Good Girl Complex is a contemporary cross-class romance which is weighed down by its formula, and while the author gives an excellent view of her working-class hero, she doesn’t deliver on the heroine’s wealthy side of the class divide. Mackenzie – Mac – Cabot is just one of the many filthy-rich brats who pass through…
One True Loves is sweet, honest and touching in its portrayal of that space between being a teenager and becoming an independent college student. The delightful Lenore Bennett is brilliant, talented and no romantic – though she wants to be in love, has tried to be in love, and has lost repeatedly along the way. …
One of my students recently asked me for some reading on asexuality – she’s thinking it’s a label she may want to own, and wanted to know if I could recommend some fiction books to help her understand it better. I couldn’t, so I headed to the direct messages of some friends and asked for…
Elle Kennedy is one of my favorite authors for new adult college sports romances and The Dare is part of her Briar U spinoff of her Off Campus series. While other stories in the series have been quite fun and entertaining, this one left me somewhat disappointed, reasons for which I’ll outline below. Taylor is…
I can’t recall why I picked up Making Faces, but I do remember it generating a fair amount of buzz about 5 or 6 years ago, so I suspect I downloaded it out of curiosity. I found Harmon’s book to be something of a mixed bag. As with many self-published books I’ve read, this one…
Fans of New Adult sporty romances set on college campuses likely have writers like Elle Kennedy on their auto-buy lists and I’m definitely one of them. With her current series, Briar U, she’s been profiling some good guy hockey players, young men with an eye for the ladies as much as the game. Now it’s…
Mary H.K. Choi’s Permanent Record is a uniquely told, dazzling experience about sudden gifts of serendipity and happenstance as well as the workaday grinding world that surrounds us. The beautiful character work and realistic portrait of New York enchant, but with a heroine who feels more like a paper fantasy than a real person I…
Motion is part one of Penny Reid’s new series Laws of Physics and it is classic Penny Reid – smart, funny, and romantic with a little bit of mystery thrown in. Mona Da Vinci is a nineteen-year-old physics genius enjoying her structured life – meditation, yoga, journaling, dental checkups – all while interviewing to attend…
College is a much better fit than high school for odd, self-contained Penny Lee, getting her away from her bland high school boyfriend and her teenybopper mom. While getting a fresh start at the University of Texas, she meets Sam Becker, who’s living above the coffee shop where he bakes and makes hot drinks. Sam’s…
Elle Kennedy returns to the new adult hockey romance world with The Chase, a spinoff from her Off-Campus series, that is set to launch at least two (please more) books into the much loved setting of Briar University. While there are returning characters and a few events referenced, as well as some pre-existing dynamics from the previous series,…