Rose Lerner

I've loved Megan Chance for years. I love her heroines, especially, their bitterness and fear and bravery. Prima Donna was split up into the heroine's present-day (well, 1878 "present-day") and flashbacks to her earlier life. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is that the heroine had grown so much in the intervening years, and I didn't quite adore the flashbacks as much as the present-day stuff (set in Seattle! I love my city). I loved seeing her change and come to some tough realizations about herself and her life, and I wanted more of that. That said, I could barely put this book down. I finished it in just a few days, and it's generally taking me a week or more to read a novel these days. I highly recommend it. (And if you like historical fiction that doesn't turn a blind eye to the scariness of some aspects of the past, especially for women, check out her An Inconvenient Wife. It's one of my favorite historical novels ever. And if you can get your hands on Fall from Grace, one of her backlist romances, I loved that too).