It’s time again to write about romance novels! To my eternal sorrow, I always read fewer romance novels than I want to read, because they are much easier to get as ebooks, but I much prefer reading physical books. So if I check out five physical library books and five library ebooks, I will prioritize the five physical books and forget about the five ebooks. This is especially a problem if I want to read independent or self-published romances (which I do), which often don’t exist as print books at all. It’s a problem for which I have not yet found a solution.
(“But you read fanfic, Jenny, and that’s not physical books either” I KNOW AND I LAMENT THIS EVERY DAY.)
The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, Cat Sebastian
The arrival of a new Cat Sebastian book is always cause for rejoicing! The Queer Principles of Kit Webb is another queer historical romance, this one set in the 1700s, about a nobleman’s son called Percy who is plotting with his mother-in-law (she’s his mother-in-law but she’s his same age and they are The Best Bros) to ruin his father’s life before a blackmailer can ruin it for them. To do this, Percy must do a highway robbery! But he does not know how to do a highway robbery, which means he has to find *presto hands* A HIGHWAYMAN.
(Did anyone besides me read that poem “The Highwayman“? It’s about the highwayman who comes riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door to flirt with Bess, the landlord’s daughter, and then in order to capture the highwayman, the long arm of the law ties up Bess and puts a gun to her breast and the idea is that when the highwayman shows up, they’re going to use Bess to capture him. I won’t spoil what happens but things do not end well for Bess. She is really beset on all sides by Male Nonsense. Justice for Bess.)
The only highwayman that Percy and Marian are able to track down is out of the game. Kit Webb retired from the life of a highwayman after his partner Rob was killed and he himself was significantly injured. Now he runs a coffeehouse, where he grumps around very handsomely and runs a lending library very grumpily. He has long luscious brown hair. You will never convince me that he’s not English Eliot Spencer. He even runs a brewpub basically.
English Eliot Spencer Kit Webb is out of the game, but he is allured by the prospect of one last job, even though he knows that it, and Percy, are a bad idea.
As noted, this is a new time period for Cat Sebastian (I think? unless I am forgetting something?), and she really leans all the way into it. The 1700s were a horrible (read: amazing) time for fashion, complete with beauty spots for people of all genders, decorative swords, and so many wigs. Percy wears all of those things. It is great. I am so glad that Cat Sebastian did not try to pretend that the fashions in 1751 were anything other than what they were. Sometimes Percy wears very quiet clothes in order to skulk around and blend in, but other times he goes all in on 1750s nonsense, and it never failed to make me laugh.
A nice trend that I’ve noticed in m/m romance lately is a greater emphasis on the women in people’s lives (and community more broadly). I loved Kit and Percy’s romance, of course, but I also adored Percy and Marian’s friendship. Their relationship is totally unromantic, but that doesn’t make it less important. It’s of vital importance to them both, the life raft that keeps them afloat in the ocean of 1750s society. Marian is ferociously intelligent and determined to see their plan through to the end. If I had one small complaint about this book, it’s that I’d have liked to see either more or less of what was going on with Marian: Clearly she’s got her own drama, which we catch glimpses of in the background of this book, and which I presume is setting up a sequel? But there’s just enough of it that it felt like it should have been more central to this book, rather than a tease for the next one, and the lack of resolution made the book as a whole feel not quite resolved.
But also, I mean, who cares? We’ll get Marian’s book (right? right?), and then I will be happy. And in the meantime, Cat Sebastian’s romances continue to be an absolute treat, every single time.
Note: I got this from Netgalley for review and am also mutuals with the author on Twitter, where I am trying to convince her to share with me her archives of Harry Potter fanfic from the olden days.
The Spare, Miranda Dubner
You know how sometimes you have a book on the docket to read, and you know you’re going to like it, but somehow you don’t get to it right away, and then you get distracted by other shiny things? And then when you go back to that one book, you’re like WHY DID I NOT READ THIS SOONER? That was my journey with The Spare. I have no explanation! I knew I was going to enjoy it!
At baseline, The Spare is a romance between a prince (of alterna-England) and his bodyguard. Already great stuff, no? But instead of being a completely straightforward, two-point-of-view romance, it’s more of an ensemble piece. Eddie and Isaac have their chapters, but so do Eddie’s sister Alex, his mother Victoria, even his older brother (the heir-apparent). As I feel that I’ve said ad nauseam in recent romance round-up posts (and am going to say again about the next book because I am Predictable), I love reading a romance where the central couple feels really situated in their community. Admittedly Eddie and Isaac have very specific, rarefied, some might say deeply weird communities, but it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to care about some of those people too.
Reading stories about fictional royals is always slightly weird for me because I do not like the monarchy! I want to topple the monarchy! But I also have a soft spot a mile wide for indulgent royal silliness, and The Spare came through for me in all the ways I wanted it to. There’s all the made-up (that’s not a jab) royal protocol that everyone has to adhere to with stone-faced seriousness because of their Duty to their Country. There’s lots of public relations people and their opinions about what information about the royal siblings and their lives can be shared with the public (in Eddie’s case, photos of him with a guy have been leaked to the press, and now everyone wants to do damage control about the Absolute Scandal of having a bisexual prince). There are public charity efforts and private charity efforts; there are excruciating public events of the type that make me glad to be in quarantine.1
Underneath and alongside that silliness, though, is a core of true warmth and care. I was describing this book to a friend as “50% [royal] nonsense, 50% the most incredible weapons-grade softness.” (They were like, isn’t softness inherently not weapons-grade? and I was like DEPENDS WHAT YOU WANT THE WEAPON TO DO.) Everyone in this book messes up and makes careless decisions, sometimes to the very serious detriment of other characters, but what’s fundamental to them all is that they want to do the right thing, not just by each other, but by the world. It’s soft and lovely –and occasionally searingly insightful — in all the ways I need my books to be soft and lovely right now.
Note: The author sent me this for review!
Accidentally Engaged, Farah Heron
Sourdough starters really freak me out, and Accidentally Engaged, despite having many strengths as a book, did not ease my mind vis-a-vis sourdough starters. Did you know that sourdough starters double in size all the time? So you have to keep trimming them or whatever, to prevent them from running rampant? (Don’t fact-check this; I was too frightened and grossed out to go back and reread the part of the book that talked about this, because I didn’t want to give myself nightmares.)
When Reena runs into a hot new neighbor, Nadim, she thinks nothing of it — until she learns that Nadim is her father’s newest employee, and that her parents are hoping she’ll marry Nadim. She does, um, not want to. What she does want, after she’s laid off from her job, is to enter a home cooking competition, but to do it, she needs to have a pretend fiance. It’s a win-win! Maybe. Sort of. And anyway she is definitely not going to fall in love with her fake TV fiance.
Y’all I lied. She is going to fall in love with her fake (web) TV fiance. Also I never remember how many Es go in the word fiance. Thank you for being a safe space for me to be open about these vulnerable truths.
Remember that period of YA where all the books with Muslim American protagonists were about those protagonists breaking free from the strictures of their old-fashioned first-generation immigrant parents? And then YA moved on, and now we get to have lots of different kinds of first-generation immigrant parents? Accidentally Engaged feels like the sequel to that era of YA novels. Reena works hard to be independent of her parents, who are overbearing and they do keep secrets and they can’t be trusted with the truth about what’s going on with her. But over the course of the story (and this was far and away my favorite thing about the book), she starts to realize that she doesn’t want to separate herself from her family. Rather, she wants to find ways to be true to herself within her family and her culture.
As a person with a warm and loving family, and a person who has had to renegotiate her relationships with most of her nuclear family members in adulthood, I truly loved Reena’s journey to being more truthful with her family and giving them space to be more truthful with her. She starts the book with a lot of anger towards her sister Saira, and the shift in how she views Saira was a particularly lovely element of a broader plot arc around her family that I already loved.
Her romance with Nadim is also a lot of fun, especially if you’re a fan of fake relationships. Reena and Nadim cycle through just about every possible permutation of real and fake relationships, in ways that poke fun at the genre conventions while also partaking in them — catnip to me! Nadim is also a little kinky, in ways I rarely see in romance novels, and the book overall feels really sex-positive despite being a closed-door romance. The big misunderstanding in the final third was a good one, although Heron might have gone the teeniest bit overboard on accumulating evidence of Nadim’s wickedness, which she then had to painstakingly refute later on.
There is also a recipe for a Zanzibar egg curry at the back of the book that I am for sure going to try to make. It looks delicious.
That’s it for me and recent romances, friends! What romances have y’all been reading lately?
- I AM NOT GLAD TO BE IN QUARANTINE SOMEONE SAVE ME. ↩