I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into this novella, Doranna Durgin’s shortest installment in her Sentinels paranormal romance series. The description of the story makes it sound like it’s erotica, since the main character, Tayla Garrett, must be initiated by another Sentinel before she can gain full command of her abilities. And by…

Aw yeah, now we’re talkin’. Doranna Durgin’s Sentinels series, in Books 1 and 2, was only mildly entertaining me–but with Book 3, I jumped up to actively enjoying it. This time around, we have the story featuring one of the characters only passingly mentioned in the first two books, Nick Carter, who leads the Sentinels…

I liked Lion Heart, Doranna Durgin’s second paranormal romance featuring her Sentinels shapeshifters, a bit more than the first book–possibly just because I found the scenario that brought the lead characters together more fun this time around. Joe Ryan is a Sentinel in exile, believed to have been involved with the death of his former…

The first of her Sentinels series of paranormal romances, Jaguar Night is basically Doranna Durgin Does Shapeshifters. The worldbuilding is a bit thin for my tastes: you’ve got the Sentinels vs. the Atrum Core, who are two warring factions theoretically descended from a pair of half-brothers in ancient Britain, one a Druid and the other…

A Feral Darkness is hands down my favorite of Doranna Durgin’s books. There are a lot of elements to it that might file it into the paranormal romance or urban fantasy genres, though for my money, I would still call it a straightforward fantasy. Romance it’s got, to be sure, but quieter and sweeter than…

I’ve always loved Doranna Durgin’s work, although I miss her earlier fantasy novels. Her latest paranormal romance, The Reckoners, hearkens back a bit to those even as it’s squarely targeted at the paranormal romance crowd. The book starts off a bit shakily, introducing us to Lisa “Garrie” McGarrity and her team of ghost hunters, who…

I’m primarily familiar with Mira Grant, a.k.a. , through her filk music and through the folks in the Pacific Northwest who know her. That was enough of a connection, though, to make me quite pleased to hear she was pursuing a writing career, and certainly I was pleased to see that as urban fantasies go,…

With so much urban fantasy saturating the market these days, it’s really nice to see that a good ol’ fashioned fantasy novel can still show up on the shelves. Like, say, Benjamin Tate’s Well of Sorrows. Well of Sorrows tells the story of Colin, a boy who’s come with his parents across the sea to…

Much has been made of Malinda Lo’s being a “lesbian Cinderella”, and while that’s certainly true, it’s only true up to a point. If you’re familiar with the fairy tale in question, you’ll certainly see most of its familiar elements in play here: the young girl whose mother’s death leads to her father’s disastrous second…

Kate Noble’s The Summer of You is an immediate sequel to Revealed, quite literally picking up pretty much right where the previous book left off. And, as is often the way with consecutive romance novels from the same author, they involve a connected cast of characters. In this case, the heroine is Lady Jane, the…