Love Her or Lose Her is the second book in Tessa Bailey’s Hot & Hammered series. A love story about a marriage on the rocks and about growing into who you were always meant to be, this novel is fun, sweet, intense and heartwarming. It stands very well on its own; Georgie and Travis from…
Second Chance Sweet Shop is a very pleasant romance about a patisserie owner who falls in love with a single-father dentist six years her junior. Unfortunately there are a few hiccups that keep it from reaching DIK status. Having recently divorced an abusive country star, Sasha Manning has finally opened her long-dreamed-of patisserie, Sasha’s Sweet…
I’ve enjoyed all the books in Annabeth Albert’s Out of Uniform series, and although I wasn’t wild about the book before this one Wheels Up, book five, Squared Away is one of my favourites, a beautifully told story of love – romantic and familial – trust, and acceptance, featuring a gorgeous slow-burn romance as two…
There’s an old saying that “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince/princess.” That has certainly been true for Hannah Mayfield and Jack Nolan from Not the Girl You Marry. For them, love is a battlefield, and they are battle scarred and combat fatigued and neither of them wants to…
Wealthy Chloe Brown has fibromyalgia. She also has a list of things she wants to experience (I’m so over ‘tick off items on a list’ as a plot device), and major abandonment issues related both to her diagnosis (a douche of a fiancé, rarely mentioned, who ditched her because of her illness) and her narcissism…
In the Carla Kelly tradition of holiday shorts that make you smile, these three sweet short stories (set in the Edwardian Caribbean across Christmas, New Year, and Reyes Magos) are a lovely addition to any holiday romance fan’s library. These are gentle, realistic stories about the holidays of ordinary or even poor historical people; it’s…
Adriana Herrera’s Dreamers, a series about a group of four Afro-Latinx friends who live and work in and around New York, seems to get better and better with each book. American Love Story is the third instalment and I loved it. It’s complex and romantic while remaining grounded in reality; the two leads are principled men…
Harlequin novels are a trope-y subgenre, and this book hits a lot of them. While Black Tie Billionaire avoids a lot of the worst pitfalls of archetype, there are too many contrivances. Shay ‘Camille’ Neal, heiress, is doing a favor for her friend and moonlighting in disguise as catering staff at a Chicago fundraiser attended…
The Write Escape combines the fantasy escapism of falling in love in a charming small foreign town with very real problems, including self-empowerment, racism and generational cycles of alcohol abuse. It’s mostly successful and very dreamy on all counts, with a couple of flaws in its conclusion keeping it from a flat out A. Antonia…
Talia Hibbert’s A Girl Like Her was one of my favorite books in 2018. I initially doubted the story could or would appeal to me – as I mentioned in my review, it featured a heroine alternately described as rude, awkward, and, according to everyone in town, bad news. But I was completely won over…