What a delightful book. Dahlia Adler’s Home Field Advantage combines the serious with the fun and light, providing a novel with a whiff of the 1980s about it together with lovable, memorable characters that will please any discerning teenager looking for an afternoon’s read. Amber McCloud is a cheerleader with a mission – to become…
If you’re a queer kid who survived life as a student at a religious school, I Kissed Shara Wheeler will definitely have a strong impact on you. You’ll either remember the agonies of self-discovery under the crucible of religion, academia and social pressure, or you’ll nod your head as Casey McQuiston effortlessly wraps her arms…
With apologies to Paul Simon, it seems there are 50 million ways to rewrite Little Women. I’ve seen modern adaptions that switch the book’s setting and time period; versions that give us a living Beth or a Jo/Laurie union. Versions where the Marches are vampires or werewolves, or just plain horny. The four folks taking…
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care is a queer contemporary romance about a small-town single mom and a big city photographer. There is no love lost between Delilah Green and her miniscule home town, Bright Falls. She fled when she was eighteen and barely looked back, preferring to spend her time pursuing her artistic dreams in Manhattan….
Alexandria Bellefleur’s Written in the Stars series – about romance and astrology in Seattle – comes to a sweet conclusion with Count Your Lucky Stars, about two former high school girlfriends who reunite unexpectedly after many years. It’s warm and funny and real about what it’s like to fall in love when you think romance…
There’s been a mini-epidemic of Canadian and American lady hockey players entering into lovelocks, marriage and childrearing together – prime romance novel material. Thus I’ve been yearning for more F/F centered hockey romances (there is a bumper crop of het and M/M ones in the genre), and Unexpected Goals was just the treat I was…
Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer is a YA suspense tech thriller with strong romantic elements, and it’s electrically good at every single element. Steph Turner and her mother have been on the run for almost as long as Steph can remember. Her father tried to kill them both via arson and has the tech-savvy…
A Spindle Splintered, Alix E. Harrow’s wonderful retelling of Sleeping Beauty, stands the fairytale’s premise on its head while managing to hit the right familiar notes to evoke emotions in its readers. Zinnia Gray suffered through a rare industrial accident that has given her a fatal disease which will kill her before the age of…
How to Find a Princess is one of Alyssa Cole’s more lighthearted books – but it’s also the weakest romance I’ve read from her so far. I don’t think it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination – its warmth earns a B and a recommendation from me – but pacing problems keep this one…
The Hellion’s Waltz is a lot of fun, but has a few flaws that knock it out of the DIK bracket and make it the weakest of Olivia’s Waite’s Feminine Pursuits series. It’s still well worth the read though, though. Sophie Roseingrave is a piano teacher, tuner and composer with a problem. All she wants…