I get asked advice all the time by beginning romance writers. “What can I do to get published?” they ask me, their faces strained with earnest passion. “If I write every day…If I take twelve writing courses…If I pay for an editor?” They want me to tell them the secret handshake, the formula, the way to get that prized book – and I can’t.

The truth is that the secret formula is so individual that it can’t be passed on. What an author needs is an incantatory mix of old and new, of surprises and romance. To be published – and stay published – a romance author needs to have an individual footprint. Her own way of writing. Think about one of Teresa Medeiros’s books. Now think about one of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s book. It’s almost as if they were totally different species, both wonderful in their own way, both mapping out a different terrain within the way men and women fall in love with each that is absolutely theirs, created by an imprint as individual as their own voices. Can you imagine SEP writing a book about a charming witch? Or Teresa Medeiros writing a book about a contemporary football player?

People are always describing the secret as a “voice.” To me, it’s not only a question of voice. One area that Anne Gracie is staking out as her own, from what I’ve read, is a funny, sweet romance that has a truly dark undertow to it. In other words, these novels rocket from being near farce – to suddenly dealing with very serious subjects indeed. And they deal with them in an unflinching manner. For example, in The Perfect Waltz, the hero believes that his little sisters have been abused. Right there the book turns on a dime: from farce, froth, delicious sexual innuendo, to something deeper and more subtle.

The Perfect Kiss has everything of the earlier Perfects – and more. It’s my favorite in the series. A good deal of the time she engages in a deft, hysterical parody of Gothic novels (which happen to be some of my favorite childhood reads!). But put together the huge gothic castle, the cobweb-strewn gargoyle, the brooding hero returned from former parts – and add in the signature Anne Gracie touches. The heroine’s best friend is not only falling in love with the hero (possibly) – but engaged to him. The heroine is carrying a knife in her boot and has good reason to feel unlovable. There’s one moment when the heroine sighs and says to herself: It was all getting horribly complicated.

But not for the reader – in which case, all those horrible complications, and all the fabulous Gothic-esque characters, and the surprising moments, are fabulous, funny and totally entertaining.

~ buy this book on Amazon ~
~ buy this book on Barnes & Noble ~