Début novels can be a bit of a gamble, but I’m glad to report that Lily Chu’s The Stand-In is a risk worth taking. Gracie Reed is the biracial daughter of a white Canadian man and a Chinese mother now struggling with dementia. First, her boss sexually harasses and then fires her. Next, a paparazzo…
Everything for You – book five in Chloe Liese’s Bergman Brothers series – is the first entry in that series to feature a same sex couple and is also the author’s first m/m romance. As I haven’t read anything by Ms. Liese before, I decided to rectify that by picking it up for review. It’s…
After Mackenzi Lee’s Tulip Fever was cancelled in 2019 for multiple reasons, the author has returned to the familiar stomping ground of her Montague Siblings series. This third (and allegedly final) book in that triad focuses on the youngest brother, Adrian. For those worried that the book would be unsatisfactory after the author took a…
Fans of angsty romance will be delighted with The Heart Principle, the third book in Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient series. While this book – and therefore this review – does contain spoilers for the first two novels, you do not have to read those to enjoy this story. Quan Diep, older brother to the…
Sonali Dev delivers a charming, poignant love story in this third offering in her Raje Family Austen-inspired series. You do not have to read the others to enjoy Incense and Sensibility. Yash Raje, California’s first Indian-American gubernatorial candidate, has always looked at his privilege as a test. It’s a chance to prove that he is…
Kris Ripper’s The Hate Project is a warm, quirky and often very funny romance with a difference – a grumpy/grumpy pairing – and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a well-written mixture of snarky and poignant, and I loved the idiosyncratic and uncompromising voice of PoV character Oscar, whose anxiety and depression are presented in…
Alyssa Cole spins off her Reluctant Royals series (the hero and heroine in this story both appeared in A Prince on Paper) into a brand new set of tales, starting with How to Catch a Queen, a beautiful story about a woman who’s always wanted to be a queen, a man who never wanted to…
I like dogs and cats, and I like shifter stories that center ‘pack’. Unfortunately, despite these things – and my fondness for this author’s work – I didn’t really like Better Than People. No, it isn’t a shifter story. But animals and pack are at its heart, and if you aren’t a big time dog…
Beware of judging a book by its title. Had I listened to my inner book snob, I would not have read Heidi Cullinan’s beautiful romance The Professor’s Green Card Marriage. I had passed over the novel a few times because I believed the clunky title to be too literal and uninspired for my tastes. But,…
A Delicate Deception is a sparkler of a tale, featuring a complex heroine, a winning hero, a great romance and memorable secondary characters. Amelia Allenby has come to the Derbyshire countryside with her friend and former governess Georgiana to get away from the prying eyes of society after causing a shocking scandal. It’s a scandal…