I initially stumbled upon this title while looking for romances that had "respectful heroes". This one had more of the "protective alpha male" trope than I really wanted, but it didn't dissuade me too much.

I think my favorite part of this novel was the easy, natural dialogue between all the characters. I wish I could write conversation so well!

However, reading Smooth Talking Stranger cemented my disinterest in M/F sex scenes. By god, there were a lot of them. I am a heterosexual lady, but het sex is so boring when you're not a part of it!

I just couldn't handle the presentation of the prose. Stream-of-consciousness is wasted on me.

Many defenders of this book see the abuse that Claire suffers at the hands of Jamie as valid and as something done for a "good cause". She made a decision that put herself and others in danger and the beating he gave her was a direct consequence of that action.

If this were anything but a love story I could stomach it for the sake of the plot. Because Outlander is a romance, I am turned off from the entire series completely.

More's the pity, because Sam Heughan is such a good looking man and I would not have minded watching him in (sexy, non violent) action.

I finished this, but just barely. It tried too hard to be a lot of things. Disappointing, because I enjoy Ellen as an entertainer.

I found this at a garage sale when I was a young girl. There were sanitary belts involved and I was so confused. I'm pretty sure more of this book focused on Margaret's crisis of faith and self, but all I remember are those weird menstrual torture devices.

The Alice books were one of my main source of information about puberty and growing up in a fun, non-clinical manner. There was no internet to be had when I was a preteen and the very idea of speaking to my mother about this sort of thing filled me with horror (still does, to be honest!) To my mother's credit, I think she may have known this, because she was always very understanding of my need for knowledge and did not protest my urging for weekly library trips.

I mostly remember this particular Alice book as one that actually explained the "pencil test", because I had it all sorts of confused in my head prior to reading it. Come to find out, doing this test with your friends around at a sleepover is quite like worrying about quicksand as a child: it's a lot less prevalent than you were led to believe.

It's been at least a decade since I've read this novel, but there's a line I remember to this day:

"She sat down ... and crossed her legs in a way that she knew made them look a mile long.

It's not a particularly well-written or evocative line of prose, so it's strange to me how it's managed to stick with me all these years. I think it was one of my first lightbulb moments where I noticed a woman in fiction deliberately doing something to make herself attractive (versus the often used trope of "she doesn't know she's beautiful", to misquote One Direction).