There was no reason for me to do this. I just felt like attaining an arbitrary goal that made me feel clever. Do I still have more than 30 books checked out from the library? Yes. Do I have multiple ARCs that I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing and they’ve piled up and I’m starting to worry I’ll never catch up? Yes. But January Jenny read one book per day this entire month. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS. So here comes a lightning round of all the books I read in January.

There are thirty-one of them.

I’m a goals genius.

Week One

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor – A heavily augmented woman called AO is attacked in the marketplace, after which — she is extremely strong due to all the augmentations — she goes on the run across Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman she meets. A whole world of surveillance follows.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, Tamsyn Muir – What a weirdo Tamsyn Muir is. I say it with love! Princess Floralinda is the story of a princess imprisoned in, yep, a forty-flight tower. On every flight there is a different monster, and at the bottom there is a dragon, and none of the princes make it very far. With the help of a horrible little fairy, Floralinda slowly begins to make her way downward. But as she’s changing the state of things in the tower, she changes the state of things in herself as well.

Where the Children Take Us, Zain Asher – This was a Booklist read! It’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sister’s memoir. Did you know poor Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a horrible accident with his father when he was a kid? He and his dad were on a road trip around Nigeria to help Ejiofor connect with his heritage, and there was a car accident, and the dad died and the son was very badly injured; and anyway, then Zain Asher’s mum raised them all by herself while running a pharmacy in London. The book’s a love letter to Asher’s mother, although I am not personally a huge fan of memoirs.

The Thief on a Winged Horse, Kate Mascarenhas – I got this for Christmas! The author of The Psychology of Time Travel, which I was so in love with, wrote another book that only (curses!) got published in the UK and not in the US. It’s about a dysfunctional family that makes magic dolls, a young dollmaker who comes to town and insists on joining them, and a daughter of the family who wants to learn her family’s dollmaking secrets too, despite family traditions that reserve those secrets only to the men. It’s a slightly chillier book than The Psychology of Time Travel, but fascinating and enjoyable anyway.

Silence Is a Sense, Layla Alammar – A sort of literary Rear Window, from the point of view of a Syrian refugee with post-traumatic mutism. From her window in a council flat, she watches her neighbors and writes essays, anonymously, about refugees and Muslim identity. When her local mosque is the victim of a vicious attack of vandalism, she’s drawn further into the community. The writing in this was gorgeous, although the ending was maybe just a little pat.

Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane – My first time out with Mhairi McFarlane! Recommended by my lovely pal Katie, McFarlane’s a Scottish author who writes lovely books about friendship and romance. Just Last Night follows Eve and her group of friends in the aftermath of one of their deaths. As Eve grapples with the loss of Susie, she’s also forced to reckon with her feelings about Ed — which everyone in the group has known about for years. The romance in this one is slightly back-burnered, and I’d more call it women’s fiction, much as I hate the term?, because it’s really more about Eve’s journey of self-acceptance.

The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon – I read this out of order! Which is a shame, because the inciting incident of the series sounds delightful: Three different women discover they’re dating the same man. They ditch the man and become the best of friends, and each of the books in the series focuses on the romance of one of them. The Dating Playbook follows Taylor Powell, a personal trainer who gets her big break when NFL player Jamar Dixon hires her to get him in shape to rejoin the league after a major injury. It’s funny and sweet and contains fake dating: everything you want in a romance novel! I can’t wait to read the others in the series!

The Perishing, Natashia Deon – This one’s a literary fantasy novel about a girl who shows up in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or who she was before. She heals with inhuman speed and — later on — realizes that she seems to possess memories from former lives. Lou’s story, which is vivid in its depiction of the time and place, is interspersed with glimpses of a woman called Sarah in the 2100s, who reflects on her past relationships and the generations-long struggle for equality. The novel’s light on speculative elements and is definitely more on the literary fiction side of things, which suits its plotting (uneven), characterization (wonderful), and writing (gorgeous).

Week Two

Assembly, Natasha Brown – A short novel about refusal.

The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon – I read and enjoyed Solomon’s first novel, so I thought I’d pick this one up! It was fine though perhaps not quite my thing. It’s a novel that alternates chapters between a rather fraught dinner party (delicious) and the protagonist’s college career and tumultuous relationship with one of her exes. Both bits were interesting, but I’d actually have loved it to be just a dinner party book. Y’all know my feelings on bottle episodes!

Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield – A very long time ago, all the cool bloggers were reading this. It is perhaps not surprising that it took me like ten years to get to it. I found it tiresome when I started, but then I realized that the trick was to read it as it was written — in brief installments, like a newspaper column. Once I caught wise and started reading it like that, a few entries at a time, I quite enjoyed it. Not to reread, but it was an amusing entertainment of an evening.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, Akash Kapur – Only once ever have I been so intrigued by the book featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review that I’ve read that review in its entirety, the front page bit and the rest of it that you have to skip to, before reading the rest of the book review. This is because I am fascinated by cults. Auroville wasn’t a cult, but it was, at least, cult-adjacent. Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and his wife’s parents died there under troubling circumstances. Better to Have Gone tells the story of the founding of this intentional community outside of Pondicherry in India and the deaths of the two people who raised his wife. (Whiskey Jenny and I went to Pondicherry when we were in India, but not to Auroville. I did buy a comforter for my bed, though, that was made in Auroville!)

The Road Trip, Beth O’Leary – Remember how I said a minute ago that I love bottle episodes? Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip is one, and it was great. Addie and her sister and a stranger who’s hitching a ride with them are on their way to their friend’s wedding when she’s in a car crash with her ex-boyfriend Dylan and his horrible posh friend Marcus. They all pile into the car to go to the wedding (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so! no trains!), and everyone is mad at everyone, and I, obviously, loved it. Easily my favorite of Beth O’Leary’s books thus far. Par for the course with her, it deals with some heavy issues, including alcoholism and sexual assault. But also: ROAD TRIP.

Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian – I mean! As I was already on the road trip theme! It just made good sense to read Cat Sebastian’s latest, Peter Cabot Gets Lost, in which a rich queer Cabot boy goes on a road trip with a (not rich) former classmate he doesn’t have a crush on. As they make their way across America, they’re forced to reassess their initial ideas about each other and also sometimes there is only one bed. Great stuff. Classic. It’s a very very soft book, as Cat Sebastian’s books always are these days, mainly comprising conversations and sex and occasional stops to check out weird Americana. Also, is it a journey to California or a journey to self-acceptance? YOU DECIDE.

Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer – Another memoir for Booklist! This one about farming. My God, farming sounds hard; equally, I bet James Herriot would have liked these two women and their animals. Food for thought.

A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee – omg so fun. This is the lesbian witch YA dark academia book you’ve been dreaming of. It’s got similar vibes to Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers, except for it’s more focused on academia — our protagonist, Felicity Darrow (they all have names like this), is studying but pretending she’s not studying a bunch of dead witches who once attended her school. She’s also grieving her girlfriend’s death the previous year, a death in which Felicity and witchcraft may or may not have been complicit. Ellis Haley, for her part, wants to write a book about the dead girls, for which she needs to research how to get away with murder. Setting aside the question of whether anything in this book makes sense, it was fucking fun as hell and I will certainly read more by this author.

The Eternal Audience of One, Rémy Ngamije – I loved this! It’s about a Rwandan Namibian guy and his family and his friends. Actually I have a pretty hard time describing what it’s about! But what I will say is that it made me laugh out loud several times, and I am n o t a person who typically laughs out loud at books. Also, love to see Namibia getting its flowers for welcoming refugees from other parts of Africa that were experiencing unrest in the late twentieth century. What a great country.

Week Three

Subtle Blood, KJ Charles – This is the third in a romance series I generally liked but also felt kind of weird about because it’s set in England between the wars, and the Big Bad is a giant international conspiracy of all-knowing people who are highly placed in government and they want to hoard all the wealth. JUST FELT WEIRD. Anyway, Subtle Blood was my favorite in the series because there is the least amount of the giant international conspiracy, and moreover, Kim’s really excellent former fiancee shows back up and I love her.

The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary – Delighted by my success with The Road Trip, I tried the final Beth O’Leary book I hadn’t read yet, so I read The Flatshare. I loved it more than The Switch but less than The Road Trip, and I was very touched by the friendship between Tiffy and Richie.

Mr. Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater – After my absolute adoration of the Raven Cycle, the first book in Maggie Stiefvater’s new Dreamers Trilogy kinda left me cold. Mr. Impossible is just a way way way better book (it contains the following sentence, which I loved: “She was dressed in a cocktail dress that said, Look at me, and also said, Now that you’re looking, did you notice I think you’re stupid? It was a good dress.“), but I still did not feel emotionally connected to it. Everyone is mad at everyone else! The only bits where I felt emotionally connected to the book were when two characters liked each other, so it was pretty much just when Matthew was helping out Jordan and they were bonding. I’ll read the third book though!

A Lot Like Adios, Alexis Daria – I maybe loved this a scootch less than Daria’s prior book, mainly because the previous one was about a telenovela and that’s my jam. This one was still really fun though. It’s also a solid entrant in the “people with jobs” genre, so there was a lot of stuff about the central couple achieving professional satisfaction. I love that shit.

The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee – I am not 100% convinced that I’m smart enough for flash fiction. That’s all, that’s the review.

Lore Olympus, vol 1, Rachel Smythe – Maybe Lore Olympus was too hyped up for me to love it and/or maybe I needed to have read further into it. As I was reading it, I kinda had no idea why the characters were Greek gods at all? Readers please weigh in: Should I press on? Does it take a little while to form a true emotional connection to this book and these characters?

Once More Upon a Time, Rokshani Chokshi – I really should have paired this with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, as they are both novella-length twists on fairy tales. This is about a couple who were once in love, but because of magical shenanigans, they no longer are. In order to get the life they want, as non-married not-in-love people, they have to go on a road trip to do a favor for a witch. You’ll never guess what happens over the course of the road trip! Never ever once will you ever guess!

Week Four

School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale – Look at meeeee I picked up a book while browsingggggg at the libraryyyyyy! I do this all the time, but usually only from the new book shelves. Doing it from the old book shelves felt very smart of me. I have been meaning to read something by Patrick Chamoiseau for ages, and this story about a young boy attending an extremely colonial Martinique school that does all sorts of colonial things. It evoked a really vivid sense of place, despite being overall way too slow-paced for me.

Don’t You Forget about Me, Mhairi McFarlane – Another repeat author in January! I liked this one more than Just Last Night, because the romance was more central, plus there was a pub. It weirdly also had a lot of similarities to The Road Trip. Reading synergy? It’s about a woman leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, and she gets a job in a pub that turns out to be owned by her first love. Great stuff. Plus there is a dog.

Radha and Jai’s Recipe for Romance, Nisha Sharma – I love this type of YA romance, but this specific one didn’t work for me. The central characters were constantly blowing up at, lying to, or misunderstanding each other, so it didn’t feel like a satisfying or coherent relationship arc. I loved all the stuff about cooking and dance though!

Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert – Why am I suddenly reading so many memoirs for Booklist? I was not familiar with Nyle DiMarco, but reading the book caused me to get to watch a bunch of quite cool performances on Dancing with the Stars. Also I love that he represented ASL conversations with the structure and syntax of ASL. I haven’t seen that before!

Future Feeling, Joss Lake – For such an allegorical story (I don’t like allegories) with at least two daddy-kink-heavy sex scenes (I am from the South, where adults call their fathers Daddy, so therefore I cannot with it as a sexual thing), Future Feeling was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. It was funny and heartfelt, and also I loved the escapist fantasy of a global network of trans minders looking out for all trans people.

L.A. Weather, Maria Amparo Escandon – I am actually not sure why this has been getting such a huge marketing push! It’s enjoyable, but I expected there to be more there there, somehow. One thing I did love was the representation of Jewish/Catholic syncretism within this Mexican American family. Apart from that, it’s a perfectly fine family novel! It’s everywhere because publicity decisions were made that it should be everywhere!

The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed – OH how skin-crawly this book made me, in a good way! It’s set in a post-everything-disaster world, and its protagonist, Reid, gets an acceptance letter from a university, her ticket out of the life that keeps her and her family and everyone she knows working flat out to just barely get by. Her mother doesn’t believe the university is even real, but Reid is determined to take her chance at a better life. The truly special thing about this book, though, is Mohamed’s depiction of the Cad, an infection that lives under the skin of Reid and her mother and numerous others, and it might be semi-sentient. The Annual Migration of Clouds is about hope and choice in the most fascinating ways, a very very strong book to end the month on.

WHEW that was a lot of books. I feel like that song “88 Lines about 44 Women.” How was your January?

The post The Thirty-One Books of January appeared first on Reading the End.

(“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?

The post Bodyguards! Highwaymen! Sourdough Starters!: A Romance Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

The Ex Talk, Rachel Solomon

Here’s a twist on fake dating I’ve never seen before: Fake exes. In order to save their small public radio station, Shay Goldstein has to team up with the pretentious hotshot at her work, a man named Dominic Yun who’s beloved of their sexist boss and can’t stop talking about his master’s degree in journalism. They’ll be working on a podcast called The Ex Talk, where two exes discuss the world of relationships and dating, as well as their own unsuccessful relationship. Except Dominic and Shay have never dated; they’ve barely even talked.

For as silly as this premise is (I say that with affection; I love a ridiculous romance novel premise), Solomon brings real emotional weight to bear, exploring Shay’s history of too-early declarations of love, Dominic’s insecurity about how to date after the collapse of his longest-slash-only relationship, and Shay’s widowed mother’s pursuit of romantic happiness with her new husband.

I’ve talked in the past about my fondness for romance novels that build a network of supportive relationships around their leads. The Ex Talk doesn’t exactly do that — it’s closely focused on Dominic and Shay — but it has a really smart twist on the isolated romance protagonists: Dominic and Shay are lonely. Both of them have struggled to build networks of friends in Seattle, and part of their budding relationship is the pact they make to go out on more (separate, unrelated-to-each-other) friend dates. It was so lovely to see a romance novel acknowledge how hard it can be to make friends as an adult, and I finished the book with the feeling that Dominic and Shay were now much better positioned to have happy and fulfilling lives — with each other, yes, but with their friends-and-relations as well.

Apart from all of that, this book was just fun. Solomon does some great banter, and the relationship is a very satisfying slow burn that hinges on a great deal of forced proximity of the “we have to get to know each other so our fake history of dating will seem more realistic to the podcast audience” genre. Shay and Dominic have lots of terrific, thoughtful, bantery conversations before they ever get down to boning, which is obviously A+ to me, a slow burn fanatic. This book was a ton of fun, and I am grateful to my lovely mum for pushing me to read it ASAP.

Sweet on the Greek, Talia Hibbert

Speaking of variations on a theme, I recently interviewed Talia Hibbert (that podcast will come out next week, in concert with her amazing new book Act Your Age, Eve Brown), and she mentioned that she has a particular fondness for one of her lesser-known books, Sweet on the Greek.

The premise is that there’s this very hot Greek retired footballer¹ who falls in love at first sight with a very gothy woman who won’t give him the time of day. Afraid that she’ll get away, Nik tells her that he needs a fake girlfriend for a week away with his teammates; he’ll pay her a hundred thousand pounds. Aria agrees. Nik does not need a fake girlfriend at all; it has all been a tangled web of lies. This makes me giggle every time I think about it.

While Sweet on the Greek doesn’t feel quite as substantial as some of Talia Hibbert’s more recent work, her strength as always is in crafting characters you have no choice but to adore. As in The Ex Talk, our heroine here tends to give her heart away quickly, and she has suffered for it in the past. A former boyfriend of Aria’s turned out to be her best friend’s stalker, using Aria to gain access to Jen, whom he kidnapped and nearly killed; and Aria’s terrified not just of getting hurt again, but of placing her loved ones at risk.

(This is a great reason for me to read the previous books in the series. I love a romance series with this kind of operatic drama; see below wherein You Had Me at Hola.)

To Have and to Hoax, Martha Waters

After oodles of people on Romance Twitter had recced me To Have and to Hoax and I had checked it out of the library after much impatient waiting, I very belatedly realized that it’s about an estranged married couple that does a prank war on each other and eventually realize they are still in love. I almost returned it to the library out of hand at this news! I am not a woman who has any truck with pranks. Even very kind, gentle pranks can end with the prankees feeling foolish and duped. Don’t do pranks!

However, in the case of To Have and to Hoax, the two main characters are both terrible at doing deceptions. While Violet and James each come up with one or two ways to trick and pester each other, there isn’t anything that I would say rose to the level of a prank — whether because they were so incompetent at executing the pranks they came up with, or because the other person immediately twigged what was happening and foiled the prank. Really it was more of your very classic second-chance romance! It’s also one of those romances where if you try to put too much real-world morality on the things the characters are doing, it all falls apart. So just do not do that! Accept the book on its own terms as a Jolly Madcap Romance! If so, you will enjoy it.

As with Bringing Down the Duke or, frankly, any first romance in a series, about 30% of my fun while reading To Have and to Hoax was inspecting the other characters to see who else was going to get their own romance. I was maybe not quite so excited about a few of these couples, but at least one of them made me perk up very much and look forward to more books by Martha Waters, even though like, Jolly Madcap Romances are probably not my top-tier romance subgenre. There was just enough true feeling and emotional honesty in this one to keep me on the hook for future books.

You Had Me at Hola, Alexis Daria

Oh my GOD I loved this book. Alexis Daria has carved out the funnest niche² in the funnest genre, writing romance novels about performers (dancers, actors) who have to navigate their public and private lives while finding love. I live for it.

This one — an absolute gem, an unbelievable treasure, I adored it — is about tele!novela! stars! Soap star Jasmine Lin Rodriguez has resolved never to show up in the tabloids again, following a messy public breakup. This is all well good until she gets cast on a TV show opposite telenovela darling Ashton Suárez. Both of them see their current show as their best chance to save their careers — it’s a bilingual romcom for Not!Netflix — so they agree to practice privately to ensure that their chemistry is the best it can be. SPARKS FLY.

I’ll be honest: I was so thrilled about the premise that I kept having to put the book down and shriek quietly to myself. Alexis Daria writes a damn good romcom, with enough soapy elements to satisfy the heart of a woman who came up watching Guiding Light and has no regrets.³ Daria’s clever about using social and psychological obstacles to keep her leads apart, including in the Big Misunderstanding moment (which is not so much a Misunderstanding as it is that one character has kept a giant secret from another character, but it’s for really sympathetic reasons), most of which arise from the very success they’re courting with their show, Carmen in Charge. I enjoyed every minute of reading this book and can’t wait for the sequel.

Two Rogues Make a Right, Cat Sebastian

When Will discovers that his oldest friend Martin is holed up miserable and sick in a London garret⁴, he promptly kidnaps him and takes him to the country for some fresh air. Prickly, broke, and unwilling to be dependent on his old friend, Martin is determined to go through with his aunt’s plan of marrying for money — no matter how much it breaks his and Will’s hearts.

Cat Sebastian fears neither death nor pain, and I know this is true because she has come on this very blog to say she loves that there’s a genre of fanfic where a character helps another character feel better about their dick. That said, her books are on a career-long trajectory of becoming softer and softer (see also her contribution to He’s Come Undone), and I think with Two Rogues Make a Right she has finally achieved a softness singularity. I, a noted angst fiend, was no proof against this much softness. In one sense there’s a plot, but the plot is mainly “how okay can things become after a very not-okay past?” and the answer is “with kindness and help to fend off structural inequities, things can become very good indeed.” It is a good message for These Times — especially because Cat Sebastian’s not ignoring the corrupting influence of money and power, nor the necessity to have some measure of those things in order to thrive.

It was also great to see a chronically ill protagonist grappling with the ways his sickness has shaped his life and will go on doing so. One of the emotional problems the book has to solve is that Martin’s awful, abusive father spent years telling him he was a burden, and it’s left Martin a) convinced he’s a burden; and b) desperate to not be a burden on Will, the person he loves so dearly. But though the narrative of burden weighs down the character quite a bit, the book gives it no quarter. There is a happy life available to Martin, in which he’s supported by kind people who care about him, and the thing he has to overcome is not his poor health but the societal narratives around poor health that have made it hard for him to accept love and support.

Which is, in fact, fundamental to my love of this book and also Cat Sebastian. The obstacles that Will and Martin must overcome for their HEA have nothing to do with whether they love each other, want the best for each other, or know that the other one wants the best for them. Some of their problems really can be solved by having a conversation, but they have to first become the person who’s able to have that conversation, and Cat Sebastian shows the hard work of reaching that point. And then they also need some source of income to live, and enough people around them who can be cool about their queerness, which are things that the author can swoop down and give them. Which she did. Five million stars.

Conventionally Yours, Annabeth Albert

Conrad and Alden have been longtime rivals at playing Odyssey for their mentor’s YouTube gaming channel, Gamer Grandpa, and they’ve both been given the opportunity to attend a massive con for their beloved game, and even compete in the big tournament. Alden is struggling to discover what he wants his future to be, while Conrad is holding on by the skin of his teeth to even have a financial future. They’re each willing to do anything to win the tournament — even take a cross-country road trip together to get there.

I! Love! A road trip! Conventionally Yours is a glorious enemies-to-friends-to-lovers road trip story, hitting all the beats you want it to (they get lost! they exchange confidences! there’s only one bed!) while delicately building up the relationship between these two characters. Alden is neurodivergent in a way that nobody’s ever been able to conclusively diagnose, and his moms have always been certain that he’s destined for great things (category: doctor or similarly prestige career). Conrad is handsome and popular and charming, but secretly he’s barely getting by. Ever since his father found out he was gay, he’s lost his family’s financial and emotional support and is working several jobs at once just to make rent. As the road trip goes on, the two begin to soften, learning more about each other’s lives, working out how to take care of each other, and giving themselves permission to be taken care of.

While a dual-POV is kind of a norm in romance novels, I find it particularly satisfying in enemies-to-lovers stories. Annabeth Albert excels at depicting how Alden and Conrad look from the outside vs how they experience their own lives and interiority. At the beginning, as you’re seeing Conrad through Alden’s eyes and vice versa, you’re well able to believe the unpleasant versions of the other person. I fucking love this kind of reminder that people look different on the outside than they really are on the inside, and honestly when it’s done well, it is one of my favorite things about the romance genre. I enjoyed this a lot (despite not understanding the Odyssey game, like, at all) and will definitely look for more in the series!

WHEW that was so many romance novels! What romances have y’all been reading?

The post Just So Much Fake Dating: A Romance Novels Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi

Riot Baby felt terrifyingly topical when I read it in January of this year, and then it just got more and more and more topical somehow. It’s about two Black siblings, Ella and Kev, who each have special powers. Jumping around in time, Riot Baby shows us a dystopian America that’s functionally just… America, and Kev ends up incarcerated for living in the world while Black. Using their powers, Ella and Kev pay telepathic (?) visits to each other, as well as to a number of scenes in America’s racist history, and search for ways to bring the whole racist system down.

Tor’s novella line continues to publish absolute bangers, and Riot Baby felt like a gift in a year when America has felt even more like a dystopia than usual. Its leaps through time are deliberately disorienting, so that the reader is never quite allowed to settle into any certainty about what the book is going to be. Instead you’re carried through time and space in a sort of grand tour of American oppression. Riot Baby is imaginative, strange, dizzying, exhilarating.

Butterfly Yellow, Thanha Lai

I can’t remember who recommended Butterfly Yellow to me, but it was this wonderfully quiet and careful YA novel about a Vietnamese girl who comes to America in search of her little brother, from whom she was separated during the Vietnam War. She’s certain that he’ll be delighted to be reunited with her, but instead she finds that he’s comfortable in his new life with his adoptive parents. Hằng befriends a cowboy named LeeRoy and sticks around, patiently trying to rebuilt her relationship with her brother.

Because we see Hằng so much through LeeRoy’s eyes, I kept thinking that she was younger than she was, so it threw me off a bit when she develops a romance with LeeRoy. And overall I think Butterfly Yellow feels slightly more middle grade than YA. Aside from that small area of disorientation, though, it was a book with a great deal of emotional depth. No matter how much we want easy answers, such answers aren’t forthcoming. Instead, it’s a story about perseverance in love and finding joy in an imperfect world.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

On a grim day in January, I opened my mail to find an ARC of Harrow the Ninth, upon which I shrieked like a banshee and dived into it with an enthusiasm. Gideon the Ninth, you’ll recall, was the lesbian necromancers in space book, and this is the middle book in the series. We follow Harrow as she struggles with her imperfect Lyctorhood and her fractured memories of what happened at Canaan House.

This book is bonkers. It is bonkers. Every choice that Tamsyn Muir makes in this book is bonkers. It is a symphony of what-the-fuck, with every instrument playing a perfect, terrifying what the fuck variation, and all I could do was let myself be swept along by it. I know that some folks have said they found this one a harder read than Gideon — in Gideon the Ninth you’re in Gideon’s head enjoying her irreverent take on all the horrifying blood and murder events, whereas in Harrow the Ninth you’re living with Harrow’s rage, grief, and self-loathing. So I hope it won’t make me sound like a callous monster when I say I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I was grinning from ear to ear every time I opened it. I cannot wait for the third one.

Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

WHEW did somebody say “mastery of the novella form”? I got Empress of Salt and Fortune as an ARC and was not immediately sucked in after reading the first few pages. Then on a Saturday I was like “I’m going to dedicate some actual time to reading this bastard” and sat down and read it all in one sitting. It’s the story of cleric Chih, who is collecting stories on their travels through a country that has been shaped by a powerful empress. They encounter an old woman who used to serve in the royal palace, and settle in to hear her version of the empress’s rise.

Just, wow. I absolutely loved this book. I am not one for secondary world fantasy, usually, but Vo builds her world around material culture: the tooth that was part of the gown the empress wore when she came as a bride to the palace; the dice that she used to play games and cast lots; a map of pilgrimage shrines throughout the empire. The things are the hook into the story of this empress, and the story is about women’s rage. It’s about the refusal to accept the oppression and denial your life has given you, and the overlooked ways women use to communicate among themselves, using tools that powerful men can’t be bothered glancing at twice.

I still don’t quite know how Vo managed to pack so much worldbuilding, emotion, and plot into 118 pages, but I do know that I’m excited for her future career and inevitable superstardom in the world of SFF.

The Good Luck Girls, Charlotte Nicole Davis

ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE YA!!!

Every year for the last few years, there’s been at least one YA novel where I was like “this is just a good fucking adventure story, what a pleasure, what a dream,” and as I look back on them, they are all, one hundred percent of them, road trip adventures. So in case there was any lack of clarity about what I like and whether I am predictable, the answers are road trips and yes, I am very predictable.

The Good Luck Girls tells the story of a group of girls fleeing from the brothel to which they were sold as children, trying to escape the consequences of a patron’s death. They are seeking asylum in a place they’ve only heard about, a place that for all they know doesn’t even exist — but they have to try and get there, or else resign themselves to spending their lives being hunted by the raveners who have been tasked with finding them and punishing them.

As dark as this premise is, Davis does a terrific job of writing a book that doesn’t feel doomed, yet also doesn’t gloss over the genuine trauma these girls have been through in their lives. Aster is determined to get all her friends to safety, whatever the cost to her; she’s smart and resourceful and angry and driven, and I cherished her. There’s a slow build-up of grudging respect between her and the house favorite at their brothel, Violet, which of course I adored, and the stakes of their road trip escape remain high, high, high, so there’s this lovely release of tension any time they have the chance to stop and rest and be happy for even a short time. And the set-up for book two just really thrilled me. Can’t wait for more!

The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Whoever decided to get Paul Lewin to do the cover for this book deserves a trophy. Also, I love Paul Lewin’s art. One of my goals for this year is to read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, not just because I need to read more of Octavia Butler’s work, but also because if I like it then I can maybe buy the editions that feature Paul Lewin’s fancy, gorgeous covers.

Anyway, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games digs deep into major fantasy properties to explore the ways Black characters in those franchises have been used and abused by both the stories themselves and the audiences who received them. Thomas is a terrific, insightful cultural critic, and her work is particularly notable for how clearly she loves these properties and wants better for them. Her readings of the texts and their audiences enriched my understanding of these books, movies, and TV shows, and I’m so excited for whatever this author plans to do next.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Anne Carson

Before *waves hands* all this, I attended a conference at which New Directions had a booth, and you just wouldn’t believe the shriek of joy I emitted when I realized that Anne Carson had a new book. Anne Carson is the translator, poet, and genius behind If Not, Winter (an amazing translation of Sappho) and Nox, a book-in-a-box I incepted myself into being able to afford the first year I lived in New York.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy combines the story of Helen of Troy with the life of Marilyn Monroe, whose name before fame was Norma Jeane Baker. It’s expectedly strange and funny and devastating.

In ancient Greece you use the verb [I am too lazy to recreate this in WordPress], which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum, and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

Anne Carson is a queen on etymology. If you liked the above quotation, I refer you to Nox, which does a lot of this kind of thing.

Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri

Remember when I was lowkey obsessed with Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri’s debut? Well, in an exciting twist, I loved Realm of Ash even more. It maintains the same Angry Girl / Soft Boy romance dynamic, but dials the anger and the softness up by several notches.

Even saying that feels like a disservice to Realm of Ash, because it ignores the absolutely wonderful worldbuilding and plot work that Tasha Suri is doing. It’s the kind of sequel that Diana Wynne Jones would write, where the book is set in the same world under (some of) the same set of assumptions, but it’s far more of a companion novel than the type of sequel where you’re like, aw, yeah, gonna get some answers now. Realm of Ash is about the crumbling Ambhan Empire, and the efforts of a widow and a prince to understand the limits of their forbidden magic.

I just… I loved this? Again I say that I tend to struggle with secondary world fantasy, but authors like Tasha Suri and Nghi Vo seem determined to undermine my carefully established opinions. Tasha Suri comes out of fanfic, and you can really tell by the way she makes relationships so central to her plotting. I loved this book, and I cannot wait for Suri’s 2021 book The Jasmine Throne. I love her.

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

This round-up includes three nonfiction books (unless you count the book of poetry; in which case, four), and I stand by all of them. Because Internet is a linguistics book about the language of the internet, and it’s 24-karat gold in my opinion. Gretchen McCulloch talks about all the things you’d expect, like the development of emojis and the reason why memes work or don’t, as well as a whole slew of things you wouldn’t, like how Arabic-speakers convey the Arabic alphabet on Twitter and why old people use so many ellipses in their emails.

If you’ve ever been like “I am extremely online, but why?”, I highly recommend that you read Because Internet. It won’t explain why you are so online (who could?), but it will describe your life in terrifyingly accurate terms.

The True Queen, Zen Cho

I could just as well have put The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water on this list, because Zen Cho blessed us with two new releases in the last two years, but The True Queen was the one that I really loved. This may reflect my general preference for the novel-length format. The True Queen is a follow-up to the 2015 Sorcerer to the Crown, and I loved it so so so so so much. It’s set in an alternate version of the nineteenth century, as Sorcerer to the Crown was, but it focuses much more on people who aren’t English. Yay!

I love Zen Cho for so consistently writing books that could have been dark and grim but are, in fact, funny and light-hearted. In these quarantimes, it feels like a particularly revolutionary writing choice. The True Queen deals with a lot of heavy themes (imperialism, family conflict, etc.) in a way that isn’t too grim but also doesn’t feel like a cop-out by the author. I just truly loved this book, as I have all her books to date. I had so much fucking fun reading it, and in a year where fun was few and far between, I value that so so so much. ZEN CHO.

The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Yes, I was furious at the offhand way in which NK Jemisin dismissed New Orleans in this book, and yes, it made me cry on podcast. But apart from that gripe, which while not minor to me was minor in terms of the space it occupied in the book, I really loved NK Jemisin’s latest novel. It’s about the city of New York becoming sentient, manifesting itself in the avatars for each borough, who must come together to fight against an evil white Lovecraftian tentacle creature.

In perhaps the clearest measure of success, The City We Became made me feel agonizingly homesick for New York City. I was supposed to visit it in 2020! Reading this reminded me so keenly of what the city is like, in all its boroughs, in every iteration, and I just got really fucking emoshe about it. NK Jemisin’s writing is typically beautiful, her plotting typically tense, and I was left with a mighty yearning for more of this series.

A Song Below Water, Bethany Morrow

It’s the misogynoir fantasy novel of your dreams! Tavia has known for years that she’s a siren, and she knows that she must be careful never to reveal what she is. Living in the city of Portland, she has plenty of opportunity to see the kind of oppression faced by other Black people, especially Black women, especially sirens. In the aftermath of a siren murder trial, Tavia learns that an idol of hers is also a siren, and she begins to understand that she has no alternative but to use her voice to pursue her values.

I loved the worldbuilding in A Song Below Water, and I dearly hope that Bethany Morrow has plans for more books in this universe. Though Tavia struggles mightily with understanding what it means to be a siren, sirens are not the only magical being in this world. I would love to see books that deal with other kinds of magic and their implications — not least because Tavia’s beloved sister Effie has secrets of her own that are uncovered in the course of the novel. I love sister stuff! I love it! And this book is about sisters who are absolutely ride-or-die for each other, which was great to see — I love a complicated sibling relationship, but I also love the kind of relationship that’s all about love and loyalty.

Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Mirabile, Janet Kagan

Okay, I confess that this one’s on me. My aunt has been trying to get me to read Mirabile for, like, six years, and every time I was like “oh yeah yeah I’ll get to it for sure” and then because I couldn’t easily access the book, I did not for sure get to it. Last year, my aunt totally got me by just lending me the mf book, so it was either I read it promptly or I became one of those people who borrows a book and never remembers to return it. And y’all know I refuse to be that person.

Mirabile, which was published in 1991, is about xenobiologist (?) / xenoecologist (??) Mama Jason, who is responsible for researching and keeping under control the many mutant life forms that inevitably arise on the planet colony of Mirabile. This is a novel in stories (not usually my favorite thing), most of which were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction before being collected in novel form, and each chapter deals with a specific life form, from the Kangaroo Rex to the Loch Moose Monster. It’s the kind of low-stakes SFF novel that I’m constantly searching for: Though Mama Jason is tasked in some ways with the survival of the colony, there’s never any real question that she’ll succeed in her endeavors. She has a funny, wry narrative voice, and it’s overall just great to see an older woman protagonist in SF. My aunt was right. I should have read this sooner.

Part two is coming your way soon! Probably!

The post All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1 appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into reading fic? What were the first fandoms you read in, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?

My first fandom was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that was back when fic was mainly shared on message boards and list serves and sometimes literally just email that got forwarded around. I don’t think even live journal was a thing in 1998. Then I mostly lapsed out of fandom except for Holmes/Watson until last year when I imprinted on Bucky Barnes like some kind of baby duck. Now I’m reading Sirius/Remus like my life depends on it.

Please tell the people about the genesis of your fic spreadsheet, which is the most epic fic spreadsheet ever. And then I would also like to know how you find fic to read!

At the beginning of 2018 I started to track my reading in general, so it made sense to log my fanfic reading alongside my profic reading. Also, when you read a couple hundred fics that involve the same characters, it helps to write a line distinguishing one from the other (“this is the one where Steve turns into a golden retriever”) that way if you ever want to reread it or recommend it, you can actually find it. Even better, I can just share the entire spreadsheet—or at least the fics that I’ve marked as favorites—with people who want it.

Also, spreadsheets in general provide the illusion of having accomplished something, which is satisfying.

I mainly find new fic via recommendations, or by reading other works by the writer of a fic I’ve enjoyed. Sometimes I’ll search by tag in AO3 and sort by kudos.

How has fic influenced your professional work? Were you already reading fic by the time you wrote The Ruin of a Rake? I ask because there’s such a terrific fic-ish line in that book.

The main thing I’ve taken away from fic is that story structure—hero’s journey, save the cat, Freytag’s pyramid, whatever—doesn’t matter much to me as a reader, and in fact might prioritize a certain kind of story that I’m not very interested in telling anyway. Compelling characters who act like humans, rising action, stakes that matter, satisfying resolution: that’s a story. Beats and pinch points and so forth can get you there, but they aren’t a goal in themselves. And for me, for what I like to read and what I like to write—which is mainly characters learning how to care for and about one another, and sometimes even care for and about themselves—it’s okay for the story to be quiet and tender rather than big and plotty. I’m not sure I’d have gotten there without some time in the fanfic trenches.

I believe I wrote Ruin during one of my Holmes/Watson periods and I’m dying to know what the fic-ish line is!¹

What makes you ship characters? Or more broadly, what elements in canon make you likely to want fic of the thing?

Best friends separated by time and injustice, subsequently reunited with mountains of hurt/comfort. I show up for that every time, and every time I’m genuinely shocked to discover that this dynamic hits me where I live. Bucky and Steve. Sirius and Remus. Holmes and Watson, after the hiatus. Even Crowley and Aziraphale, from a certain angle.

But the other thing that make me (and I think a large swath of fandom in general) crave fic is when canon is lacking. When canon provides a character with a really interesting backstory and complicated friendships and then completely ignores all of that in favor of, say, making a terrifying assassin decide she’s unlovable due to her infertility, this creates so much dissonance that I need fanfic to set it right. Or sometimes, when two characters have this really compelling dynamic and it’s the most interesting conflict in the entire canon, and then canon brushes it aside in favor of a really half-assed romance plot that manages to reduce women to prizes and sexy lamps while also forgetting how things like love and friendship actually work? Yeah, I’ll need some fic to smooth that over.

Have you ever read fic where you’re not familiar with the canon? What made you do it?

Many times! I follow favorite authors almost anywhere they go. I’ve never seen an episode of Supernatural, and God willing I never will, but I happily read in that fandom.

What do you love about fanfic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?

One of my favorite things about fanfic is that it’s constantly inventing new tropes and forms. 5+1, soulmark AUs, Hogwarts AUs, etc. I love that “a character’s dick got too big so another character helps them feel okay about it” is a framework fic readers recognize in the way Renaissance audiences would have recognized the stock characters of the Commedia dell’arte. This makes me almost giddy with delight.

I also love that fanfic creates a community in which people can make things and tell stories and just do art together. It’s such a basic, human thing to do together. Since we don’t have bards reciting the Iliad to us, we have the MCU (God help us) and Stargate Atlantis and so forth to give us characters and scenarios that provide a sort of storytelling lingua franca.

Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?

My favorites are hurt/comfort, angst/fluff, and literally anything genderbent. Because of basic patriarchal horseshit, canon provides a pitifully small number of women characters, and even fewer nonbinary or genderqueer characters. So when a writer decides to make, say, Draco Malfoy a girl? I will dive headfirst into that.

I tend not to actively seek out modern AUs, but I can think of a dozen I’ve really loved, all written by a handful of authors whose voices just work for me.

Are there fics or authors that influenced you, or that you frequently return to?

Katie Forsythe, candle_beck, and Speranza. They all influenced me as a baby writer, and continue to influence me now, and I never get tired of rereading their work.

Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?

YOU BET I CAN. Most of these don’t require much background in canon.

“From Tralfamadore, With Love” by newsbypostcard. Steve is sent 18 years into the future, and is reunited with a Bucky Barnes who has spent all those years without him. It’s heartbreaking and healing.

“Mistakes of Our Youth” by candle_beck. Holmes and Watson fall in love, then one of them moves on. Not exactly a happy ending, unless you really like sorrow? I promise my next recommendation will be light and airy!

“The Dogfather” by hollimichelle. Harry Potter is adopted by wonderful muggles, Sirius escapes from Azkaban ten years early and is Harry’s pet dog, and everybody behaves reasonably. Whenever an update to this series appears in my inbox I shriek.

“Sparklers on the Fourth of July” by what_alchemy. Bucky Barnes is a gender nonconforming woman. It contains the immortal line “kiss my stump, Rogers” and also pegging.

“20^th Century Limited” by Speranza. People who have been exposed to the serum have ESP with one another, so Steve and Bucky spend their years apart creating a world together in their minds. This is another crying-based recommendation.²

Cat Sebastian writes historical romance about LGBTQ+ people. She lives in a swampy part of the South but also on twitter.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Cat Sebastian appeared first on Reading the End.

Although I don’t tend to like romances that follow a single couple across multiple books, I would make an exception if Hither, Page could be the start of its own series. James Sommers and Leo Page, solving crimes between the wars! I’d be so into it. The central romance was a good one: James has retreated from the world, but the world — in the form of Leo Page — has very much not retreated from him. He’s one of these protagonists who claims to want peace and quiet, but then falls in love with the least peaceful least quiet party imaginable — because actually what James wants a retreat from is chaos, which he has known far too much of in the War. On his side, it’s a question of making space for, if not adventure, then at least the unexpected. Meanwhile Leo, who has always thrived on the chaos of spycraft, but has never had a real family, begins to find something appealing and desirable in small-town life.

The setting was chef’s kiss, with a gorgeous cast of secondary characters, from sharpshooting lesbians to an orphan girl instituting minor townwide socialism to a even-shell-shocked-er-than-James veteran living in the forest and avoiding human company. If there was any problem with this as a murder mystery, it was that I couldn’t identify anyone who sucked enough that I wanted them to be the murderer. I wanted everyone to live happily ever after, and hey! It’s a romance novel! So they did!

(I received an e-galley of this book for review. Do we still have to make this disclosure? It’s so weird. Newspaper reviewers don’t have to make this disclosure. What even is this life.)

Because I tend to skew historical in my romance reading, I haven’t read nearly as many sports romances as I would like. Off the top of my head, the only one I could think of was the Ruthie Knox romance about long-distance biking or whatever (Ride with Me), and that’s on the outer edges of what could be considered a sports romance. I was delighted to find Alexa Martin’s Intercepted, the first in a series about the romantic lives of the fictional Denver Mustangs NFL team.

I read Intercepted after a bit of a break from romance reading, and it was the greatest reminder of why I love this genre so much. Though the sex scenes were a little awkward, I just absolutely loved the two central characters, and I loved how easily Martin wrote reasons for them to be apart as well as together. Marlee had a one-night stand with Gavin, but he disappeared the morning after, and she’s been trying to forget about it ever since. She’s dating Chris now, and things are going well, except that he keeps making excuses for why they’re not getting engaged or talking kids. And then Gavin gets traded to the Mustangs, and everything changes.

Gavin’s first on-page appearance sees him helping with the dishes. YES the bar is low for men but I AM SOFT FOR THIS. Dishes are such a pain! It is the best when a guest helps with them! And then he stayed my fave by consistently and staunchly standing up for Marlee throughout the rest of the book. Not only is this a terrific trait in a romantic lead, but it also sets up a central conflict in their relationship, which is that Marlee wants to fight her own fights, and it’s hard for Gavin to step back and let her do it.

The banter and chemistry between the leads was wonderful, which tends to be a common feature of romances I love? But where Intercepted truly shines is its putdowns. Marlee and Gavin, and even Marlee’s gentle friend Namoi, end up in confrontations with assholes a bunch of times over the course of the book, and Martin has them put the jerks resoundingly in their place. It’s so satisfying. If you’ve ever experienced l’esprit de l’escalier, where you think of the perfect thing to say as you’re on the way home from the confrontation with the asshole, Intercepted will be balm to your soul.

The next book in this series is about adorable sunshine wide receiver TK. He had a minor role in this book, but he was such a bunny. I can’t wait for him to find happiness!

Many thanks to the marvelous Not Now, I’m Reading podcast for recommending Adriana Herrera’s American Dreamer, because it was a treasure. The protagonists are a food truck owner hoping to make it big in Ithaca, NY, and a public servant working to establish a mobile library to get books to poor kids. Yes, those are their jobs. Yes, it is as great as you’re imagining. Jude hasn’t spoken to his family since he came out, while Nesto has a massive, loving, supportive family; Nesto is driven and open, while Jude is more careful of his heart.

Just, what a dear and kind book. You can tell a social worker wrote it, if I may be slightly vain about my own people: Herrera writes with such compassion, and she neither glosses over the hardships and traumas that life can bring, nor presents them as insoluble. Instead, she’s truly solving a feelings problem, unpeeling the challenges that Nesto and Jude face with care and kindness. This book felt so emotionally true, and I maybe cried a little bit while I was reading it, although in justice to me I was on a plane.

(Ugh, that’s a lie, I wasn’t on the plane yet, I was just making excuses. I was in the airport waiting for a very delayed flight.)

I CRIED ABOUT THIS NEXT ONE TOO, frankly I do not know what y’all want of me. The latest in Alyssa Cole’s Reluctant Royals, A Prince on Paper, series follows Ledi’s cousin Nya, whose father was caught doing many treasons and also poisonings.¹ After years of being told that she’s frail and foolish and should stay home and be the dutiful daughter, Nya is trying to find an independent life for herself. New York didn’t match her movie-montage dreams, and she’s headed back to pretend-Lesotho when she finds herself in bed (litrally!) with the playboy prince of pretend-Luxembourg, Johan.

Nya and Johan were absolutely terrific. Their blossoming mutual admiration for each other was perfectly written, and y’all know I am soft for romances where they admire each other. In particular, they’re able to see qualities in each other that individually they struggle to see for themselves. While Nya fears she’ll never be brave, Johan admires the bravery in her choice to live life with an open heart. While Johan is afraid that his many pretenses (put on to protect his younger sibling from media scrutiny) mean that there’s nothing more to him, Nya is able to see his good heart almost from their very first meeting at the start of the book.

That’s not why I cried, though. I got mushy as shit about Johan’s younger sibling Lukas, who’s begun acting out for reasons neither Johan nor his stepfather (the king!) can understand. And with a looming referendum to decide whether the monarchy will be retained or abolished, it’s more important than ever that Lukas doesn’t tumble into scandal. Nya’s able to see a scared kid trying to find a place in the world, and Lukas coming out to her as nonbinary is just the dearest thing. And when Lukas comes out to their father, and receives nothing but support (even if it’s a little clumsy at first), I cried even more. Every time I think about their dad’s reaction I get choked up all over again.

Gosh, I have missed romance! It’s been a minute since I read a whole bunch of them in a row, and it felt so great to read four in a row where I really loved all of them. Catch me up, friends! What romance novels have you been reading? Any new favorite authors?

The post Spies, Football, and Food Trucks: A Romance Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Wrong to Need You, Alisha Rai (Goodreads link!)

Sadia Ahmad owns a cafe, tends a bar, and raises her son. When her dead husband’s brother comes back to town after years of radio silence, Sadia’s tidy world is thrown into disarray. Then they bang. A bunch. (Wrong to Need You is the second in Alisha Rai’s wonderfully angsty Forbidden Hearts series, but as with most romance serieses, you can read this one without reading the first one first.)

My favorite thing about Wrong to Need You is that Alisha Rai draws on tropes I love — a strong silent type for the hero, a stalwart single mom for the heroine, a resounding come-back-to-small-town-and-face-the-past plotline — and puts them in service of an emotionally satisfying story of two people trying to find their way. As in Hate to Want You, Rai gives her characters genuine flaws and struggles, which can’t be brushed aside by some good sex. The obstacles that stand in the way of Jackson and Sadia’s happily ever after are internal, but no less real: Each of the protagonists has to grapple with themselves and their past before they’re able to embrace the possibility of a real relationship.

Rai also includes an excellent cast of secondary characters. The Kane and Chandler families make their appearance again in this book, and Sadia has family of her own: Loving, if sometimes pushy, parents, and four sisters who adore and support her, even as they have their own ideas about the choices Sadia should be making. Watching Alisha Rai flesh out the town and residents that populate the pages of her Forbidden Hearts series has been a treat, and Wrong to Need You delivered an eminently satisfying romance that left me eager for Eve’s story.

PS I love it when romance novels set you up for what the next one’s going to be. It’s like the end of Nancy Drew mysteries. I love it. It’s the best. This has not been sarcasm.

It Takes Two to Tumble, Cat Sebastian

Much as I might like to try to summarize Cat Sebastian’s latest historical romance (Goodreads link!), she has already written what is perhaps the world’s most perfect summary of any romance novel ever. I give you:

It Takes Two to Tumble is the story of a free spirited vicar and a grumpy sea captain.  It’s basically a gay, regency Sound of Music, with far fewer children and no musical numbers.

Yep. The vicar, Ben Sedgewick, comes from free-spirited parents who lived without regard to the niceties and rituals of regency England. In some ways this was great — his father doesn’t much mind that Ben prefers men — and in other ways, it left Ben and his siblings adrift to manage for themselves. As an adult, Ben wants a life of comfort and predictability.

The sea captain, Phillip Dacre, plans to stop home just long enough to acquire a suitable tutor for his three children, now that their mother has passed away. But the children are running wild, and the vicar who’s minding them (by climbing trees with them and doing fractions about how to divide their evening pie) keeps making him see things in a new light.

It Takes Two to Tumble is — typically for Cat Sebastian — an immensely sweet romance novel in which the principal characters achieve happiness by having lots of honest conversations with each other. Phillip is mourning the loss of someone he never confessed his love to; Ben is engaged to his closest friend, Alice, who he fears will be alone in the world if Ben follows his heart and cries off from the marriage. Both of them are devoted to the Dacre children, but neither can see his way clear to making a life with them — in spite of the children’s obvious need for stability. There are also ducklings.

All in all, I tend to prefer a scootch more angst in my romance novels than It Takes Two to Tumble offered. But if you are on the hunt for something sweet and frank and open, hit up Cat Sebastian’s latest. It comes out on December 12th.

The post Angst and Ducklings: A Tiny Romance Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

I frequently recommend Alyssa Cole’s Off the Grid series to romance newbies, particularly ones who are coming to romance from SFF. Her latest book, An Extraordinary Union, maintains everything I love about her earlier work, but this time with spies!

Elle Burns is a former slave, former staple of the abolitionist circuit, and current spy for the Union. Her eidetic memory makes her a unique asset, and she’s posing as a mute slave in Richmond as she tries to gain intelligence about the Confederacy’s plans. When she finds herself having a legit nice conversation with a visiting Confederate soldier, she starts to question herself but GUESS WHAT Y’ALL. He is not a real Confederate soldier after all, he is ANOTHER SPY.

Cole doesn’t shy away from the fear that dogs Elle’s every step when she’s living as a slave, and she doesn’t elide the horrors of slavery. At the same time, because the reader knows that Elle and Malcolm are going to win and live happily ever after, it doesn’t feel upsetting in the way that most fiction set in this time period (rightfully) does feel. If you (like me) are fed up with the master/slave Nazi/concentration camp victim romances that keep getting published somehow, An Extraordinary Union is a wonderful, and surprisingly fun, antidote.

When I first started reading Ruthie Knox, I feared that her heroines might be too manic pixie dream girly for me. But my fears have always been allayed, and her latest book, Madly, pulls off an array of emotional tricks with casual aplomb.

Allie and Winston meet by chance, at a bar, and because they both have a lot to get off their chests, they embark on a program of radical honesty with each other. “When you’re ready to mess everything up,” Allie says, “you can practice [being you] on the mailman.” So they become each other’s mailman (plus banging).

Knox sensibly populates her world with relationships other than the central one, so we get to see Allie struggling with being a sister and daughter, and Winston with being a father. They also have sex setbacks, which is vanishingly rare in romance novels: Sometimes the thing they both wanted to try doesn’t work exactly like they were imagining, and they have to put a pin in the sexytimes to talk about feelings or come up with a new plan of (sex) action. It’s refreshing and great, and Knox seamlessly puts the sex scenes in service of their burgeoning relationship. She’s one of my favorite contemporary romance novelists, and this may be her best book yet.

OMG and they talk about how non-penetrative sex is still sex. Allie says, “I want to say fuck you to the whole idea that getting penetrated is the point of the deal, like it’s not sex if there’s not something inside me. I’m inside me. I am.”

Next up, I read Cathy Pegau’s Rulebreaker, the story of a woman called Liv who gets involved in a massive con that will get her fifty million credits and a new life. All she has to do is cozy up to the sexy head of a major company….but guess what. Guess what happens.

Ding ding ding! That’s right! Liv finds herself falling for Zia, the sexy, competent executive whose secrets she’s supposed to be learning. Rulebreaker is tremendous fun, with an array of shifting loyalties for Liv to sort through as she’s trying to decide where her heart lies. I have a spoilerish gripe, which I will discuss in the next paragraph. Jump down to the next book cover if you want to miss the spoiler!

Okay, are you gone?

Okay. So it turns out that Zia’s company is testing a new air filter? or something? on a bunch of prisoners who’ve volunteered to test this air filter while working in The Mines. Liv discovers that the death rates on these tests are higher than Zia has realized, and that many of the inmates are unwilling participants in the tests. And Zia’s really sorry that she didn’t put a stop to the unethical tests in the first place, before they reached this peak of unethicalness that she didn’t know about. Uh, but, I am not actually fine with love interests who are part of a corporation that’s doing tests on prisoners where one in five of them die? That’s morally disqualifying! And it dimmed my delight in this particular HEA. Like maybe Liv should find someone with equally nice boobs but who didn’t preside over a convict leasing program.

The thing that I am the trash of: Stories where one person has always been told that a quality they possess is Wrong and Bad and they are all messed up about it but then here comes their love interest like “Hey, I think that quality is very nifty; in fact it makes me want to bang you like a screen door in a hurricane.” If you also are the trash of that thing, please allow me to direct your attention to The Lawrence Browne Affair.

So Lawrence Browne is the scion of a terrible family who wants to not be terrible (yay), and he’s got an anxiety disorder (yay), and he’s all cooped up in his drafty miserable stately home trying to do Science (yay), all the while believing that he is Mad. Along comes Georgie Turner, his new secretary, who is secretly on the run from like a London gangster, and who is also the perpetual fuck-up of his family in that he has a penchant for doing things like getting in bad with London gangsters. The book not only features the thing I am the trash of (see above) but also some home renovation, which I always find immensely satisfying in fiction.¹

What romance novels have y’all been reading lately?

The post Spies and Cons and Really Frank Conversations about Sex appeared first on Reading the End.