Bestselling romance novelist and author of the recent Duchess by Night, Eloisa James is contributing to the Barnes & Noble Review’s Reading Romance column the first Monday of every month.
Sharing her thoughts about the powerful protagonists in Christina Dodd’s Darkness Chosen series and Nalini Singh’s Dark River series, Eloisa justifies the intense sexual forces unleashed in these books by explaining, “The key to these novels is that the hero’s animal nature allows him to act like a caveman throwback without being politically incorrect.” She also wonders if the original mythmakers were originally women.
The thought that Ovid and his fellow mythologists may really have been women occurred to me after reading a recent crop of paranormal romance novels in which the sexiest heroes give Jupiter a run for his money, transforming not into faintly effeminate swans, as Jupiter did to abduct Leda, but into predatory, powerful felines.