Hopefully you all won’t mind my humor, because it’s a great series and has made Katherine Lowry Logan a very successful independent author. This one is definitely heavier on romance, and the heroine is a little (a lot) over the top, so I poked some fun at it, still giving it 4 stars. I love time travel books, but I prefer those that lean more towards the historical than romance/sex. I must explain myself before I post my review. The Ruby Brooch is the first book in Katherine Lowry Logan’s extremely successful Celtic Brooch series. Today I’m looking at a review I did years ago, back in 2013, and it’s my actually my most popular review on Amazon. Self-Published Saturday is my attempt to help self-published and independent authors with one of the many tasks they have to handle on their own–marketing.
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Publisher Note: This book was originally published elsewhere in 1979. Instead, Roger and Leonie found love and reasons to live-if they could escape exposure to the revolutionary fanatics and their favorite toy, the guillotine. Perhaps he was hoping for the peace death brings when he set out to wrest his old friend Henry de Conyers from the murderous grip of the French Revolution. By the time she died, Roger felt dead himself. Solange did not love him she was selfish and vicious and extravagant. Eyre’s life had been destroyed by the girl he fell passionately in love with. Did Leonie dare to believe in such altruism? Roger St. And her father died in an escape engineered by a stranger who claimed he had come to bring her to England where she would inherit the property and wealth of an uncle. Her mother and brother died in the prison where she had been raped and starved for no greater crime than her father’s title. Leonie de Conyers’ life had been destroyed by the French Revolution. The English Heiress Roberta Gellis Blush: This is a sensual romance (may have explicit love scenes, but not erotic level). Her flowery prose draws readers into the forest but does not leave them snarled in the trees, as can happen in some historical fiction. Essex does well in leaning into this emotion to entice readers through the gilded halls of her novel. There’s something nostalgic and romantic about this period that still resonates with people hundreds of years later. On the whole, Leonardo’s Swans allows reader to immerse themselves in the turbulent, heady, and even sordid days of the Renaissance. The two sisters complete for supremacy in the illustrious courts of Europe, and Isabella vows that will not rest until she wrestles back her true fate and plays temptress to the sensuous Ludovico and muse to the great Leonardo.ĭespite her machinations, Isabella’s wish for immortality seems part of a distant future as da Vinci prevaricates and as Italy’s ever-shifting geopolitics threaten both her and Beatrice’s security. The elder sister, increasingly unhappy in her marriage, desires the lifestyle Beatrice has, including access to da Vinci.Īs author Karen Essex writes on the book jacket: Sforza and Isabella share common interests and skills: art, political acumen, ambition. Miniature of Beatrice d’Este, Giovanni Pietro Birago, 1494 | ©British Library, Add MS 21413/Wikimedia Commons Jade Fire Gold tells the dual stories of Ahn, a young woman who finds her life completely upended, and Altan, a former prince, as their lives and missions completely and unintentionally converge.Īhn is an orphaned young girl living with a kind stranger in a small outskirts town, who is uprooted suddenly when she discovers that her father is a very senior ally to the royal family that desperately needs her help to solve an age old problem. I’m kicking myself for leaving it unread on my shelf for so long when I knew how much I was going to love it, and I’m very happy that I finally got round to it. First of all, thank you to Hodder for the eARC of this incredible book, and SORRY to Hodder for taking so ridiculously long to pick it up. “That’s ridiculous,” Jack thinks, “Ma was never in Outside.” It’s a telling moment, both because of the limits of the boy’s imagination and the precociousness of his thinking, his ability to conceptualize the world (such as it is) around him and give it an interpretation all his own. With Jack, however, the question of confinement becomes more nuanced, since he has no experience of “Outside.” Early in the novel, Ma tries to explain “There’s more things on earth than you ever dreamed about,” she says. And yet, like Sebold, Donoghue has other aspirations than merely to see if she can pull it off.Īpparently inspired by the experiences of Elisabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard - both of whom were held for many years by captors (in Fritzl’s case, her father) by whom they bore children - she has said that to frame this story through a mother’s eyes “would be too obviously sad.” Of course, it is a gimmick to have a 5-year-old narrate a novel, just as it was for Alice Sebold to write “The Lovely Bones” from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who had been raped and killed. Push too far in one direction and it becomes a gimmick, too far in the other and it grows obscure. As to why this is important, “Room” depends entirely on voice to be successful, and voice is a fragile thing. |