What I'm Reading: Remember Love - Mary Balogh

I don't read many real romance novels. Genre romance, that is. I found Mary Balogh because I'd run out of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer books and was looking for something else that was Regency. I tried a few different authors but nothing was a good fit for me. I think I came to them from the wrong direction so they just didn’t feel right.

Then I found Mary Balogh. I think I've read almost everything she's written now, including her category romances and short stories for Christmas anthologies. Her books are pure pleasure, a warm bath of reading. I can tell when I read her that she loves Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer as much as I do but she isn’t just an imitator. She brings herself to all her book. There’s a Balogh-ness to them of decency and realism and humour. I like that her characters talk to each other about their problems, they try to figure out how to makes lives with each other even after causing each other pain.

My favourite book of her, The Notorious Rake, has as self-loathing a hero as you could ever find and a heroine tangled up in fear and dislike and pity. I read it again not long ago and still loved it. Other books of her that are also wonderful are: The Secret Pearl, Tempting Harriet, Dancing With Clara, and Slightly Dangerous. I generally prefer her standalone category books to her later series books but they're all worth trying because her writing is reliably lovely.

Her newest book, Remember Love, was gorgeous with lots of achy, Balogh longing and characters who have to come to terms with their own failings and judgement of others. Bit of a slow burn to start off with and it's the first of a series so other characters are being set up to have their stories told in the following books but very enjoyable just the same.