Smart Bitches reviewed A Lily Among Thorns!
I don’t know if I can really even explain how exciting this is for me. But here’s an excerpt of the email I wrote SBTB when I submitted Lily for review, back when it was rereleased by Samhain in 2014 (I hope Sarah won’t mind my sharing it):
I still love your blog, but sometimes I forget that back when I first discovered it, the only other person I regularly talked to who read romance was my mother. She could snark like nobody’s business, sure, but SBTB was the first time I felt like part of a romance community. [I] remember vividly many happy hours snort-laughing over cover snark and that incredible feeling of “Finally, people who get it!”
SBTB gave me the confidence that maybe there’d be a market for what I was writing, that not every romance reader was committed to only reading the type of hero that was in almost every historical at the time.
I was already working on the book that would become (some time collecting dust under the bed and a millionty rewrites later) A Lily Among Thorns, and I fantasized regularly about seeing it reviewed on Smart Bitches. Of course by the time it came out in 2011, Dorchester was being boycotted by a lot of bloggers including SBTB–which I actually thought was awesome, btw, so please don’t think I’m complaining. I reluctantly gave up on that fantasy.
And now it’s there! It’s really there! And they liked it!
Serena is my favourite character in the entire book…Watching her try to balance all of the plates she’s spinning is simultaneously stressful and delightful…whether the book is showing her first awkward attempts at friendships or having her in perfect control of a dangerous situation.
…I was so invested in the romance working out and in Solomon’s recovery from grief, and I loved getting to watch Serena defend everything she loved even as I was angry that she had to.
Learn more about A Lily Among Thorns, including where to buy it. (The self-pubbed edition has a new epilogue showing the resolution of the secondary romance!)
To celebrate the review, I’m working on a revamp of my Lily extras page. So far, I’ve organized all the mini-stories in one place with a table of contents.
It’s been a while since I updated this blog, so in case you mostly get your Rose Lerner news here, a few other items of interest:
- I started a Patreon
- I’m trying out a new project, Rose Reads Aloud (I’m currently reading Listen to the Moon)
- I revealed the cover for my upcoming f/f Gothic, The Sea May Burn
- I’ll be putting A Taste of Honey on sale for the Jewish New Year (when it’s traditional to eat honey for a sweet year)! Watch this space for details, or join my mailing list to get notified in your inbox.
Yours, &c.,
