Cat Sebastian takes readers back to Georgian England with her latest novel, The Queer Principles of Kit Webb. It’s a lively tale laden with wit, sparkling dialogue and insightful social commentary; the two leads are superbly characterised and there’s a vibrant secondary cast, too. In fact, when I was only a few chapters in, I…
Harlequin Historicals continues to demonstrate that smaller packages contain not just good things, but sometimes, things that are great. As a young girl, Psyché Winthrop-Abeni came to England from Jamaica with her biological father, a white man (her enslaved mother had died). She was raised alongside her white cousin as a daughter of the house…
Author Irene Hannon is a master of setting and conveying emotional tone, and in Blackberry Beach, the seventh book of the A Hope Harbor Novel series, the tone is like smooth water and soft sunlight. Ms. Hannon explores the theme of thresholds in life and how we humans face and deal with them, and this…
Narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Stephen Dexter Sarina Bowen’s The Understatement of the Year and the co-authored (with Elle Kennedy) Him/Us are some of my favourite m/m stories and go-to re-listens, so when I saw that Teddy Hamilton was on board for Roommate, the first book in a new series that takes place in the…
I first learned about the writing of Romanceclass in the Philippines when I interviewed Bianca Mori for the Tropical Romance Book Club. Both Mori’s novella One Night at the Palace Hotel and another #romanceclass novel by Mina V. Esguerra, Kiss and Cry, have been DIKs for me, so I was quite excited to try the…
When I read Powder & Pavlova, book one in Jay Hogan’s Southern Lights series, I was intrigued by the character of Adrian Powell, the handsome, enigmatic and tight-lipped barista who worked in the café owned by Ethan Sharpe and who, by the end of the book, had joined him in setting up a coffee roasting…
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,…
Sarah Mayberry is an author well known to those who read contemporary romance. It’s been a while since she’s released anything new so when I saw that she had a romantic comedy novella coming out, I made sure to pick it up. She’s good at evoking a lot of emotions in both her characters and…
Kelly Jensen’s Uncommon Ground is book one in her Aliens in New York duology, a story that combines mystery, science fiction and a bit of action with a tender and poignant romance between two people who don’t really fit anywhere – until they find each other. Dillon Lee has always felt like an outsider. He’s…
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…