Reviews

I read the book "The Princess and the Rose" recently and found it to be enchanting. It is the kind of book you can't put down. The Princess is continuously getting into and out of trouble. Just when you think she will be safe, something else happens. I usually don't ready romance novels, but this one sparked my interest. I highly recommend this book.

When Robin Sutton's youngest son was diagnosed with autism, she started her own business so she could spend more time with him and finding out about his needs. One thing led to another and she is now an author, having published her first novel "The Princess and The Rose." She visited Lone Star Book Scouters on June 21 to sign copies of her book and talk about breaking into the romance novel business. She opened her business as a secretarial service, then converted it to an event planning business. One of her clients was Walt Anderson, who ran Milk & Honey Publishing. "He writes books for college students," Sutton explained. "So I asked him, would you publish one if I wrote it? He said yeah." So she set to work. "It took me a little while, it took me about six months to do this one," she said, referring to her book. She's already working on her second one, called Ambrosia.

If you're expecting a traditional bodice-ripper, don't bother reading "The Princess and The Rose." Sutton threw out all the rules. "Mine's not quite Harlequin," she said, referring to a popular brand of romance novels. She learned that when she went to her first meeting of the Romance Writers Association in Dallas. "I try to promote mine as being a little different, because even when I went to that meeting, there was almost like a set format. Well, that gets old after a while, You kind of knew what was going to happen. I try to have the villain a little more involved, so you get reading it, you're not sure if these two lovers are going to get together in the end, like with this one."

Sutton thinks that's just what the genre needs. "At that last meeting, they said, there's a lull (in sales). Well, maybe it's because everybody's following the same format. Some of the ladies were telling me, 'Well there's general rules, you don't do da-da-da-da-da.' Well, then you don't want to read this one." Sutton knows some elements of the genre will probably always remain the same, but that doesn't mean you can't shake it up a bit. "You might have morals to where you don't want this or that in there, but if it's part of the plot and you don't make it too graphic..." she suggested. "Like for some of mine, there's certain things that she said, well, then you don't want to read this one then, because I broke some rules. It depends on what you want to do to the characters," she said, adding that the writer wants to evoke certain feelings in the reader. "You want them to fall in love with the heroine and you want 'em to be mad at the villain, but sometimes you want them to kind of go, 'wait a minute, I don't mind the villain,' or 'wait a minute, we've changed here.' "You want them to read to the end."