The Reading List is a sweet, simple and tender story about the power words have to heal and the joys that books can bring. It’s a bit cheesy, but it’s just the right sort of cheese – like a toasty sandwich filled with melting gouda. Mukesh is a widower of two years, still in mourning…
It Happened One Summer is a contemporary romance about socialite Piper Bellinger reeling after a fall from grace. Following some bad choices, Piper finds herself stuck for the summer in the small town where she was born, where she might find more than she bargained for. Our story begins when Piper is dumped by her…
I loved Float Plan! This is my first book by Trish Doller and I’m looking forward to reading through her past releases. Anna Beck needs to run away from her life. Less than a year earlier, her fiancé committed suicide and left Anna alone and spinning from the fallout. For the past ten months, she’s…
Ladies of the House is a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, following a family as they fall from grace after the death of their patriarch. Mother and daughters have to grapple with their new lives, and learn to survive independently, despite a deck stacked against them. The Richardson women are blindsided by…
Olivia Dade’s Marysburg series stars older teachers (all characters are forty-somethings) in workplace romances. This anthology contains three novellas: Sweetest in the Gale (in its first release), and reprints of Unraveled (originally from the anthology He’s Come Undone) and Cover Me (from the anthology Rogue Acts). All three stories are heartfelt and enjoyable, and if…
In Off Balance, the first book in her new series of contemporary romances, author Jay Hogan takes a big geographical leap from one end of New Zealand to the other, from the lakes and mountains of the Southland (the setting for her recent Southern Lights books) to the coastal region of subtropical Northland at the…
Justin A. Reynolds’ impressionistic, speculative, emotionally accessible and beautifully original novel, Early Departures, explores the pain of regret that attends sudden and unexpected death, especially when it happens to young people. Jamal has one regret in his young life – he didn’t save the life of his close friend Quincy – Q – Barrantes when…
Amazon’s listing data for the Sugar Sun series is a bit confusing, but Tempting Hymn is definitely book 1.5, and I strongly recommend that you do not read it first, because its entire premise is a spoiler for book one. On the other hand, I actually enjoyed the appearances by the characters I deduced were…
I haven’t read too many début stories this year, but I heard good chatter on social media about Cara Bastone’s Just a Heartbeat Away, the first full length novel in her Forever Yours series. (Technically her first book is a prequel novella to the series, When We First Met, but this is her first full…
Beth O’Leary’s 2019 début The Flatshare was just marvelous – our reviewer gave it an A-, and it was an A for me personally. But the sophomore slump has struck more than one début star, so it was with both hope and nervousness that I volunteered to review The Switch, about a grandmother from the…