My Author Fan Letter (Blog Crawl 2011)

First of all I must thank Kassa for pulling together this author appreciation blog crawl.

Yesterday Val at Obsidian Bookshelf posted her letters to two authors, JM Snyder and Jordan Castillo Price. Now it’s my turn.

Dear Donna Boyd,

The year was 1999. Over the past decade I had only stuck to reading historical and contemporary romance. I wasn’t interested in supernatural and paranormal fiction for the most part. Werewolves, vampires and those things that go bump in the night made me yawn. But then, I realized I needed to expand my reading horizons because I seriously read every single romance my local library had to offer. Grumbling that I couldn’t find any new romances to read and kept re-reading my favorites, I ended up in front of the new fiction section of the library. I barely went in this section because it was filled with hardcovers and always had those hoity-toity literary fiction type books. I mainly stuck with paperbacks because that’s where the good stuff was (mainly hot sex). But I was desperate.

I don’t know why I picked up The Passion. The cover wasn’t visually appealing. But then I read the blurb inside the book. The first thing that caught my eye was The Passion begins as a contemporary and then goes back in time to the Victorian era. It’s about a young girl who’s introduced to an underground world of werewolves who really control the world. The key words used were romance, spell binding and sensuous. I thought, well, maybe I’ll get lucky and this hoity-toity book will have hot sex between the heroine and a hot sexy werewolf.

Words cannot describe what reading The Passion was like for me. My heart was in my throat most of the time. Your words and incredible storytelling skills were unlike anything I ever read up to that moment. Gone with the Wind was the reason I started reading romance. The Passion is the reason I now read paranormal fiction. Before JR Ward, Christine Feehan, Nalini Singh, plus a slew of other paranormal authors, you came first. This book enabled me to open my mind to new literature and is the only book out of a very small number that left me emotionally numb after I finished reading.

I was numb because the all-consuming romance you set in such a complicated way where the heroine, Tessa LeGuerre, falls for the powerful leader of the werewolves, Alexander Devoncroix, made me sigh, as well as rage. And then you throw a whammy of a twist by introducing Alexander’s brother Denis, the villain, who takes over the story and eventually steals Tessa’s soul in a gripping way that left me flabbergasted.

Denis is one of my all-time favorite villains of romantic literature. You made a villain so seductively evil, cold and calculating, but one-hundred percent redeemable by the end. And the end. Oh. My. God. I cursed you to the high heavens over the ending of The Passion. I wanted to through the book across the room because it nearly destroyed me.

The Passion is one of my top 10 favorite books of all time. The sequel, The Promise didn’t hit me as hard as The Passion, but ties everything together so perfectly. Because of you and The Passion, I then walked into a bookstore a few weeks later. For the first time I bypassed the romance section and found myself in the horror and fantasy section. There I picked up a very different book because it was about vampires but with a heroine who reminded me a bit like Tessa. That book was Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures. And then I walked into the Crime and Mystery section and found J.D. Robb’s Naked in Death.

Thank you Ms. Boyd for writing such a book that allowed me to expand my reading horizons. You opened a whole new world that introduced me to fascinating creatures and characters that I will never forget, and with some awesome hot sex to seal the deal.

Yours,

Kate/KB

Stop by Heidenkin at Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Books tomorrow for her author fan letter.