Gigi Reads Romance

  I loved The Widow of Rose House and I was super excited to get a book about another member of the adorable Moore family.  Benedict, the brilliant doctor and Sam’s brother in Widow, returns to France for a conference. There he runs into the girl who had dragged him back from his grief twelve years before. The girl is now a prima ballerina for the Paris Opera Ballet. Amelie St. James has spent the last seven years pretending that she’s not being haunted by the past. Now she is being haunted by a literal ghost right when the man she never stopped loving reappears in her life. But Amelie’s entire life is built upon her saintly image, her future and that of her little sister depends on it. She needs help figuring out how to stop the hauntings. She recruits Ben since his brother Sam is an expert. She agrees to fake a relationship with him to keep the gossips from destroying her hard-won reputation.  This was a gorgeously written book. But, in my opinion, it is not a romance. Yes it has a h

The Duke of Kingsland needs a wife since his potential fiancee ditched him in the last book. His secretary, the stalwart Penelope Pettypeace is tasked with finding him a duchess. Pettypeace is determined to find him the perfect wife even though it will break her heart since she has been in love with him for years. But she's resigned to unrequited love because not only is she a commoner but she also hides a terrible secret and a scandalous past. I love Lorraine Heath. She's one of the few authors I still auto-buy. I like her authorial voice, her prose is clean and not flowery, her books are romantic, her heroes sexy and she has a wicked way with a plot twist. All of these things are present in this book. I loved the dialogue, the humor, and the revelations that even after reading most of her books I didn't see coming. I liked Penelope. I loved her strength, her directness, and the way she just told it like it was. She was also a virgin but she wasn't shy about what she w

Pre pandemic me: I will never read Mafia romance and I most definitely don’t care for daddy kink. Ew. Pandemic me: PUT IT IN MY VEINS! My old snooty dismissive self can take a hike because a mafia book with daddy kink is now one of my favorite books of the year. Fausto “Il Diavolo” is THE mafia king and no one dares double-cross him unless they want to sleep with the fishes, har har. So when a fellow but less powerful Canadian mobster owes him a  debt he repays it by giving Fausto his eldest daughter Frankie as a bride for his son, thus uniting the two families. Frankie has dreams of going away to college and finally living a normal life away from the suffocating constraints of being the daughter of a notorious mobster. So when she finds out she has to marry some dude she never met, she nopes on out of there and escapes. Experienced romance readers know that escaping heroines, no matter how plucky, never make it very far. They also know the captor will inevitably become enthralled by h