Fifty Shades of Green

I used to write a blog called Paper Frigate, in which I reviewed (mostly) books, commented on things I encountered while shopping for books or reading them, and generally shared my views as a Reader making my way through life. Sadly, the blog is now officially a cobWeb site.

So I will start again, opening this time with the surprising range of novels written by Sharon Green.

Why the Fifty Shades reference?

I first encountered Sharon Green at a time when I was collecting novels that had themes of B&D or had main characters who were strong women. For a while, it seemed that aside from the Gor novels, all the multi-novel series that matched the first criteria were written by Sharon Green, and they all also met the second parameter.

I had three shelves in my wall bookcase devoted to Green. And each time a new novel in a series came out, I had the joy of re-reading the novels that went before it. I also had a constant battle to keep my collection intact; friends would "borrow" a paperback and it would be unavailable to reread.

Early eBook Author

Green has written more than 40 novels, most available as eBooks. This is especially important to me, because now I read mostly on Kindle. So much easier to protect my collections when they are not displayed on a bookshelf!

And what a wide swath of story types Green has generated so far:

• warrior maidens in a world of magic and myth (the Jalav, Amazon Warrior series); 
• psychically-enabled competitors for world power (The Blending and The Blending Enthroned pentalogies);
• interstellar secret agents trying to operate in radically different cultures (the Terrilian and Mind Warrior series);
• "hard sci-fi" with cool gadgets and spy-vs-spy action (the sadly-truncated Diana Santee series, encompassing 13 novels so far - I keep waiting for the final novel, but Green has said she "just doesn't hear that story line any more");
• vampire and werewolf action (the brilliant Taz Bell series, but also Werewolf Moon, a favorite - and a Harlequin Romance!, and Shadowborn);
• "contemporary romance", some with B&D themes and some without;
• "historical romance" (really, Silken Dreams is almost a steampunk novel, although the original cover image certainly doesn't do the story justice).

You get the picture. I've written Amazon reviews of Green novels on occasion, but a single review attached to a single novel simply doesn't touch the amazing bandwidth of stories produced by this prolific author.

So this post is to celebrate an author who's brought me (and all those friends who've borrowed my paperbacks over the years) a lot of pleasure:

Sharon Green, Warrior of Amazon!