's characters in her modern romance. Modern romance is not always a happy genre; many really bad authors have done loads of damage to it. But this is Lucy Monroe, no categorizing necessary. Let's get into the nitty-gritty of Hot Alaska Nights.

A Marquis, a Dog, and Cows in London Parks

Cows in London's Park are nothing new or revolutionary, as much as councils may try to make it look that way. There were cows (as part of the amusements offered) there in Georgian time. Georgette Heyer's heroine finds that out to her chagrin when she takes her oversize dog walking one day. And that is just one of the many scrapes she and her family get into.

Summers in Maine

Take a trip down memory lane to long summers spent at the camp or at the family house on the coast. The memoir is lovingly built and gives a believable and charming picture of family summers spent in Maine in the 1960s. Up to the point where tragedy strikes and the reader encounters the dark side of backwater America.

Literary Trolls

If you think that writers or authors are a happy family, think again. They may be part of one big writing family, but the family can be highly dysfunctional. Authors are in fact able to be vitriolic in their abuse of other writers albeit with some style. Unlike the often incoherent mutterings of common internet trolls, their comments come with truly horrendous barbs, sharp like scalpels, and honed like harpoons.

Three Generations: The Forgotten Garden

Pan Books published The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. In it, she tells the stories of three women in search of their roots covering a hundred years of family history. While two of them were displaced by no choice of their own, the third is set upon her quest by her grandmother to solve a family mystery.

Heligan Gardens

Poking Fun at Book Critics

Rupert Thomson has written a novel under the title of a memoir. He is out to take book critics for a ride. As far as I was able to find reviews, he was extremely successful even though plot, style, and hyperbole used are a dead give-away. But the book offers much more than schadenfreude at the expense of hapless professional book reviewers.