A TEXAS-MADE FAMILY by Roz Denny Fox                 

via Love Romances & More Reviews by Angie on 10/17/08

A TEXAS-MADE FAMILY by Roz Denny Fox
Publisher Harlequin Super Romance
Date published October 2008
ISBN 978-0-373-71518-3
Contemporary Romance
Mass Market Paperback
Reviewed by Angie

Rebecca Geroux feels that her children are her number one priority in life. Their happiness and seeing them succeed is all that she has time for. She is working two jobs, and doing everything she can to make sure they have dinner together and work well as a family. Although money and time is always tight things seem to be going well until her daughter Lisa’s grades begin to slip and she finds out that Lisa is skipping on studying to go to baseball games to see a boy play.

Grant Lane has just retired from the military and moved to San Antonio to get to know his kids and to be the father he has never been. Having lived on military bases and always having hired staff, he is now getting to realize just how tough being a parent is. When Rebecca contacts him and asks him to put a stop to his son’s interest in her daughter, he finds her irresistible and can’t understand why she wants to stop the teenagers from having fun.

You, Me & The Kids from Harlequin’s Super Romance line always leaves me smiling as a reader and A TEXAS-MADE FAMILY is no exception. Roz Denny Fox is a talented writer who never leaves her stories unfinished, she gives as good as it gets, and is a sure bet to a winning story. She filled this novel with touching scenes, loving characters and a dog. What more can a reader want?

Rebecca and Grant are both parents who want the best for their children. When they meet, they both feel the attraction. Grant can see no reason not to pursue Rebecca, yet Rebecca feels she has no time for romance, and only wants to fix Lisa’s grades and make her daughter understand the value of an education. The interaction between these two is enough to make readers swoon. If every parent worked as hard as these two to make a successful family, divorce would be much less common.

This novel may have a great hero and heroine, but what really makes it shine is the cast of secondary characters. Rebecca’s teens are both honest and loveable, Grant’s son is hard headed but wants the best for his friend, even when she doesn’t agree, and throw in Grant’s eleven year old daughter, who just wants a mother, and you have a cast of characters worthy of a great romance novel. Add in an ex-husband who is incarcerated, and wants revenge on his ex-wife, and the suspense turns a great romance into the perfect novel. This novel takes first place on this reader’s shelf this month.

Roz D. Fox of Tucson has written 20 Harlequin romance novels, assisted by her husband, Denny, who helps with technical accuracy. The couple also enjoys scouting locations together for Fox's novels.


Feel it?
Valentine's Day is around the corner and love is in the air.                                            
                                                                                                                                            

But Roz Denny Fox doesn't have to wait for Valentine's Day.
Romance writing is her job.

Six days a week, Fox sits down at the Hewlett Packard Pavilion 6460 in the office of her comfortable East Side home and composes her happily-ever-afters from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Surrounded by her notes, research folders and reference works, including "Writer's Guide to Character Traits" and "Profiles to Human Behaviors and Personality Types," she brings the same efficiency to her craft that she once displayed as a 9-to-5 secretary.
Only now, instead of writing from midnight to 3 a.m., after her eight-hour job, she spins out romances full time.

One recent morning, she took a break from working on her current book, a romance involving a mountain climber.
On her computer, her hero was about to rappel down a cliff.
Fox had written that "He didn't make note that he'd ruffled her feathers by insinuating as a woman that she might not be up to the task. . . ."
Nearby, her "Pictorial English Dictionary" was open to illustrations of climbing gear.
"That saves you from having to go out and climb mountains," Fox said.
Sooner or later, her hero and heroine will, shall we say, mingle.
"Writing love scenes is tough," Fox said. "You're always reaching for something new and different."
She said that she also feels a responsibility toward her readers.
"You know, I usually have them (her characters) use protection and so forth," she said.
When finished, her book will be one of the three 85,000-word Harlequin romance novels that she turns out each year.
All of them are about the kind of folks that readers wouldn't mind having over for dinner.  "Harlequin wants their people likable," Fox said. "You couldn't have a hero or heroine who did something really bad."
Alcoholism, for example, is all right, if the character overcomes it.
"They would have to show growth and be a really good person at the time," she said.
Her 20 books, which have been published in 15 languages, include "Baby, Baby," "Mom's The Word" and "Mad About the Major."

"I believe in romance," said Fox, who prefers to keep her age to herself.
"I've been married for 42 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren, so that'll give you some idea," she said.
Her husband, Denny, a retired telephone engineer, is the Denny in Roz Denny Fox, her writing name.
Over the years, they've lived in Oregon, Hawaii, California, Texas and, for the last six years, Tucson.
"I gave him credit from the beginning, because he was so helpful," said Fox, who published her first romance, "Red Hot Pepper," in 1990.
Before she knew how to handle a computer, she wrote her first three books in longhand.
Denny input them for her.
"He still reads them all for technical things," she said. "Like if I put an airplane in there, he knows that the airplane is right."
In "Sweet Tibby Mack," for example, Denny helped plot a golf game.
"I laid it out so the score at the end was exactly how she wanted it to come out," Denny said.
With each revision, he had to juggle the game around a bit to fit the story.
"I think all of us were sick of the book by the time we got done," Fox said.
Both of them enjoy researching locations for Fox's novels.
"Wherever I set a book, I like to go there and absorb the setting," she said.
For one of her books, "Anything You Can Do," the pair traveled the length of the old Santa Fe Trail.
"It's about a professor setting up a wagon trail," Fox said. "He wanted to prove that modern women can't handle what pioneer women did."
"We actually drove it all the way to its origin in Missouri," Denny said. "We saw all the old forts and old schools and anything that theoretically had something to do with the trail."
In Fox's books, "commitment" is the operative word.
"They cannot imagine not being with that person," she said.
That's pretty much how it works for her and Denny.
"He's a nice person, interested in everything," she said. "We like to do things together, go places, hike, poke around and look in little hidey-hole stores," she said.
"We just hit it off," Denny said.
For Fox, romance novels reflect real life as she's lived it.
However, she admits that writing romances has its drawbacks.
"People don't respect you, unless you write a literary book," she said. "I don't even like to read those, because they're so depressing."

* Contact Ed Severson at 573-4137 or severson@azstarnet.com.