Dear Johanna Lindsey,
Words can not thank you enough. You may not know this, but before I randomly picked up Gentle Rogue in a supermarket to read, I was floundering to get my reading mojo back. I was in my early 20s, and had outgrown Young Adult. (Back then, it wasn't cool to read YA, unless you were in fact a teen.) I had tried several different genres, but none were sticking. I quickly got burned out on Chick Lit and had trouble with literary fiction, (I wanted to escape when I read, not read about someone elses problems.) and I always seemed to figure out who killed whom long before the ending in mysteries.
I read Gentle Rogue in one sitting. I loved Georgie-she was unlike any heroine I had ever read, and James Mallory was one of my first book boyfriends. I think he actually set the mold for them. He has a good heart-but it's buried deep. Georgie was just so much fun-I mean a girl who hides out as a cabin boy to get to her destination? The romance on the high seas was just what I needed. The entire Mallory family drew me into wanting to read more about them. By the time I discovered Gentle Rogue, there were quite a few books out in the series Your entire backlist was devoured in a month-and that was in the days before Amazon. I had to search a ton of used bookstores and new ones to find them all. You were one of my first auto buy authors. I couldn't get enough of the Mallory's or Anderson's. I looked forward to each family member getting their own story, but through the years Georgie and James remained my favorite members of both families.
The books you wrote were more then just romances-they were about people wanting to be accepted for who they were and not let any influence them to change them into something they weren't. It was something I needed (and sometimes still need) at that point in my life. Through your books I discovered Julie Garwood, Judith McNaught, Christina Dodd and Julia Quinn. I love impressing people with random history facts that I've learned over the years from reading historical romances. There is nothing like coming home from a hard day at work and slipping into another time and place.
While my tastes may have changed over the years I still re-read Gentle Rogue every year, and I think I've owned just about every copy of the book that was published. Thank you so much for widening my horizons into the world of romance. I can't imagine how boring my life would be without romance books in my life! Where else can you read about pirates, long lost earls, demon slayers and shape shifters?
Thank you so very much-
Colette
~ Be sure to read yesterdays letter at Literary Escapism and tomorrows letter is at author Marie Sextons website.
Can you guess which cover made me pick it up? :)
Heartsick and desperate to return home to America, Georgina Anderson boards the Maiden Anne disguised as a cabin boy, never dreaming she′ll be forced into intimate servitude at the whim of the ship′s irrepressible captain, James Mallory.The black sheep of a proud and tempestuous family, the handsome ex-pirate once swore no woman alive could entice him into matrimony. But on the high seas his resolve will be weakened by an unrestrained passion and by the high-spirited beauty whose love of freedom and adventure rivals his own (goodreads.com)
