In this week’s podcast episode, we’re looking at the book reviews for the September 2002 issue of RT Magazine.
Thank you to Mari, the Romance Girl for this issue!
You can also find all the RTRW content at our category page for Romantic Times Rewind.
And, most importantly, if you want to listen and follow along with this entry, we have more detail in the audio, but you can click play and listen and read and absorb all the visual goodness:
Ok, let’s get started!
This issue was voted the winner by our podcast Patreon community, and can you guess why? Rrrrrrrrromantasy by any other name would be a familiar genre, yes?
We start with Historical Romance where I selected Catherine and the Pirate by Karen Hawkins, part of the Avon True Romance line.
We agree that sword is quite impressive, yes?
Amanda looked at Season of Splendor by Liz Madison:
In Sci-Fi and Fantasy I looked at the one star (!!) review of Evil Seed by CG McGovern-Bowen:
This cover, y’all.
Is that fire? Some kind of sauce? What is happening?
Amanda chose Earthrise by William Dietz:
Over in Mystery/Thriller there’s this curious category key:
I chose to take a look at The Body in the Bathhouse by LindseyDavis:
The new cover has a mosaic on it that’s very neat:
But the older cover has an illustration style I kinda like:
Amanda and I had a LOT to say about Labyrinth by Mark T. Sullivan:
A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD IS LEADING THE CAVING EXPEDITION FOR NASA?
Ok. Sure.
The cover is very creepy!
We skipped Mainstream Fiction because none of the books were all that exciting to us.
Yet again we have a category key for Mainstream Romance, and there was another category key that overlaps a LOT with several other sections of the magazine. 
Vampire? Ghost?! What is going on?
I picked 204 Rosewood Lane by Debbie Macomber:
This is also where we talked about Ashia Monet’s Twitter thread about marketing books by story trope rather than story arc.
Amanda selected Side Effects by Francis Eden, another one-star review:
In Series, we both picked one star reviews, both of which were in the same series line. I picked A Man Worth Remembering by Delores Fossen, while Amanda picked When Lightning Strikes by Aimee Thurlo:
And finally, Inspirational! No big hats, not cool jobs, alas, alas. I picked Firstborn by Robin Lee Hatcher:
We had to go look at reviews of the book to find out what was in the letter!
Amanda picked The Covenant by Beverly Lewis:
Our next episode will examine the advertisements and features in this issue, and that’ll air on June 28. Some of them are a LOT of fun.
And remember, if you join the Patreon, you’ll get access to the entire issue as a PDF.
What do you think? Have you read any of these? Do you remember some of these titles? Are you going on a NASA caving expedition co-led by a 14 year old?
Did you mean to repost the May 1994 Visual Aids?
Nope, my mistake! I didn’t update the title in the template. All fixed!
Oh, Avon True Romances! I read a few back in the day, and even own a copy of Anna and the Duke that I picked up for cheap, secondhand. Catherine and the Pirate was the one I was most excited about at the time, but I remember I had a big ol’ “meh” reaction to it. (Then I reread it as a full-fledged adult in the mid-2010s and had an even worse reaction to it, hah.) “Written with intelligence” is highly debatable, as there are a number of silly plot holes and continuity errors. The story has potential, but def could have used another pass or two with a good editor, imo. On the bright(?) side, to answer the age gap question, it’s only four years–the heroine’s seventeen and the hero’s twenty-one.
Would legit recommend Amelia and the Outlaw, though. (Can’t speak for Lorraine Heath’s other contribution as I never read that one.) Unlike some of the authors in the line, I don’t feel Heath “dumbed down” her writing for a younger audience. To me, it reads very much like an adult romance, with all the complexities you’d expect from such a thing–it just happens to feature characters who are teenagers.