the ask@AAR: What is your favorite of Madeline Hunter’s many works?
With the death of Madeline Hunter, historical romance loses one of its sharpest minds and quietest radicals. Her books were among the first that made me feel like the genre could be as layered and exacting as any literary fiction. She didn’t pander. She didn’t oversimplify. Her novels were intelligent, emotionally complex, and structurally bold—stories that stayed with you not because they were comforting, but because they felt true.
I started with The Seducer, and at first, I didn’t get it. The hero was unreadable, the heroine felt too young, and the whole thing struck me as oddly cool. But as I kept reading, I fell for the prose, the restraint, the intricate unraveling of longing. That book taught me to listen harder to what characters don’t say. Hunter’s romances didn’t offer fireworks; they built tension slowly, precisely—and then, when you least expected it, broke your heart open.
It’s hard to name favorites. Her medievals—especially By Design—are extraordinary: unsparing, richly textured, and grounded in women’s work and ambition. By Possession remains one of the best class-crossed romances I’ve ever read. She excelled at series. I particularly love The Rarest Blooms. Each book is sexy, sharp, and emotionally generous. I’ve read them all more than once, not just for the heat (though it’s there), but for the way Hunter treated desire as something complex and deeply rooted—never cheap, never easy.
That mystery was part of her power. Hunter wrote passion with elision—sometimes more than I wanted—but when it worked, it was perfect. Her love scenes were never purple, but they shimmered with that charged, unnameable energy between people lucky enough to share great sex. She understood that lust could be transformative, and that real connection often lives in what can’t quite be said. Reading her was like entering a world where nothing was accidental—not a glance, not a sentence, not a kiss.
What set her apart, always, was her interest in power—who holds it, who wants it, and what it costs. Her heroines had agency before the genre demanded it, and her heroes weren’t undone by that. Even in her quieter novels, she kept pushing, letting her characters be smart, flawed, and fully human. She was a two-time RITA Award winner, a consistent bestseller, and a writer whose influence can be traced in the generation that followed. She showed us what romance could be—and now that she’s gone, we’ll keep rereading her, grateful she gave us so much.
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