Well, friends, I hope you are all hanging in there. These past few weeks have been hard even by 2020 standards, as the country’s government showed yet again — as if there remained any doubt — that it does not care about Black lives, and will uphold white supremacy at any cost. The protests that resulted have been met all too frequently with police violence. If anyone reading this has felt unsure about the aims and demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, I hope those doubts have been laid to rest in the past fortnight. Our country must confront its racism and make drastic, radical changes.
I don’t really have a good segue! If you are Black and reading this, I hope that you are able to get the space and peace that you need in this very hard and sad time. To non-Black readers, I encourage us to educate ourselves (privately, not by asking for more labor from Black acquaintances, coworkers, and friends) and work for systemic change. There is no way to be neutral at this moment in history (see also: every other moment in history). We must stand against white supremacy in America, and around the world.
And uh, now for some romance novels.
The Worst Best Man, Mia Sosa
My friend Ashley has recently been on the hunt for thrillers in the subgenre People with Jobs, and I’d like to take this opportunity to state for the record that this is also a subgenre of romance that I absolutely adore. The Worst Best Man has many, many things to recommend it — which I’ll get into — but in particular, it is one of the most satisfying People with Jobs romances I’ve read in a while.
During a drunken night out, Max somehow (he can’t remember!) convinced his brother not to marry his fiancee, Lina. The wedding was called off just as Lina was preparing to walk down the aisle. Now, three years later, Lina has built a successful wedding planning business and is preparing to move to the next step. If she can work with the Cartwright group’s marketing firm to put together a kick-ass presentation to make the case for her to be hired as the in-house wedding planner of an upscale hotel. The only hitch is that her marketing contact is none other than Max Hartley.
I loved this book, everything from the charming-as-fuck illustrated cover to the warm and loving family relationships to the wonderful banter and tenderness between the central couple. As an entry in the People with Jobs subgenre, it’s practically perfect. We aren’t just told that Lina’s a superb wedding planner; we get to see it in action, all the tiny details that go into making a perfect day. It’s also cool to see Max work out a marketing plan for her business, trying on different angles and perspectives to find which one works the best for her. It’s the kind of thing that’s very fun in a primary couple but will also be fun to see on the sidelines in future books.
I also loved seeing Max and Lina work together on communication and being a couple. They’re both bringing baggage to the table — Lina has faced down some major failures and wants never to do it again, while Max has spent his whole life in his brother’s shadow. But at the same time, they truly like each other. Even when they screw up and hurt each other’s feelings, they’re both really trying to speak the truth and interact with honesty. It’s lovely and great and had me rooting for them all the way.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the food in this book. Lina comes from a large, warm Brazilian American family, and her mother and aunts own a shop that sells Brazilian food (among other things). She’s constantly talking about food items that make my mouth water, even though I’m unfamiliar with them. When this (*waves hands around*) is all over, in like, 2025, I have got to find a Brazilian restaurant to try. Mia Sosa is killing me. I loved this debut novel and cannot wait to get my hands on this author’s backlist.
Romancing the Duke, Tessa Dare
My friend Ashley recced this book to me, and it’s as much of a delight as I was promised. Izzy Goodnight was left in poverty after her father’s death. Though he was the celebrated and wealthy author of a series of books about a fantasy world told in stories to a beautiful little girl named Izzy Goodnight, he never changed his will to ensure that Izzy was protected after his death. Now she depends on the goodwill of fans, though she feels hemmed in by their expectations that she will forever be the sweet innocent of the stories.
When she receives word of an inheritance from a distant godfather, she hopes for a few hundred pounds, at most. What she gets is a castle. The downside is that it’s already occupied, by a wrathful, cynical duke who has withdrawn from the world since an injury left him with scarring, debilitating headaches, and near-total blindness. He insists that the castle belongs to him, that he would never have sold it. Stuck at an impasse, he and Izzy make a bargain: She’ll go through his long-neglected correspondence in an effort to help him sort out what happened with his castle, and he’ll pay her an extortionate rate that will keep her solvent once (he hopes) it’s proved that the castle still belongs to him. What ensues includes home renovations, a renewed belief in the power of friendship, and more cosplay than you might be expecting.
(I don’t know if y’all know this, but I love romance novels where they have to fix up a shitty old place and make it nice again. It’s my favorite kind of forced proximity. Romance novels have an inherent arc that moves from disorder to order, so honestly home renovation is a very natural fit for them.)
While I continue to feel stresst about that romance trope where someone has a scar and/or a disability that they believe makes them ugly and unlovable, I do think Tessa Dare did a fair bit of unpacking of All That in Romancing the Duke. She gets into the weeds of what Ransom can and can’t see, and in particular she makes it clear that the main reason he thinks he’s unlovable was his upbringing, not his injury. Moreover, it helps that his conviction of his undesirability is matched by Izzy’s, and that neither one of them find their insecurities borne out by the way the fans treat them. So yep, another delightful soft gem of a Tessa Dare romance.
Gilded Cage, KJ Charles
As I was contemplating purchase of KJ Charles’ newest release, I suddenly realized to my horror that I had never read the previous one! Gilded Cage is a companion novel to Any Old Diamonds, a book about a son of the nobility who hires a jewel thief to get revenge on his abusive father. The jewel thief in Diamonds, Jerry Crozier, has a partner called Templeton Lane — not his real name — and at the start of Gilded Cage he walks into what he thinks is going to be a simple robbery but turns out to be an extremely murder scene. Suspected of doing the murders, his only hope rests with private detective Susan Lazarus. They have a history, but Temp hopes that she’ll still be willing to help him clear his name, if only for the sake of seeing justice done.
To nobody’s surprise — KJ Charles being one of my favorite romance authors — I loved this book. Susan Lazarus is the angry, brilliant, ambitious heroine of my dreams, and she’s in no rush to forgive the man who (she thinks) abandoned her when they were teenagers. For his part, Templeton Lane admires her desperately and does his best to make himself a safe and worthwhile partner to her. It’s a lovely romance that gives space to the idea that in this period, a woman marrying a man is doing one of the riskiest things it’s possible to do — and I loved that. I won’t say more because I guess it’s a spoiler?, but I’ll just add that as happy as I was with the conversations around this issue, I was even happier with where the protagonists ended up.
One of the things Charles does well is really prickly, tense relationships between two people who don’t trust anyone, generally, and specifically don’t trust each other. I was interested to see how that would play out in a m/f romance! The trouble with adversarial romances between men and women, particularly in a historical romance, is that it’s very easy to slip into some troubling gender dynamics. KJ Charles solves the problem tidily by giving Susan the upper hand in every possible way: Templeton is under suspicion of two murders, and he is absolutely at Susan’s mercy. If she chooses to give him up to the police, he’s finished, and if she chooses not to help find the real murderer, he’s finished there too. It makes an excellent counterbalance to the ways in which he could potentially be a threat to her, as a (pretty huge!) guy in a very sexist time and place.
So yes! Definitely up there with Think of England or An Unnatural Vice. Plus I learned some things about opals, and I enjoyed the careful, methodical untangling of the mystery. Good times.
What romance novels have y’all been reading lately? Any particularly good entries in the subgenre People with Jobs?