During ‘Heroine’s Week,’ we’ve learned that as readers, we expect and search for different things in and from the heroines that we consider our favorites.  They might be someone we admire, someone who we wish to be or someone who we want to know, and even possibly someone in whom we can see just a bit of ourselves.  They can be fallible or perfect, timid, strong or somewhere in between

But the fact that the genre we all love has room for all of them, speaks volumes about its depth and the available body of work.  Thank you, from all of us at RNTV, for making ‘Heroine’s Week’ such a success.

I’m not the sort of reader who tends to relate to the heroine of most novels I read.  I think it’s mostly because the reaction of most heroines to the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in are so unlike what mine would be.  And so it is a rare thing and a momentous occasion when I do actually find one.  I have found a few: Ilana Hamilton from Susan Grant’s ‘The Star Princess’, Amanda from Lisa Kleypas’ ‘Suddenly You’ , Alicia Lawrence from Celeste Bradley’s “Seducing a Spy” and…Percy Parker from Leanna Renee Hieber’s “The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Percy Parker.”

Percy Parker? Yep.  Absolutely.  Why?  Well, she blushes, stammers, and tries to be invisible in a crowd of people that scare her, like in this scene:

Sitting near the back, Percy…

Reviewed by Stacey Agdern
Publisher: Dorchester
5 Stars

What makes a good writer is how they choose to tell the substance of their story; in essence, the style of their work. The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker can be commended not only for it’s substance, but it’s style as well.

Leanna Renee Hieber makes a conscious choice to tell the majority of Percy’s story in the limited third person perspective of two of the main characters:  Percy herself, and Mr. Alexi Rychman, the intended hero.  But in limited third person, as with first person, a writer is restricted to knowledge that their point of view character has.  That means that a great deal of events are taking place outside of either character’s point of view.  And in most cases, this information is…

Two Sides to Amnesia:

A Comparison of ‘Loving a Lost Lord’ by Mary Jo Putney and ‘The Wild Road by Marjorie M. Liu

by Stacey Agdern

Loving a Lost Lord, Mary Jo Putney: 5 Stars

The Wild Road, Marjorie M. Liu: 5 Stars

Amnesia is a plot device which has been used in Romance Novels through the years with varying affects. But using amnesia doesn’t necessarily dictate either the plot or the message of a story. In fact, two relatively recent books by two different authors use amnesia to discuss two completely opposite themes. ‘Loving a Lost Lord’, Mary Jo Putney’s brilliant return to Historical Romance, uses amnesia to emphasize the idea of a return to home and family. On the other hand, ‘The Wild Road’ Marjorie Liu’s evocative 8th novel in her Dirk and…

True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
4.75 Stars
Reviewed by Stacey Agdern, romance reader and Ranger Fan

When they signed their deal with Harlequin, NASCAR noted that “40 percent of its estimated 75 million fans in the United States (were) women”.  But what about the NHL, where it is reported, that anywhere between 33 to 44 percent of its fan base is female.

What we do know is that there’s enough of a female fan base for the Washington Capitals to have formed the first official female NHL fan club.  It also seems there is enough of an understanding of female sports fandom in general to allow what I consider the very first ‘NHL’ Romance to be published.

Before she became part of the Harlequin-NASCAR alliance, Pamela Britton wrote a book about stock…

Review of Turning Japanese by Cathy Yardley
4.75 Star

At its core, Chick Lit is a genre of stories about young women and their ups and downs, told in a witty and brilliant first person voice.  They are both fun and thought provoking in equal parts.  The same goes for the best of shoujo manga.  They can be romantic stories, but they’re stories of dreamers and fighters, who happen to be young women.   So when I got the chance to review a book that promised to mix the two of them, I jumped at the chance.

Cathy Yardley’s ‘Turning Japanese’ is the story of a young woman who gets the chance of a lifetime.  Her manga is chosen as the winner of a contest where the prize is an internship at a Japanese…