Midsummer Moon

Rating:
Summary: My favorite book of my favorite author!
Review: I don't care what the others thought. I still believe this to be THE best of Kinsale's books. The inventor was just SO smart that she invented things to improve HER life (such as the talking box aka phone) and never considered that others would find it a miracle. Once her invention works, she forgot it and went on to the next. She was not absent minded or dense. She was just so smart she moved on.

This is my all time favorite of Laura Kinsale's books. That is saying something since Laura Kinsale is my personal all time favorite author!

I can hardly wait for "Enchanter" to come out within the next year!

Rating:
Summary: I really liked this book!
Review: I've read lots of other reviews for this book, and most people don't like it at all. Conversely, books other people adore, I either find mediocre (like A Knight In Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux) or downright hateful (like The Flame and The Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss). I'm a big Laura Kinsale Fan; I have yet to read a book by her I didn't like, but I have to say, this is one of my all-time favorites.

Maybe it's because it's one the best "funny" romances I've ever read. People like Jill Barnett, Rebecca Paisley and Geralyn Dawson have written historical romances with a decidedly humorous bent, with ditzy, sweet heroines and forbidding, stern heroes. For some reason, all the books I've read by the authors above have irritated me. Midsummer Moon is the one of the few humorous romance I've been able to thoroughly enjoy. I found Merlin's absent-mindedness hilarious without verging into ridiculousness, and I thought the chemistry between her and Ransom was wonderful. I also loved the fact that Ransom finally gave up trying to change her--it's significant that Merlin finally gave up trying to resist him only then.

But is it a particularly realistic book? No. Will the liberties taken with scientific fact irritate you? Perhaps. Will Merlin irritate you? Maybe. But as far as "humorous" romances go, I say this is the best I've read so far, and it's one of my favorite romances from a very talented author.

Rating:
Summary: Worth a Second Look
Review: OK, I'll admit - my absolute favorite thing about this book is that the real hero is Merlin's pet hedgehog. Oh, there's a human hero, of the usual tall, dark and handsome type, for love interest - but it's the hedgehog who really saves the day. He's a perfectly natural hedgehog, not an anthropomorphized animal - he just does his hedgehogly thing. As the human slave to three pet hedgehogs, I got a great kick out of him.

Let's see. Merlin hasn't invented quite as many things as Ayla (you may remember Ayla, from the "Clan of the Cave Bear" series - Ayla domesticates the horse, Ayla domesticates the dog, Ayla invents the slingshot, Ayla invents the sewing needle, Ayla invents the cotton gin - no wait, that was someone else...) but she has her share - the telephone, and, more importantly to the English forces arrayed against Napoleon, the hang glider.

This is the only romance novel I've ever even tried to convince a guy to read, and the guy liked it. He missed a bit, not being as familiar with all the "conventions" of Regency era romances as most regular readers of them are, but he still enjoyed it.

My tastes in romances are pretty particular- I have high standards I demand of the writing, and clumsy or poorly written books turn me off. Kinsale will never fall into that category - she, along with a precious few others - Mary Balough, Edith Layton... writes well enough that if her books weren't pre-stigmatized as romances, they'd be among our better-written novels by contemporary novelists.

Rating:
Summary: A Story to treasure again and again
Review: The characters in this early Kinsale are totally individual and there are quite a few eccentrics running around. Ransom is wonderful...totally besotted but very stiff and British in a way that comes accross as refreshingly accurate rather than an exagerrated charicature. He also has his touching well hidden flaws -including a phobia about heights which causes some really believable conflict with the aviatrix/inventor heroine. I could not believe some of the other reviewers found the emotion in any way lacking - I thought it was wonderful and really intense. Kinsale is in my top 5 author list and I loved this book and have been re-reading it on and off since I bought it about 7 years ago.

Rating:
Summary: A fair book
Review: This book did not impress me as much as her other books. I got the book eventhough many people have reviewed the book saying that the heroine was annoying - I should have listened!

In my opinion she was annoying because she seemed so unintelligent for someone who's supposed to be a great inventor (I presume Laura Kinsale was going for the whole absent-minded professor kind of thing). Plus she really took a lot of flack from Ransom - all along he discouraged her dream (i knew he had reasons so it was ok) but then he destroyed her lifelong dream and she still let him trample all over her? If I were her I would have beat him up or at the very least gone away! I did like the other characters in the book - Ransom, his brother Shelby and all the others were very well written, and they managed to pull the book together.

If you have not read Laura Kinsale before I'd recommend you to NOT start with this book - perhaps "The Shadow & The Star", "The Hidden Heart" or "Uncertain Magic".