A special Halloween treat! Fresh Fiction Reviewer Miranda Owen is letting us know her favorite paranormal romance heroes!  “I’m not the big bad wolf everyone makes me out to be.” – “Rocky Ride” by Vivian Arend In general, I prefer heroes who are more Clark Kent than your typical bad boy or antihero, but there are a few amazing exceptions. My main beef with bad boy heroes is when they take on “alphahole” qualities, say or do things to the heroine that are reprehensible and can’t be easily – if at all – taken back, and use their supposedly sexy bad boy status to get away with anything. I also feel cheated if the author has the bad boy hero experience a miraculous epiphany in the last few chapters or pages of a book and completely change his personality without any believable buildup to see how the character got to that momentous change. I much prefer when an author digs deep into the psyche of a bad boy, explains his thinking, and changes his perspective and how others view him, rather than a fundamental and all-encompassing change that seems hard to believe. One of my favorite examples of a bad…

I am fortunate enough to be a reviewer, and have the opportunity to read some of my favorite author’s work early. This weekend I’m indulging myself with Summer On Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber. As I read I find myself wishing that I knew a place like A Good Yarn, and a person like Lydia Goetz. To me that is the sign of a good writer…one who puts their reader right into the story. This got me to thinking, is there a book or character who has struck a personal chord with you, and you find yourself wondering what you would do if you were a part of the book or a particular character? So while I’d love to be a part of the community who shares their lives at A Good Yarn, I’m not sure I’d be successful at the knitting aspect of it. Which book do you see yourself as part of? Is there a certain character you’d like to be? Until next week happy page turning to all. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

This past weekend I did something I can only remember doing one other time. I started a book and did not finish it. Worse yet, was the fact it was a review book. I always feel the need to finish a book I guess I have what might be considered an optimistic outlook that the book surely has to get better, thus my continued need to read. The book I was reading for review was a bound and printed ARC (Advanced Reader’s Copy) and full of typos which as you know from a previous blog I don’t usually notice, but these were so glaring that they totally prevented me from being able to get a good reading flow going. My second problem with this particular book was that the storyline seemed to go from one idea to another without any really rhythm. These two issues made me decide to ask the person in charge of reviews if I truly had to read and review this book. Luckily for me she did release from having to read this book, and I can move on to the next. Unlike what I think most people will do I think I shall put a…

When my TBR blog was posted last week I went back and read it. I was so embarrassed to have my name attached to it because of the mistakes I found where I obviously hadn’t gone back and proofread it. This got me to thinking about when I read a book with poor editing, and how it can pull a reader from the story. I recently read a galley of Overnight Sensation by Karen Foley, and I was amazed at the number of mistakes I caught. It pulled me from the story, and truly affected my enjoyment of it. I didn’t mention it in my review, because I’m confident that in the editing process the mistakes were caught, because if I were to be honest I would tell you that for me to notice it has to be blaring, so I’m positive that a professional editor or proofreader would catch the errors and have the author correct them. I have no doubt that the final copies that readers are buying from their local bookseller are perfect, and that readers will thoroughly enjoy Overnight Sensation. I am not trying to single out Ms. Foley’s work by any means, but this is…