Ah, the romance... Sigh...

Written by: Milda Harris

Ah, the romance novel. They're definitely a guilty pleasure. I do like them, though. I admit it.

In the last few weeks, I have read a variety of romances, all of them, amusingly enough, on my Reading Challenge List. I kicked things off with a couple of Harlequin Romances - Rescued by Mr. Right and The Goodbye Groom. Then I moved on to a gothic romantic mystery by Victoria Holt called Seven For a Secret. And, soon hope to move onto a romance/mystery written in the 1960s called Window on the Square by Phyllis Whitney.

And, since Caroline and I have vowed to write up reviews as we plow through the last few months of the Reading Challenge, these are my reviews of my latest romance novel conquests. :)

I do not regularly read Harlequin romances and had purchased the ones I read recently in preparation for the nanowrimo challenge in 2006, where I wrote a romance. I didn't get around to reading them before I started the challenge and since I have been thinking about rewriting my manuscript, I thought it was a good time to dive into the Harlequin romances I owned (Plus, they're on my Reading Challenge list! A big bonus!). They were easy, quick reads about normal people falling in love...even  if the circumstances of their meetings were a little unconventional. In Rescued by Mr. Right, a Silhouette Romance, the hero breaks down outside the heroine's house and funny enough, she is looking for a boarder to rent a room to and wouldn't you know it - romance ensues... In The Goodbye Groom, an American Romance, the heroine meets the hero after she's been jilted at the alter by his brother! She wants his help in finding his brother, so that she can confront him and again, romance ensues... Both of these books did what they promised to do - tell a story of falling in love. Although, looking back, as a reader, I think I tend to like a little more spice/romantic suspense in my novels than those two offered. That's okay -  there's about 30 other subtypes of Harlequin romance novels that I can still sink my teeth into and, yes, they do have a supernatural line, if you just thought about vampires.

And, I definitely like gothic romances, so I was excited to read Seven For a Secret. It was an interesting jaunt to that era, but it wasn't what I expected. The romance was mediocre and the plot was soap opera-ish in that there was: a pregnancy out of wedlock, an attempted rape, a suicide, a shooting murder, a long-lost father, a wife thought dead who wasn't, babies switched at birth, etc. I'm not kidding. All of this was packed into 370 or so pages. It was insane! I still enjoyed it, but I had hoped for more out of it - I felt like it had real potential at the start. When I read romances in that vein, I find I am always looking for the next Jane Eyre and this was not it.

Although, none of the above has hit my all time favorites list, it's definitely still been fun research! And the research continues - next on my list is Window on the Square by Phyllis Whitney - another romantic/suspense.