The green grass of home

REVIEWS BY BARBARA SAMUEL

Community as a grounding point is at the heart of a great deal of women's fiction and romance. One such community is the Shenandoah Valley in Emilie Richards' Shenandoah Album series, a world where there is honor and truth, where human beings—though often flawed—at least try to give their best. In Touching Stars bed-and-breakfast owner Gayle Fortman takes in a guest she cannot turn away: her long ago ex-husband and the father of her three sons. Gayle has built a strong and satisfying life for herself on the green banks of the picturesque Shenandoah River, raising her three boys and building a business to be proud of, and she even has an amicable and mature post-divorce relationship with her ex. Eric Fortman is a charismatic television journalist who breezes in now and again. But when he's taken hostage in Afghanistan and escapes, he has to heal from his mental and physical wounds, and Gayle wants to give her sons time with him. The trouble is that she has never really divorced the man she thinks of as the love of her life. Quilted with the piecework of a number of surprising and colorful storylines, Touching Stars examines the ways we are who we are and how we make our choices—and how rewarding that can be.


A gathering of guardians

The rules of magic create a community of their own. The always adept Mary Jo Putney brings us a darkly atmospheric and moody tale in her second Guardians novel, A Distant Magic. Jean Macrae, the daughter of a Guardian, has traveled to Marseille for a wedding, where she is kidnapped by a tortured pirate, Nikolai, who claims to have made a blood oath against her father for a long-ago crime of betrayal. Jean is herself of Guardian blood, though she finds magic painful to use, and yet that magic tells her that the haunted and bitter Nikolai might be vulnerable to the love of the right woman. Written in Putney's elegant style, A Distant Magic is a highly romantic fantasy novel woven with multicultural chords and sharpened with commentary about slavery and the slave trade.


An engagement of convenience

Community standards certainly held sway in the Regency period, the setting for the effervescent How to Engage an Earl by Kathryn Caskie, the second in a charming trilogy about three sisters. Anne Royle believes she is the dullest woman around—why else would she be treated as though she were invisible? Too bad she can't really be invisible, for she's found in a compromising position with the notorious rake the Earl of MacLaren with all of London's best looking on. There's only one solution: an instant betrothal, which Anne assumes they'll nullify once the hubbub dies down. MacLaren has other ideas—one of which is to prove that a rake can be made a gentleman. As the pair begins to genuinely fall in love, the complicated secrets of a generation past threaten to steal away the possibility of happiness. The plot has refreshing twists, and the characters are a fine lot, but it is Caskie's clever writing that makes How to Engage an Earl such a sweet escape.


Standing up for yourself

In the appealing, adorable Candy Kisses by Jean C. Gordon, Candy Price is burdened with a community of brothers who all think they know what's best for her—and she'd love to prove them wrong, but first she needs to figure out what the right choice is. Stuck in Albany for the summer with only her landlord, the very handsome and cheerful Mike Wheeler, she decides to take on a challenge: She's going to find Mike a new girlfriend and, in the meantime, they can share pointers on the dating scene. Candy is about to find out what love is all about, but first she has to learn how to stand up to the boss who takes advantage of her all the time and learn to let other people help her. Candy Kisses is an upbeat romance about two good people who need to make that love connection.


Barbara Samuel has written more than 30 novels. She blogs regularly about books, food and travel at www.awriterafoot.com.

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