 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. It is our webinar where we cover anything that may be of interest to libraries. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. And we do these sessions live on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine. We have all our recordings up on our website as well from all of our previous shows, so you can always watch recordings, get the presentations, any links that might be related to the topic are available there. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, which is kind of what we're doing today, yeah, many training sessions, interviews, demos. As I said, anything library related, we are happy and want to have it on the show. We have guest speakers come in sometimes, and we sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff be our presenters. And that's what we have today. Today our topic is Harlequin Take Me Away, the NLC Book Talks Romance. This is a, I guess it's a second in a series of book talking things. An informal series. Yes, yes, don't look for, yeah, certain things at a certain time. Laura Johnson over here, all the way over on my left. And Debra Drago, both from the Nebraska Library Commission, are going to share romance type books that they have read that they think you may be interested in, and some other information about romance. Romances in general, yeah. So I'll just hand it over to you guys to take it away. Okay, thank you. Down there. You might need to click on it with an mouse. Okay, now do the down there. There you go. Okay. We're gonna talk about a number of romances we've read, and maybe make some comments about the romance genre in general. This ended up kind of being, well, I wouldn't say it was a genre study. It wasn't quite formal enough for that. But we both dipped our toes into books that we don't normally read as part of our pleasure, reading lists. So yeah, we were trying things out this time. We were. And we had somewhat of a discussion on what an actual romance is. And basically, you know, there are a lot of things publishers call romances that might not fall into a typical romance definition. But we basically wound up looking for a relationship between a man and a woman and had to have a happy ending, right? Pretty much. I think all these are between a man and a woman, but I'm not even sure that that is completely true necessary. And they're not all published by Harlequin. No, Laura just came up with that catchy title. It is the commonly known romance. Which has just been bought by Harper Collins. Yeah, they just got acquired. And it's actually a huge piece of pleasure reading. They say that it's something like 40% of the paperback books that are sold are romances. So this is not something really to just say, oh, well, that, you know, that that goes in that corner. Romances are a big deal. A lot of people read what what would fall into the category of romances. So we thought maybe this was appropriate. And there are so many different subgenres within romance. You know, there's the historical in which the agency is a part of historical. It's another subsection of that. You have your contemporary. You have paranormal, which is and fantasy, which is really big at the moment. Romantic suspense, which, you know, when we were younger was often called Gothic or was related to Gothic or the had she but known. Yeah, category. And then, you know, you had mentioned adventure and history because, you know, those often have, they have a love interest in there too. And so is it a romance? Isn't it a romance? Is not always cut and dry. Right, right. And you have your your Christian fiction, Amish fiction. You have one or more like themes, maybe then then subgenre when you got your military, you have your Western cowboy stories. You have romance and kilts. Yeah, right. And then for a while there, Jane Austen, everybody was looking for Mr. Darcy in there in a lot of the romance books. So things come and go. But with the first book that we have up here, I read this one, and it's called the heart's pursuit by Robin Lee Hatcher. She's a very popular author. And actually, this one could fall under a number of subgenres. It's a historical. It takes place in 1871. It's also a Western and it's Christian fiction. The main character, Silver Matlock, was jolted at the altar by a man who turns it turns out stole them all the money in her father's safe and her stepmother's jewelry and has taken off. The hero is a bounty hunter who's actually on the track of the man who killed his family back in Kentucky. But he is working as a bounty hunter and she hires him to find her ex-fiance. It can appeal to people who are looking for that historical Western, the growth of Colorado and Nevada, the silver mining and that type of thing. It could interest people who like the horseback riding and she goes with him. It turns out her stepmother wants to bundle her off to Denver to stay with her step sister because of the embarrassment. But she decides that she needs to be part of this. So she's a spunky heroine. She goes on the trail with him. So there's the camping out, there's the horseback riding, there's the whole small town, the saloons, the gambling, the working girls. Just a lot of different things that you would expect from a Western and from this historical. It was a very entertaining story. It's okay. So you know what everybody wants to know? How sexy was it? Oh, yes. Okay, sorry. Christian story, there's some kisses. That's the key of the Christian part of the beginning, I think, when I given the idea. How romantic is that one going to get? Okay, well, this one starts at kissing and moves further. This is by Elizabeth Lowell, Knight's Diver. Elizabeth Lowell is a nom de plume of Anne Maxwell, who writes books on her own and also sometimes joins with her husband and writes books. One of the hallmarks of Elizabeth Lowell's books is she usually does research and so gives you a picture of something that you may not all together know. This one is about treasure diving, treasure recovery. A young woman who grew up in a family of people who did treasure diving was involved in a horrific accident as a very young woman and moved away. I wanted nothing to do with it, but now she's come back to help save the family business and encounters a man who's sent to over by the people who are funding this treasure hunt to oversee the treasure hunt. Instant attraction and quite a romance, but for me the interesting part of this is the information about diving, something I really knew nothing about, and the idea of recovering treasure. So it's set on a Caribbean island. Of course there's a bad guy and we have some suspense at the end. Will the bad guy win? And yes, it all ends happily and they find the treasure. In some ways a typical book, in other ways probably more adventure in this one than some romances. The romance is really quite central but there is a plot that involves the treasure and the characters are perhaps a little bit older and a little bit more worldly than some romances. But you know if you're interested in a very superficial but a view of something that you hadn't known anything about before, this case diving interesting book, and Lowell has written many books. I actually listened to this one, audio, and it was good, it was a good audio. Okay, the next title the scandalous adventures of the sister of the bride, of course indicates there is a wedding in this book, is by Victoria Alexander who is actually a Nebraska author. She lives in Omaha. So that's an attraction for of course our patrons here in Nebraska. It is a historical that takes place in 1887, so it's a little bit later than the first one I talked about, and it's not a regency. But there's still the prim and proper Lady Hargate, I'm not quite sure how they pronounced it, who is actually a widow. This is one of a series of books. Well actually there is no specific series titles, but I have to admit I have not read the, had not read the two or three previous books by this author, but it's obvious that characters carry over, and I think it might have been easier following a couple of the plot lines if I had read the previous book. But it was still very interesting. That's really very common in romances though for them to have minor characters in one book then become major characters in the next book. I've introduced them slightly. This one does start out in New York for just a brief time and then goes to the countryside of England, the traditional manor house of Lady Hargate's parents. Her name is Delilah, so even though she thinks of herself as prim and proper and very traditional, maybe she's, okay. She does go on adventures, okay. She does have a couple adventures, but they're all with one man, Sam Russell, who's a somewhat brash American, who it turns out is a friend and a business partner or business associate of the groom, her future brother-in-law, Lady Hargate's future brother-in-law. So they wind up in England at the same time at this manor house and they've had this, they met each other briefly in New York and they had this adventure. She's not expecting to see him again. It's rather taken aback when she does see him again and the sparks fly and there's a lot of sparring in their conversation. And yeah, if people are looking for two characters that are very strong, they both make plans, but the plans don't always turn out the way they expect them to. Sam is very into new inventions and looking to the future while Delilah is struggling to stay with traditional and things that have been there for time in memorial. Another interesting book, your level is, yeah, okay. It's not as graphic as some books, but there are some scenes that are more explicit. So this is Susan Wakes, another very popular author and this one, I'm not sure that some people would call it a romance. I think they might call it women's fiction, which I'm not completely sure of the distinctions there. In this young woman who works in San Francisco as a acquirer of goods for an auction firm to sell person, is asked by a man that she didn't know was her grandfather, but it turns out he is her grandfather, to come or she's asked by the family maybe, to come to, it's in wine country where he runs an apple orchard. And the apple orchard is financially failing. He's had an accident and is in a coma in the hospital. She encounters a half sister, she didn't know she had. She also encounters a banker who's trying desperately to help them in their financial pickle, but he is a winemaker on the side and she has a romance with him. Meanwhile, what I thought again was the most interesting part of the book is that it includes a number of flashbacks to Nazi occupation of Denmark, where the grandfather was a boy working in the resistance. And it turns out that there was a family treasure which seems to be lost, but if they can find it would solve many of their problems because it's worth a great deal of money. She's a very hard-charging career woman. She's finding, certainly there's some anxiety, but there's also sort of a sense of purpose in finding the treasure. But she's also seeing a way of life that's not quite as hard-charging and is perhaps more relaxing and more human. They do find the treasure in the end. They do get together in the end. The grandfather wakes up from his coma in the end. Happy ending. Happy ending. For people who are looking for optimistic stories. Yes, it is. But I thought it was kind of well written. I thought the flashbacks to the Danish resistance were very interesting. And while they're not the major part of the book, they nevertheless are definitely a strong feature. This book does continue with the story of the sister. I think it's the beekeeper's ball or something. Oh, the sequel. Yeah, there's a sequel which I would read. So there you go. This must have been pretty good if I want to continue with the story. You need to find out what happens to the sister. Yes, this book does have some sexual content, but you know kind of off-screen. And I thought pretty well written and kind of interesting. Okay. Well, for this next one, Seeds of Love by Tricia Goyer. We move to the Amish subgenre, which I would call very sweet books. And in the case of this particular one, the character Sadie Chubb is young enough that because of the storyline, I think it would also appeal to teens and maybe new adults. And for the new adults is basically the publisher, this category that publishers came up with for people who fall between the ages of 18 and 24. I don't call them young adults anymore. Young adults are basically 13 to 18. Yeah, and new adults. Yes. It hasn't been around that long, but Sadie has moved from Indiana to live with her aunt and uncle in Montana after her parents died in an accident. And her mother was a gardener and had heirloom seeds from tomatoes that Sadie took along with her. That's sort of almost, you could call it, her inheritance, her link to the past to her family. And she is now in Montana in a different climate, different growing conditions, and she's trying to raise her seeds. And in walks, Eli Plank, who has come to Montana, and I didn't quite follow this, and I lived in Montana for 10 years and I wasn't aware of this, but you can go there and if you live there for six months, then you can get a hunting license. You're eligible for a hunting license. And I guess at least for some of the Amish people who live in this place, it's a common occurrence and they have some cabins that bachelors tend to come in and rent and stay there for six months to establish residency to get a hunting license. But Eli, in addition to coming up here just to hunt, he's known as the bachelor scribe for the budget, which is an Amish newsletter newspaper. And he talks about his experiences as he moves around the country because he also works for his grandfather who has a seed company. Get the link here. Okay, things are going to happen. Seeds. But for people who are interested in the Amish, what's often called the simple life, they call it, they're simple people. Someone who wants a sweet romance where the conflict or the obstacle that they have to overcome isn't really great. It's a nice quick read. But probably won't help you if you really were going to start a seed exchange at your library. Okay, I had to put this one in. Everybody knows Janet Ivanovich, Top Secret 21, Stephanie Plum. I thought this was a good one. The Stephanie Plum books have been, I don't think I disagree with the general population to say a little uneven. Some of them have been better than others. I thought this one was pretty good. This one has quite a bit of, oh, it's kind of spies and intrigue because Ranger is doing security work. And Stephanie is working for Ranger this time. Oh, if you haven't read all of these. Stephanie Plum, a girl from Trenton, New Jersey, lost her job as a lingerie buyer and went to work for her cousin Vinnie as a bounty hunter in book one. We're now in book 21. And Stephanie is a hapless, not always very effective bounty hunter, but she seems to get her man because she's persistent and resilient. She has really two boyfriends. On the string. Yes, Ranger, who is a mysterious ex-army ranger who runs a security company and has in the past worked as a bounty hunter and sometimes Stephanie calls on him for help and professional advice. And her high school honey, who's still around and is now a cop in Trenton, New Jersey, Joe Morelle, who, and they're both hunks, of course. So, she can't make up her mind. She can't quite make up her mind, although she's kind of made up her mind in this one. She's Morelle's girl. So is this coming to an end? I don't know. But she and Morelle still have some conflicts to work out because Morelle seems to be settling down for a very traditional kind of existence in Trenton, New Jersey. And she's not quite sure she's ready to be a Trenton housewife. Meanwhile, there is a cast of Zany supporting characters, of course. And I don't, I think she only blows up. She usually blows up a couple cars in every book. I think she only blows up one in this book. So, somebody who wants action and adventure and humor. It's action, a lot of humor. It's their funny books. Stephanie is lovable. And Ranger and Joe are both cool. And, you know, when you get to number 21 in a series, you're revisiting old friends to find out how they're doing. And I think, you know, we had to find out how Steph was doing this time. So I can't imagine that these aren't popular in the library. I can tell you they're popular on our shared overdrive collection. I bet they are. We were talking a little bit about series. And it's common in romance for things to be in series. Sometimes the series are simply a number of books that are sort of linked by characters that show up in more than one of the books. But the books really do stand alone themselves. Other times, the books are really a series to the point where they're really one very long story that you need to read from the beginning. I would say that each of these books stands alone, but it probably does enhance the reading experience somewhat if you've read them from the beginning. Does that mean that you need to keep them off? Those are tough decisions to make. I would generally say that if you have a series, you should keep the whole series as long as it's still running. But if the author has stopped, just if the series is finished or the author is no longer with us, then maybe you'd get rid of the whole series. When it's no longer popular, if it's circulating. With this, I think the series can be very frustrating if a library only has some and has, like I said, these books are popular. Let's start getting them now. And you don't have all the people going to want to go back and see, wait, I want to see the beginning of this. So you really either need to have all or none. Well, I kind of feel that way. But at the same time, I do understand that libraries have space issues. And there are 21 of these now. So do you need to keep them all? I think if you have people who are coming new to the series, you might want to keep them all. Otherwise, these might stand along well enough. And they would be easy enough to get from elsewhere. What's the level of sexiness in this one? I would give them a C plus. They're not really, really graphic, but there is sex in them. And frank sexual content. And the whole setup of Stephanie working with Ranger and deening more or less engaged to Joe Morelli leads to a sexual dilemma for her sometimes. And it's an adult book. There's more than kissing going on. Okay. If you have a question, not necessarily about that, but I just forgot to answer this for everyone because I didn't say this at the beginning. This PowerPoint presentation will be available afterwards for you to have the books. And I remember this before, do we have a list of all the titles? Like a Word document? Or we just tell people if you want to know, this would be the place to go to the PowerPoint to get a list of all the books you mentioned. We could put together a list if you want. All right, we'll put together a list. You can have that as well. But the PowerPoint will also be posted as well for you to go through. In some ways, that would be frustrating because I don't think we could say these were the top romances. These are the romances we happen to read. And most of the ones that I picked were, I was looking for something that had been published recently. So out of them are, within the last few months. Most of mine are recent. So there are a lot of other good authors out there. These are just a representation. And if you're doing readers, the idea was if you're doing readers advisory or even for collection development, even though you might not read romance as a general rule, you should be familiar with the different genres and subgenres within that. And try them out every once in a while. So that you could talk to somebody about why, oh, you like this kind of book? Well, you might also like this title. Yes, read-alikes I think are very important. And probably knowing some of the top authors following authors. One of the things I found when I was looking for information about the books, and I started to include it and then it got silly, they all seem to have their own websites and their websites all seem to be www firstnamelastname.com. So it's very easy to find information about the authors and their books. But yes, we'll put together a list of the ones that were specifically mentioned in our session today. Somebody had come in late and was wanting to know about some of the authors. Okay, okay. Well, moving on to the next title, Abandon the Dark by Marta Perry. Again, she is a popular author at least within our the patrons who use the Nebraska shared overdrive collection. This particular book is romantic suspense. It falls into that category, but it has an Amish link. And actually Marta Perry, in addition to writing this type of romantic suspense, also writes simply Christian romance and Amish romance. So she has several different series lines going. This particular one, again, is part of a series. The series is called Watches of the Dark. And this one is, I think the third one in. You could read it as a standalone. You might like to read them in order just to get the full flavor of the mystery that's going on with this particular series. In this one, Lainey Cotton Colton, sorry, a graphic designer has come back to Dear Run Pennsylvania from St. Louis because her aunt, who is Amish, has become seriously ill and has given Lainey the power of attorney over her property and money, et cetera. Jake Evans, the hero, is her aunt's lawyer. Lainey's mother left the Amish community. So Lainey herself is not Amish, but she comes into contact with her aunt's family who has stayed within the traditional community. And there's some conflicts there over whether she really, as an outsider, should have power of attorney for her aunt or not. So there's that going on. And then there's also the fact that when she was 10, she spent the summer with her aunt and uncle in Dear Run. And there was a death at the time that she left. And she's come back now and has found out that one of the girls that she spent a lot of time with that summer had recently returned and had returned a few months ago and had actually stirred things up over this death of a young man, a teenager actually, and her mother had been murdered. They think they have the man who killed both her mother and the young man. But now Lainey is being bothered with pranks, anonymous letters, and other things going on. So the question is, did she maybe see something when she was 10, that was linked to this death? Or is it something that's followed her from St. Louis because she left under sort of a cloud from a situation there too? So there's all that suspense going on. If you have someone who likes a suspense type story along with their romance, they like the Amish link, but it doesn't necessarily have to focus solely on the Amish life. People who are interested in, again, not a lot of graphic sex, but a good story about a hero and heroin who come together. It's an interesting book. Okay. Okay, now we get to Suzanne Brockman, a very popular author. Brockman writes, has written a whole series about the troubleshooters, a security company started by an ex Navy SEAL. She's also written a number of books about the Navy SEAL, SEAL Company 16. And these Navy SEALs, of course, are all built, tall, hunky, smart, competent. Well, they have to be SEALs. Yes, absolutely. She really, and they linked stories, very much linked stories. This is kind of a new series, the reluctant heroes. And this shows a man who is an ex Navy SEAL. He's kind of working on his own, in his own security company, meets a strong competent woman. She's a lawyer. And they get sort of involved reluctantly, very reluctantly, with some folks who are going to carry out some terrorist activities. And they're trying to stop the terrorists. And then it turns out that maybe they're really mobsters. And a lot of action, a lot of not mystery, intrigue, more not suspense, but more action, adventure kind of thing. The heroin strong woman really takes a major role in the action as well. It's not just the men. It's more out to save the world than just solve a mystery. Yeah, it's not, well, it's to get everybody out alive. A lot of peril going on here. But it's not the woman in peril saved by the big strong man. It's tough, determined people who aren't sure they can pull this off, but they'll give it their best by gosh. And quite a bit of sex. I think one of the fun things about it is rather snappy dialogue, very snappy dialogue. And we do see one of her continuing characters from previous books. This is in the same universe as the other books, but it's not really part of other series. People who have read Brockman, I think have probably read all of Brockman. I have to tell you, I started reading Suzanne Brockman because I read an article where they asked several bestselling romance authors who they read. And all of them said they read Suzanne Brockman. I thought, well, okay, I got to try it. And I have enjoyed her very much. Fairly long books. And this one, again, I did an audio. The audio are very good. And I recommend them for people who want a contemporary, strong heroine and adventure. And don't mind some tough language. Okay, the next one, Grim Shadows by Jen Bennett. It looks pretty grim. So you might think, you know, dark, dark, dark. Well, there is some, but I found a lot of humor in this particular book. For a while there with romances, it was very common to have the alpha male, you know, the brooding wounded character. That's not this book. Low Magnuson is more of a swashbuckling archaeologist. Okay. Indiana Jones sort of. And he has a little bit of a problem just stating facts. He's called a con man a couple times, but actually he sort of reminded me of my brother-in-law who's definitely not a con man. But if he can sell you a story, rather than just telling the truth, it's so much more fun, you know. So of course that leads to trust issues. The heroine, Hadley McCall, who's a curator. Okay, can you trust a guy who's going to tell you a story all the time instead of just stating the facts? And especially, this story takes place in the 1920s. And she's a woman in a man's field. She's struggling to work herself into the position where she will take over the museum when her father retires. Okay. And things have started to happen with her father. He's ill. Things are happening that she can't quite figure out. And in walks low, and her father promises to make him the head of museum over her if he does certain things. Okay. So there's a conflict there. Then it sort of reminded me a little bit of that old movie, The Mummy, because you've got Egyptian curses. Okay. And not only is Hadley trying to become, you know, fighting for her place in a man's profession, but she inherited this Egyptian curse from her mother. If there are these demons, and if she gets angry, the demons attack whatever she's angry at. Yeah. It could lead to some problems though. And her father is not pleased with her. You know, I'm quite a number of occasions. But I found it just a very entertaining story. It takes place in San Francisco. You've got these wonderful characters. You've got this mystery they're trying to solve her mother left behind pictographs. So they have to solve the pictographs to find a particular object to actually save her father because of this illness. It's caused by another person. So there's mystery. There's, you know, all this other stuff. It is part of a series. It's actually the second one in a series. And the two main characters in the first book are carried over to this one. They're actually Lowe's brother and sister-in-law. And the sister-in-law is a spiritualist. She can actually talk to ghosts. So you've got the ghosts. You've got the demons. The demons. You know, you've got all this curses going on. It's just, it's a fun book. Okay. Okay. Ten things I love about you, Julia Quinn. This is not a brand new book. And I did this one in audio, too. This is more a traditional Regency romance. Young heroine needs to marry well because her family is not financially secure. Has grandparents who want to, and has come to London to find a husband during the season, has grandparents who want to marry her off to an elderly man, but he's titled Well to Do, and he wants an heir. She meets and begins to fall for our hero who, his deep dark secret is that he writes gothic novels. And actually, that's kind of it. There's no big, really, the conflict is that to marry this rich older man, her family would be secure, but she really digs this younger guy. There's quite a bit of humor in it. It's a light book. It's not very sexy at all. And the hero has this quirk, but the heroine actually, I would say was not a terribly well-developed character as far as the way it's written. The strongest character in the book, probably is the grandmother who's very tart-tongued, and so is kind of fun. And several times people make lists of 10 things. They, whatever, whatever. And so these are 10 things she loved about him. It's a cute book, a fast read, pleasant to listen to. I would read more Julia Quinn. I had not encountered her before. So, but not setting the world on fire, but good. Okay, Keeper of the Moon by Harley-Jane Kozak. This is actually a book from last year. I was asked to read this particular one. She is a Nebraska author, and this is her first romance. Okay. I'm going to say I don't know her. I know her as Nebraska, but not for this genre. Yeah, she wrote mysteries. She wrote mysteries. But she actually got together with two friends, Heather Graham and Alexandra Sokoloff. And they came up with these three characters, three female cousins, and they're each writing about one, I guess. And I read, I haven't read the others. I read this one by Harley-Jane. And it is a paranormal, actually. There are elven werewolves, vampires, and shape shifters. Okay. The main characters, Sailor Grifold, and I'm not quite sure if I'm pronouncing that name right, but that's as close as I can come. She is an elven keeper for a section of Los Angeles. Okay. And Declan Wainwright, the hero, is a shape shifter keeper. And the action does take place around the whole Hollywood scene. People, women, actually, who are linked somehow to the movie industry have been attacked and have died. People outside these special people, the keepers, etc., don't realize that they've been infected with what's called the scarlet pathogen. And the women were all elven, because the elven people are beautiful, so of course they have to be the actors and actresses, etc. There is some sex, it's not too graphic. You know, harlequins with their different lines have different levels of intimacy, you know, prescribed. I guess that's all I have to say about it at the moment. Is the harlequin nocturne line usually paranormal, or is it usually just mystery? I didn't check. Well, we can find that out. If you go to the harlequin website, they really will tell you pretty much exactly what is in all of these different lines that they, so the blaze, temptation, special, I don't, I don't think they have a special moment, but American stories, this is from the harlequin website. I just googled harlequin nocturne, pretty easy. Delves into dark, sensuous, often dangerous territory where the normal and paranormal collide. There you go. Paranormal, like all things you talk about, this is the series to look for. Yeah, so people in your library can't get enough of the paranormal, here you go. Paranormal romance. Yeah. Okay, from the paranormal, we're going to move to this series, and I did, I put all the titles down because she's written quite a few now. These are all sort of linked books about the pink carnation, a spy, an English spy in France during the Napoleonic era, so they are sort of regencies, but sort of not. They also have contemporary twists to them too. Yeah, they do have a contemporary twist that some of it's told in flashback. We have a young researcher, she's working on her PhD, and she's trying to find information about the pink carnation, because the pink carnation operated for a long time and never was caught and never was identified. People really don't know who the pink carnation was, but then we go back into the story, the historic story, and we know exactly who the pink carnation is, but I won't tell because I'll keep it a surprise. And the other members of the spy ring. Yes, and there are many other members of the spy ring. There are many of the conventions of the Regency romance. The couple I've read, this particular one is actually a governess. She's a governess spy who goes to work for a French official. He works in the Department of Police in France, but it turns out that he's really working for the Restoration of the Monarchy, and then they get discovered and they have to flee for their lives in the guise of a band of traveling players. It's fun. It was a lot of fun. I thought they were pretty well written. I enjoyed the little bit of intrigue. The romance is definitely a major part of it, but it's not graphic. I had not read her before, and I am now reading, I think my third one. I've read The Orchid Affair and The Garden Intrigue, and I am now reading The Temptation of the Night Jasmine. You didn't start out with number one? I did not start out with number one, so I guess you don't have to. No, I don't think you really do. If you want to keep up with the contemporary story, part of the story, which isn't the major part of the story, I would recommend you start at the beginning, but that's me. I'm enjoying them. Actually, I found the names of them, the Deception of the Passion of the Purple Plumeria. You couldn't get me to read a book called The Passion of the Purple Plumeria for anything in the world. You're judging a book by its color. I am. I absolutely am. But I just tell you, hold your nose and get past that, and you'll be fine. They're arch, and I'm not into that kind of thing, but actually the stories themselves were cute and pretty well written. And not all of them take place in France, either. No, some of them are in England. This one that I've just started is a duke returns to England after having served in the army in India, which, you know, is not weird because actually the Duke of Wellington was in India. That's where he really made his name before he came back to England and fought Napoleon, was he served in India. So I can't remember which one it was, but one of them does take place in India to the whole story, or the whole spy story. Okay. The next one, Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen, sort of follows along with I think the Susan Wiggs one. It's not what normally is labeled as a romance story, but I call it a literary love story. I enjoyed this one. She had a book come out a couple of years ago called the, oh gosh, I just forgot the name of it, the Peach Keepers something. Well, anyway, it was, it was very, very popular, which started me reading her titles. I like that one. The Peach Keeper. Oh, the Peach Keeper. Okay. Thank you. I really like the Peach Keeper, and I really like it. It does sound like a piece of Tupperware, but okay. Well, and it wasn't. She writes Southern books. Okay. Lost Lake is actually a small camp with cabins in rural Georgia. It's about four hours away from Atlanta. Okay. There are sort of more than one main character, but the main young character is Kate Ferris, who's a widow, and her husband died a year ago, and she's sort of been sleepwalking through life this past year, but she has an eight-year-old daughter who her mother-in-law has taken over, and she's on the way to totally taking over Kate their whole life, and Devon, her daughter, really, you know, she doesn't like the private school. She doesn't like the fact that her grandmother won't let her wear what she likes to wear, but grandmother has sold the house. She's a real estate mogul, and so they're packing things up. They have to move out. Okay. Well, they're in the attic, and Devon finds a postcard from Lost Lake from Aunt Evie, who is Kate's great aunt. Kate actually spent a summer, part of a summer, at Lost Lake with her great aunt, Evie, and Uncle George, and met Wes there, a boy that she had adventures with, but her mother got really upset with her aunt, and they left abruptly. Okay. Hasn't seen her since. Well, the postcard was from Aunt Evie, inviting Kate to come back at any time. So Kate has, you know, just come awake, and she's realized what her mother-in-law has been doing to her daughter and to her life, and to Kate's own life. So they decide to take off and see if Lost Lake still exists. She hasn't heard from Aunt Evie for 15 years. Okay. So they go down there. Well, of course, it's, you know, southern. You've got all these eccentric characters. You've got magical elements, which often occur in Alan's stories. One of the Library of Congress subject headings for this book was first loves, but I actually look at it more as it's second chances. Second chances at life, second chances at love. What are you going to do? Okay. And it turns out everybody is changed. Evie's on the brink of selling the resort. Does she or doesn't she? Her three regulars that have been coming back for years and years. What are they going to do to help keep it alive? It's just a really nice story. It sounds like that. It's no off sexual intimacy. It's just, you know, each person. Got it. Got it. Okay. We're kind of running out of time here. So we'll go as long as needed. Just everyone in the audience knows of the show. It officially does go to 11 central time, but we won't get cut off by our software or anything. So we'll go as long as needed to get all of your titles in and everything you want to say about them. But if you guys need to go from the audience, that's fine. We're recording and you can always watch later or just get the list later for any of the titles that you missed. Okay. So do what you need to do. Okay. I'm not going to say a lot about this. Obviously, this has been, oh, this is the brand new titles within the series. It's the Outlander series. It really is one long book. You really do need to read these in order. Story of Claire and Jamie Fraser who start out in, well, before Colotton, which is what 1741, 32, something like that. And we're now in the middle of the American Revolution. These people have gone through a lot together, does have paranormal elements because Claire is actually a modern woman, was a nurse in World War II, but somehow in the Scottish Highlands was collecting herbs up in the Highlands in one of the standing circles of stones and, my gosh, she time traveled for 200 years and went back in time. An interesting device to make a heroine in an historical book, a modern heroine and not the time is sort of not out of joint there that way. Jamie Fraser is the perfect man. He is. Let us just all admit that. These are great if you're into the kind of saga, good people, good, strong protagonists, a lot of secondary characters at this point that we're interested in. And I can't imagine that these wouldn't be popular in your library and that you wouldn't want to keep them off. And it just recently started as a TV show on stars. So you have to pay the stars network. And that just started. Well, stars gave us all a free preview this weekend so we could see Outlanders. So then, you know, I did call them on Monday to subscribe so I could see the rest of it because it was pretty good. And followed the book very closely. That's something people thought I wondered how close, yeah. So, you know, you could have viewing parties at your library, I don't know, but yes, very popular books by an author who's really done a lot with them. So, you might need to click back there. There you go. Okay. Kristen Higgins book In Your Dreams isn't actually not out until September 30th. I actually got a copy of this through NetGalley, which is one way you can preview books. You do have to set up an account on NetGalley and you usually have to put in a request and then be approved to get a copy of particular books. But in this case, I happened to sit in on a webinar that was done by some Harlequin staff and they offered, I asked to get a Gallic copy and they just gave it to me because through the chat in that webinar. So, it took a, it didn't, wasn't immediate, but they did send me an email with a direct link to this book then. So, there's this NetGalley and then there's another one called Edelweiss where you can get copies of books before they're actually published. Right. Kristen Higgins is a very popular book. This is a contemporary. Emily Neal, a police officer in a small town in western New York, is the heroine and the hero is Jack Holland, whose family has a winemaking business in the area and he is a chemist actually. He went, he got a degree in college. The, there are several things that are going on in this particular story. There's PTSD. Jack is suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Actually, from not a situation that comes up very often, he actually saved some teenage boys whose car went off the road into a lake, into an ice cold lake. He, they're all alive, but one of them did not come out of it well and is in the hospital and while everyone's calling Jack a hero and talking him up, you know, he's continually having flashbacks. Did I do everything I could do and you know all this kind of thing. Emily is sort of a brash character. She's had to make a life for herself. She stuttered as a child and her two parents who are psychiatrists could never fix her, which caused problems. So she went to live with her grandmother in this small town and her parents then immediately adopted another girl, who's perfect. So, you know, it's sort of, you know, so you have all these family dynamics going on, but the one of the main baggage, lots of baggage. So if you're interested in, you know, wacky families, if you're interested in, you know, how do you have PTSD. If you're interested in, okay, another line going here is that her ex-piancé is getting married in Malibu, California and has invited her to the wedding. His parents and her parents are best friends, are good friends, you know, so that's all going on there. So Jack goes with her and they, that's actually sort of more or less their first date when he goes with her. And then it continues on from there. This is part of a series, the Blue Heron series and other care, the other books involve people in the small, one lady from the small town plus to a couple of Jack's sisters. So, it's coming up. So you can order one for your library if you want. And this is Anne Stewart, Ruthless. Anne Stewart has been writing romances since the mid-70s and I've been reading her since then. I love Anne Stewart. She's written all kinds of books. She writes historicals. She writes contemporaries. She likes to be a little outrageous. She likes to make her heroes very, very, very bad boys, which is kind of fun because, you know, then the prim and proper heroine reforms them or makes them realize that what they were really searching for was the love of a good woman. And yet they're fun. This one and these are really linked books more than a series. Historical. A house of Rohan, a man who actually, you know, what can I say? He likes to have orgies. But he finds out that that isn't what he's really interested in. What he's really interested in is this prim and proper spinster who of course is living a life of penury and want and he takes her away from all of it. And I'm sounding kind of skeptical about the whole thing, but really Anne Stewart just writes a really fun book if you like that kind of thing. And she's written a lot of books and a lot of different genres. But I really recommend her and her websites a lot of fun too. Really? I'm having, oh, sorry. I'll talk about this one really quickly. This is another historical. They never really pinpointed the exact time frame, at least that I could find, but early 1800s. At one point the hero was complaining to a friend about the reading group and the fact that they were reading Pride and Prejudice. And he couldn't get over the fact that women seemed to think that every man was in want of a wife, or that every man ended up with a wife at the end of the story. He starts off the book not wanting to get married, basically. And of course, that changes. He falls in love with Demaris Chance, who's an orphan and has actually created her own family with several other young women and an aunt. In the first book, one of the sisters, foster sisters, got married off. And now Freddie is looking after the other girls and the aunt while the couple is on their honeymoon. Well, Demaris has had bad interactions with men in the past and isn't interested in a husband. She just wants a cottage all her own in the country and she's actually working without the other people's knowledge in a pottery to make money to help buy this cottage. Well, Freddie acts like a fob, a foolish fob, but he's actually in the businessmen and he's made his own fortune, even though he's an aristocrat. And the other story, his story is that there was an accident. He's the younger son. There was an accident. His older brother died. He's been blamed by his parents. His parents don't speak to him. So of course, you know, she, Demaris changes things. So it was a very interesting book. It just is a slightly different take on that whole historical England type story. Okay. Okay. Here you go. One of your favorites. Yeah. I put these two in here by Mary Stewart just to talk a minute about the fact that they, publishers are reissuing older books. Okay. Mary Stewart wrote it mostly in the 50s and 60s. Romantic romances. Yes. She died, excuse me, in May at the age of 97. She hasn't been writing for some time. Yeah. Madam Will You Talk was her first book and it was written in the early 50s. This Rough Magic was written in 1964. So they're actually what you would call properly contemporary because they're about the time, they're written about the time that they were written in. Yeah. Okay. But to us, they could be historical because, you know, it's from a past time. Some people still really love these. Some people say, oh, they're dated. No, the point of view, the words they use. Well, I'm sorry. They were written at that time about that time. You sometimes have to stop and think about historical and how accurate they are. Okay. So many of them now have our thoughts and our moral viewpoints in them. Yes. Things that didn't really exist at that time. But does it make a good story? I think so. And I think you do have to consider whether people still really want to read these. A number of authors are not only being reissued in print, they're being reissued as e-books. And I can tell you for a fact that through the group Nebraska Collection, through Overdrive, there are people who are asking for books by Grace Livingston Hill, who wrote Christian fiction decades ago, and Barbara Michaels, who's also Elizabeth Peters. She died last year. So there is a demand out there for these older titles. But you do have to be aware, if you're not familiar with these authors, check the publication date. When you do look at a book, just to make sure that it is a current title if that's what you're looking for. Yes. And many of the romances that you would think were written fairly recently have also been reissued when an author's really popular. So make sure that you do check copyright dates and check titles. Yeah. Actually, in a recent Publishers Weekly, they had a page of authors that they're putting books out for, Linda Howard and Jane Anne Green, and they're all titles that were written back in the 80s. So they are reissuing things. You want to check that for very popular authors. Now here's a really popular author coming up September 9th. This is one of my favorites, J.D. Robb, who I don't think it's any secret, is Nora Roberts. This is, oh, like what, the 39th or 40th or around 40th book in this long-going series about Eve Dallas, a New York police detective in the year 2060. They're great fun. Eve is married to another perfect man, Rourke, the enigmatic Irish billionaire, has a huge cast of supporting characters who at this point we like to see. The books do stand alone, but the overarching relationships of people have developed through the book. So people may want to read them in order, but I don't think that's absolutely necessary, but people might like them. I have to say, I've read most of these, again, in audio. I like audio. And the narrator, Susan Eriksen, is very good. So these are just really fun. And another fun one coming up, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, one of the great romance authors. She writes a really solid book, generally does have a little bit more than fluff. There's usually actually a little substance to her books. And she has written some books that are connected to the Chicago Stars football team. But some of them are standalone. Anyway, these are certainly books to be looking for. I think people will want them. These are both really popular authors. We just wanted to go really fast to a couple of places. Here, Harlequin does send out a newsletter. You can subscribe to it and get it in your email. This will kind of tell you a little bit about new things coming up in the Harlequin world. As we said, Harlequin is not the only publisher, but they are a big publisher of romance. And worth paying a little bit of attention to in terms of your collection development. Some places to get reviews. Of course, we hope that you're reading the reviews in library journal and book list and maybe publishers weekly. These are reviews written by people who have some background in book reviewing. And of course, they're edited. Some of these, the blogs and websites, are from people who are enthusiasts. Many of them have quite a bit of knowledge of the romance genre. But you do have to kind of read them enough to get an idea of what their point of view is. And if their personal taste is really influencing. Sometimes people review a book on the basis of how good the book is. And sometimes people review a book on how well they liked it. Those are really kind of two different things. And you have to read reviews a little carefully. But here's a place to read reviews of romances in dearauthor.com. Move the mouse over to the PowerPoint. There you go. And one more time. Okay. Romantic Times is actually a magazine that comes out in print. And they do have a website as well. They rate the romances. And of course, look, if you say locked in with John Scalzi there on that, he writes science fiction. So they do a little bit more than just romances. But this is a place to find information about these books. And then all about romance, sort of a place for people to hang out and talk about their romances. And I just picked this up the other, well, actually yesterday. And you would see that they're actually talking there about the television program that was on on Saturday about Islander. So a few places if you really, as we said, romance is a big piece of a lot of people's reading. It's a lot of publication. And it's maybe worth getting a little bit serious about it in terms of your collection. I did notice that many and count of those book covers says New York Times best-selling so yeah. So anyway, that is our kind of look at romance. We hope you enjoyed it. We enjoy reading them. We enjoy talking about the books we read. It's interesting to read something that I don't normally read too. Yes. So and you know, let us know what you're reading. We'd love to hear about it. If you've got an author that you think we ought to try, let us know. We'll try. And thank you. Okay. Are we done? Good. If you're done, we're done. Yes, okay. Let me see the all right. Thank you very much, Laura and Deborah and everyone for sticking around here. There we go. That will wrap it up for this morning's Encompass Live. The show has been recorded and will have the PowerPoint available and a list at some point of just all the titles as well so you can access all of them that way. And those last two websites have also captured into our delicious account as well so that you'll have links to those two afterwards for looking at more information about romance books. So that will wrap it up for this morning. I hope you join us next week when our topic is what you need to know to apply for a youth grant. This is specifically for the Youth Excellence Grants that we offer here at the Nebraska Library Commission and Deborah will be back with us again. Yes. Got us all scheduled two weeks ago. But as Sally mentioned in the description, what we'll be talking about can also be applied to other grants. But we are, the Youth Excellence Grants will be coming. The applications will be available here shortly. And so we thought we'd talk about them before those were available. Before people started working on them. Okay. So join us for that and any of the other sessions that we have scheduled for over the next month or so. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, excuse me, you can follow us on there. Your notifications of when new sessions are coming up, when recordings are available. Just keep you up to date on what's going on with the show. So other than that, that wraps it up for us. Thank you everyone. Thanks Laura and Deborah. And we will see you next week on the show. Cool. Thanks. Bye. Bye.