Through the Nostalgia Glass: The Velvet Promise by Jude Deveraux

Warning: all the spoilers.

Welcome to the post that took me over a year to write! If you were wondering what took me so long, the answer is: I’m super lazy and my ability to procrastinate is close to a superpower, like I was bitten by a radioactive excuse or something. I was also a bit afraid to revisit a book that’s so close to my heart, a fear that, as you’re about to see, proved to be both right and unnecessary. But really, I was mostly being lazy.

The goal of this post (that may or may not become a feature, but I’m not making any promises) is to revisit beloved old favorites and see how they hold up to the reader I am today. This means that I’m interested in how my current context shapes the reading experience, and not in how the book’s past context shaped the way it was written.

A New Feature and an Update

Credit: ginnerobot

All reviews and no play make Romance Around the Corner a dull blog, so I’ve been thinking about ways to improve and freshen up the blog. The one I came up with still involves reviews, but there’s a twist.

We have talked about hype and how popular new releases get all the attention. I will be the first to admit that shiny new books are hard to resist, but we should make room for older books, especially those we hold dear. Our perception of old favorites can change during time, because while the stories remain the same, readers tend to grow and change. However, new perspectives don’t necessarily lessen the value of the books, and may even give us a new view and appreciation of the stories. So I thought that it would be an interesting experiment to re-read these old favorites and see how (or if) our reactions to them have changed and how they hold up to the test of time.