I love history, especially British and European history, but the Vikings and their era have never been one of my main areas of interest. I knew comparatively little of the history of Viking Norway, Denmark, Greenland, and (most importantly for this book) Iceland. But Nancy Marie Brown’s Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them held my interest from start to finish.
In Dusk, Night, Dawn, Lamott writes of giving and finding love, hope, courage, and forgiveness, even when we ourselves, like those we want to love and forgive, are messy, imperfect human beings. Written in 2020, during the pandemic, and published in 2021, the book touches on Lamott’s response to the many terrible things occurring in the world: climate change, wildfires, the pandemic, and the rising tide of authoritarianism
The third Penhallow brother meets his match in The Wedding Witch! A delightfully funny, slightly spooky witchy romance, perfect for the season.
The third book in Mercedes Lackey’s Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, Fortune’s Fool is an enjoyable if eclectic remix of a number of fairy tales. Lackey takes a wide assortment of elements drawn from Russian, eastern and northern European, Japanese, and Middle Eastern folk and fairy tales, and mixes them up, higgledy-piggledy… and it works surprisingly well.
Mary Robinette Kowal makes good use of the historical “year without a summer” in the third book of her Glamourist Histories. As Britain remains locked in winter’s grip, Jane and her husband Vincent are in London to work on a glamour commission for Lord Stratton, an Irish peer. Hearing that her sister Melody is melancholic and realizing there are few marriageable men near home, the Vincents invite Melody to stay with them. Melody’s growing affection for Stratton’s son, Mr. O’Brien, is complicated by Jane’s suspicions of the young man, and by the public’s growing belief that coldmongers are responsible for the unseasonable weather. Meanwhile, Jane and Vincent must contend with his father’s relentless cruelty and ambition, as well as a shadowy plot that threatens O’Brien, the young coldmongers, Jane and Vincent’s very lives, and even the British government itself.
I love this gentle romance, which explores how two people, through sheer politeness, respect, and upper-class British reticence, end up in a conventionally distant arranged marriage instead of the affectionate, loving union they both desire… and how they eventually find their way to the real marriage they long for (with a little outside help from an unexpected quarter.)
Amanda Quick’s books are always fun, and I plowed through Wait Until Midnight in two sittings. I particularly enjoyed Caroline’s career as writer of serialized “sensation novels,” which were extremely popular in the Victorian era. Adam has an interesting backstory as well, though to my regret, it wasn’t really developed as well as it could have been.
When a company of soldiers are quartered at a war widow’s farm, they bring with them a prisoner… and a threat to her safety. The prisoner is one of her land’s most fearsome enemies, so why does Roe find herself sympathizing with him? When a Dragon Comes Courting is a slow-burn, poignant dragon-shifter romance.
I enjoyed Hideaway just as much as I did the first time I read it. However, it doesn’t quite rise to the “favorites” level, in part because Hideaway is lighter on both romance and suspense than my favorite NR books.
The Love Remedy is a well-researched, sensitively written novel that delivers a moving romance while avoiding most of the usual historical-romance tropes. I loved it!
