As someone who regularly asks the question posed by the title of Jenny Colgan’s mid-2000s novel Where Have All the Boys Gone?, I don’t know if I’m comforted or horrified by the proof that women have been pondering this mystery for at least a decade and a half. Regardless, I’m quite glad that the publishers…
As someone who has enjoyed both Christian fiction and sex-not-included romantic comedies, I consider myself to have been fairly well-prepared to enjoy a Christian romance that combined both genres. Having reached the end of A Girl’s Guide to the Outback, I have to say that I found it neither excessively Christian nor excessively romantic. Ultimately,…
Most Ardently is a fun, easy on the soul treasure – a femmeslash Pride and Prejudice AU, if you will. Honors student Elisa Benitez – spirited, outspoken, poor, and independent – meets Darcy Fitzgerald, a mega-rich Kardashian type, in a lit class at Stevenson Community College. They fight over Lord of the Flies, with Darcy…
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…
Can a BDSM f/f romance, written and illustrated by a man be the sweetest, funniest, and most romantic thing you’ve read this year? The answer is a surprising but resounding yes. Lisa Williams has always had a bondage kink, but she’s limited herself to solo experimentation and writing erotic stories. Her online stories catch the…
Bethany Turner’s début, Wooing Cadie McCaffrey, is the story of two colleagues who fall in love and have to deal with the consequences when that love dents their principles. What begins as a light-hearted, funny, and touching faith-based colleagues-to-lovers romance becomes unfortunately bogged down in self-recrimination and is burdened with a heroine who is ultra-tough…
Narrated by Joel Leslie Rule Breaker, the first book in Lily Morton’s aptly named Mixed Messages series, is terrific. Opposites attract when an emotionally closed-off lawyer falls for his long-suffering assistant, and despite its sometimes heavy subject matter and slightly taboo relationship, Rule Breaker is comfort reading at its best. Romantic and sexy and passionate…
As a fervent anglophile and Janeite, I was ALL in to read Ilsa Madden-Mills’s Pride & Prejudice-inspired steamy New Adult romance, Dirty English the first in her British Bad Boys series. I was instantly hooked by the epigraph – “You have bewitched me, body and soul.” Reading Mr. Darcy’s words affirmed my confidence that Dirty…
Narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Seraphina Valentine Kennedy Ryan was a new-to-me author when I picked up Long Shot, the first book in the Hoops series. I loved it. It devastated, surprised and delighted me in equal measure, and it was one of my favorite books in 2018. I didn’t think the follow-up, Block Shot,…