Recommendsday: January Quick reviews

Just the three this month to mention – and three very different books. Well sort of. I read quite a lot last month but many of them you have already heard about – like eleven novellas in the Real Estate Rescue series…

Breathless by Beverly Jenkins

There was a big sale on Beverly Jenkins books in December and this was one of the ones I picked up. It’s the middle book in her Old West Trilogy and the one of that series I hadn’t already read. The heroine of this is Portia, an educated and independent woman who runs some of her family’s business interests. The hero is a cowboy rancher who worked for Portia’s family in the past and has just ridden back into town. He knows he’s in love with her straightaway, she’s not interested in marriage and men and this features one of my favourite romance things – kissing (or more) to try and get it out of (one of their) system(s). It doesn’t work of course and so it’s a lot of fun watching them work towards their happy ending.

It Happened One Fight by Maureen Lee Lenker

So this is a romance set in Golden Age Hollywood, which we all know is a particular favourite setting for me. It features Joan and Dash, two movie stars who are a double act – think Fred and Ginger, Hepburn and Grant etc – but who don’t get on behind the scenes. Just as Joan is finally about to get what she wants – freedom to make movies without Dash – a gossip column exposes that they’re married because: romance novel reasons. I really, really wanted to like this more than I did, but early doors I was struggling to work out how Dash was redeemable – but by the end it was Joan who was doing the awful stuff. And now you see why it didn’t end up as a Book of the Week!

Two Women Walk into a Bar by Cheryl Strayed

This Amazon Original story looks at Cheryl Strayed’s relationship with her mother in law and more particularly at the end of her mother in law’s life. I haven’t read Wild – with deals with Strayed’s trek to try and get over the death of her mother, but this has made me really want to – even though I don’t usually do grief related memoirs that much. Short but impactful.

Happy humpday!