What are your personal favorite romance novels? They don’t have to be the best ones you’ve read (although they can be). Which ones do you go back to again and again, and really, truly love?
Here are some of mine, in no particular order:
1. The first three books of Loretta Chase’s Carsington Quartet: Miss Wonderful, Mr Impossible, and Lord Perfect. (They don’t need to be read in order.) I read Mr Impossible first and ended up dropping everything to finish it the same day – then re-read it two days later! The next day, I went into town and bought every Loretta Chase novel on the bookshelf in Borders, even though I was broke. I was obsessed!
Mr Impossible is set in 1820s Egypt with a sweet-but-dumb hero, a brilliant scholar heroine, and a fabulous adventure plot. It’s basically “The Mummy” with more romance and (alas) no magic. (Even my husband liked this one! And Patrick is not a romance reader.)
Miss Wonderful is a romance between a sensitive, romantic dandy of a hero and a pragmatic heroine who’s been running a massive estate for years and has no time for romance. I’ve read it at least four times in the last few years, and it makes me happy every time.
Finally, Lord Perfect is about a perfectly responsible, utterly respectable politician hero who ends up running off in a crazy adventure with an entirely disreputable (and fabulous) heroine who has one of the best daughters ever. (Really. Her daughter is hilariously awesome, and I was so happy to also read Chase’s later novel, Last Night’s Scandal, about that daughter all grown-up and causing trouble. It was really fun, unsurprisingly.)
I’ve never loved another Loretta Chase novel quite as much as I love these three Carsington books, but these three books…oh, I love them SO much!
2. Georgette Heyer…well, duh. 😉 (My Kat books are basically a big Austen/Heyer homage!) Again, I don’t love every Heyer novel, but I enjoy almost all of them, and I love a lot of them.
My individual favorites keep on changing over the years, but The Talisman Ring is almost always my top favorite. (Smugglers! A fabulously romantic young heroine who’s based all her ideas about life on Gothic novels, and a smart older heroine who’s even MORE dangerous! Not to mention a great hero to match the older heroine. He starts out stuffy and becomes just perfect.) Right now, my second favorite is probably Faro’s Daughter (best battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedy EVER!), but I also really love the sweet, foppish beta-male hero of Cotillion and the writer-heroine of Sylvester, and, and, and… 🙂
3. Nora Roberts’s In the Garden series, starting with Blue Dahlia. (This series really does need to be read in order.) Three strong women build a strong, supportive family of friendship at the same time as finding their romantic partners AND dealing with a very freaky ghost, almost-as-freaky gossip, and gardening that’s so lushly described, it even made me want to try gardening again. (And I am NOT a gardener, to say the least!)
Now that I’ve said that, here’s the really, really embarrassing part. I picked up Blue Dahlia in the library for unbelievably snobby and elitist reasons. I picked it up, all those years ago, ASSUMING that it would be terrible dreck (I don’t even know why – just because she’s so popular, maybe? yes, I’m cringing as I type this), but thinking “Well, so many women love her books, I ought to force myself to read one just to analyze what she does right”.
I took it home, I sighed heavily as I picked it up, I rolled my eyes as I turned to the first page…and then I stayed glued to the couch until I finished it, because I COULD NOT STOP. I bought a copy of the book to keep later that week, after buying the second and third even faster, because I NEEDED to read the other women’s stories. Needless to say, I did no professional analysis whatsoever. I just devoured them all, I have re-read every book in the trilogy again and again, and I’ve been a huge Nora Roberts fan ever since.
(Guess what? If a ton of women love her books – that’s probably because they’re really good. Surprise?)
What about you guys? What are your personal favorites?