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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Better than most., March 19, 2006
This review is from: Games of Pleasure (Paperback)
Compact, fluid writing, pretty good as romance novels go.
No plotholes that I noticed.
The sex scenes were good and steamy, and there were plenty of them.
For a couple whose affection is initially based 100% on a sexual encounter, the gradual emotional ties that develop don't feel forced at all.
Dialogue was sometimes over-the-top, as with an innuendo contest whose entries seriously stretched the imagination (see romance novels generally).
Didn't like the infantilization of the lower-class characters (again, s.r.n.g.).
Uncommonly believable motives for the villain.
It was my first book by the author, and I'm interested in seeking out more.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Pleasure of a book!, November 7, 2005
This review is from: Games of Pleasure (Paperback)
Julia Ross does it again. Her books always deliver not only a gripping story, with characters that you can root for, but a lush world to escape into. Her voice just grabs me every time. I could barely stand to put the book aside to eat!
Ryder is fantastic, a reformed prig, rather than a reformed rake. What a wonderful change from the norm. And Miracle is a perfect heroine, IMHO. She's a woman of the world who LIKES sex. Not some namby-pamby miss who has to make excuses for her choices or desires.
A keeper.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful book, February 14, 2006
This review is from: Games of Pleasure (Paperback)
Julia Ross writes some of the most beautiful romances in the genre - she has the kind of talent that would be remarkable no matter what sort of book you're reading. I think Julia Ross books are like precious jewels, rare and wonderful.
But her books are like jewels in another way: I think that the beauty of her writing, the elegance of the scenes, the wit of the conversations she constructs can overwhelm the story and overshadow the real beating heart of the romance.
"Games of Pleasure" is so rich, so full of allusion, that it seems abstract - like a fairy tale. All the characters are vivid, but they seem sort of inhuman to me. Oversaturated, larger than life.
The book is amazing. The hero and heroine, Ryder and Miracle, are amazingly well drawn, amazingly sympathetic. You fall in love with the both of them, you wish each one happiness individually, you rejoice when they finally overcome the obstacles keeping them apart. And the book is immensely suspensful; up until the very end, I was very seriously wondering if Ross was going to dash my hopes and write a tragedy.
And there is a section at the end of the book - when the Duchess of Ryderbourne delivers her opinion on the wisdom of marrying a courtesan - that positively made me crow with joy.
So it's great. All I'll say is - Ross is in a category of her own. This isn't my favorite of hers because I thought that it was ultimately too stylized.
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