This time of year is one of the busiest for teachers!!!

I have been such a slacker!! I need to get my posts done for Say You Love Me and The Present. I did read them, as well as several books for #rollbackweek.  I didn't keep up with my reviews or anything because I was really just having too much fun reading!! But, I need to get it together and get back to slowing myself down a bit!
I hope everyone is having a fun time prepping for the holidays!!

Not quite so magical...at first

Description courtesy of Goodreads.com:
As wild and reckless as the most incorrigible of her male cousins, Amy Malory has reached a marriageable age and has set her sights on a most inappropriate mate: the straight-laced American ship captain who once nearly had her Uncle James  hanged for piracy.

Warren Anderson is shocked by the brazen advances of his despised enemy's beautiful niece. Though determined to resist her, he burns for the enchanting British minx. And an impassioned heart implores him to surrender to a love that could stoke the smoldering fires of a family feud into a dangerous, all consuming blaze.


This one took me a re-read (or two) to really appreciate it.  I guess that I fell into the double standard of "It's okay for a man to go for what he wants, but not for a woman to do the same."  Now granted, I very much go for what I want in life and the vast majority of my female friends do as well; it's just that for some reason, I didn't want to read about it. But that may be a topic for a different post in the future.

But once I got over it, I really did enjoy this story.  Amy knows enough about love and desire that it doesn't always make sense, but she's young enough to appreciate the fight without really allowing her hopes to be dashed to bits.  And we all know that Warren goes above and beyond to encourage her to give up on him. But that youthful optimism won't give in, and I'm so glad that it didn't.

One thing that I really did like about this story was that the intrigue didn't really take away from the romance and relationship building.  Yes, it was a central plot point because of the situation it led to (trying to stay spoiler free), but at the same time it wasn't a huge focal point.  I think that is one of the things I love most about Johanna Lindsey's writing- regardless of what is going on around them, the relationship between the hero and heroine is always the central focus.

Bad Boy Gone Good...Though He Won't Admit It!

Thank you, Goodreads, for this:

Heartsick and desperate to return home to America, Georgina Anderson boards the Maiden Anne disguised as a cabin boy, never dreaming she'll be forced into intimate servitude at the whim of the ship's irrepressible captain, James Mallory.

The black sheep of a proud and tempestuous family, the handsome ex-pirate once swore no woman alive could entice him into matrimony. But on the high seas his resolve will be weakened by an unrestrained passion and by the high-spirited beauty whose love of freedom and adventure rivals his own.

When I was younger, I had a huge crush on cover model Fabio, and picturing him as James Malory always brought a smile to my adolescent face. Thinking of Fabio still makes me smile, but now, thanks to my new friends over on FB, I have a new face to imagine when I think of James...

But even if I didn't have such a handsome man to visualize, just the character of James Malory is amazingly sexy.  So desirable that women chased him?  So bored with society that he became a (gentleman) pirate? Snarky and sarcastic?  Sign. Me. Up.

And what can I say about Georgina, er, George?  She more than holds her own against the jaded aristocrat and shows that if anyone can tame this rogue, it's her!!

(Let's not forget that now we also meet those Anderson boys!!)

#RollBackWeek

I am incredibly excited about the upcoming #RollBackWeek that is being spearheaded by Under the Covers.  I am one of those eternal optimists that believes I'll have all the time in the world to read.  So I keep buying and hoping and yeah, my towering TBR has become this:

Thanks to several new friends from the Old School Romance Book Club -yeah, I'm looking at you, Lady A!- instead of working on making this pile smaller, it has grown to epic proportions.  

The lovely ladies at Under the Covers are obviously suffering from the same dilemma and decided to take one week of each month and dedicate it to whittling away at the stack.  No re-reads, which means I will have to do my The Magic of You post ahead of time, and no books published within the last two months.  

Since I am off for the entire week of Thanksgiving, I decided that I am going to shoot for a total of 9 books - 6 historical fiction and 3 young adult.

For my historical fiction fix, I am going to (finally) complete Alexandra Hawkins's Lords of Vice series. I mean really, just look at these covers:

I bought my first of these at a thrift store and discovered it was book 7 before I started reading it.  I searched for the others, read book 1 All Night With a Rogue, then promptly got distracted by something else.  So, starting on November 24th, Till Dawn With the Devil will be on my currently reading list, to be followed by the others.

As for my YA reads, I can't wait to finally complete the Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan. I read The Lost Hero and Son of Neptune, but I am so impatient between books that I decided to wait until the final one was out.  But I now own all of them, including a couple of British versions and I am looking forward to completing this series as well.