The first book in a new series by H.L. Day, The Reluctant Companion is a light-hearted fantasy adventure featuring an opposites-attract romance between a snarky farm boy and a handsome charmer who team up – reluctantly, as the title suggests – to undertake a quest, and fall for each other along the way. It’s a…
What a fun, refreshing slow-burn of a romance! Chef’s Kiss understands what joy cooking can bring, and it brings it to life through a union between grumpy and sunshine, that universally appealing combo. TJ Alexander has some real writing skills, and they deploy them perfectly. Highly-strung Simone Larkspur is a busy pastry chef who lands…
I’ll admit that I cheated a little on TBR Challenge this month. I usually try to dig deep into the archives of my TBR, but when I saw the “Grumpy” prompt, all I could think of was the grumpy/sunshine romance I’d picked up from Amazon First Reads last month, based entirely on the author’s hilarious…
Freya Marske’s inventive and impressive début, A Marvellous Light, is an enchanting blend of magic, mystery and romance set in England in 1908, in which a newly-appointed civil servant finds himself suddenly part of a mysterious and fantastical world of deadly curses, spells and secrets. It’s a clever, well-written story featuring two attractive and strongly…
Lee Welch’s original and inventive fantasy romance Salt Magic, Skin Magic was one of my favourite books of 2018. Like most of those who read it, I was excited to read the work of such a gifted new author, and I’ve been eager for more of it ever since. In Seducing the Sorcerer, Ms. Welch…
Mariana Zapata is very well reviewed here, so I was excited to try her new book, All Rhodes Lead Here. But with its clumsy heroine, rude but ultimately gold-hearted hero, and bland first person narrator, this book reads as run-of-the-mill YA, with only the swearing and sex scenes making it an adult novel. Aurora de…
Careless Whispers is a nice, slow-burn romance that focuses on two smart people who gradually learn that they’re much more than who they seem to be at first blush. Business rivals to friends to lovers is the formula, and the formula works like gangbusters. Stone-cold tobacco and holding company heiress and businesswoman Elaina “Evil Eyes”…
Lord Peregrine Cavendish has been friends with Lysander (Zander) Winterbourne (Introducing Mr. Winterbourne) since they were young boys and schoolmates. Lysander was the golden boy Perry hero-worshiped, while Perry was just Zander’s hulking friend – Gogmagog, as old Warner, their housemaster at Fletcherfield, had called him. He’s loved Zander for years, and only discovered they…
Marie Sexton is one of those authors who’s been on my radar for a while but whose books I haven’t yet read, so I was pleased when I found something on my Kindle that would fit this month’s TBR Challenge prompt. Winter Oranges is an emotional but impossible love story that kept me guessing – right up…
I loved the first full-length novel in Cara Bastone’s Forever Yours series, Just a Heartbeat Away, which featured a widowed single dad and a teacher. In that story, secondary characters Serafine St. Romain and Tyler Leshuski were introduced as friends of the heroine and hero respectively, and seemed to clash at every turn. So it’s…