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.

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?

The post ILLUSTRATED COVERS ARE GOOD ACTUALLY: A Romance Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

I adore and cherish romances where one of the principals appears to be a familiar type of character you’ve encountered a hundred times. Proper English only employs Pat’s pov (which is fine because Pat is a treasure), which means that we see Fen through her eyes only. If you didn’t know KJ Charles (or that this is an f/f romance), you might believe that Fen was going to serve the role characters like her usually serve: the flawlessly femme and frivolous YEAH I JUST DID THAT society bitch who exists to make Pat (not like other girls tm) feel bad about herself. Instead, Fen is fucking great. She lets people believe that she’s frivolous because it’s what they already want to see — but Pat is paying attention, so she’s able to see that there’s way more to Fen than curls and boobs.

Proper English is a murder mystery with a twist, that twist being that it’s also a romance novel, which means that everybody you care about has to end the story relatively happily. It’s great! I can’t believe I never thought of this as an innovation for a murder mystery! One of the saddest things about (some) manor house murder mystery novels is that the person who did it might end up being someone whose love story you were kind of rooting for. That can literally never happen in a romance novel. If the love is true, the lovers must be innocent. HOORAY. Moreover, the person who gets murdered also can’t be someone you cared about that much. It’s so good! I can’t imagine why murder mysteries haven’t all chosen to be romance novels.

If you love Agatha Christie but wish that she had included way more ladies kissing and way less racism, Proper English has you covered. It’s out on Wednesday, so you still have time to live your best life by preordering!

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the author for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Proper English, KJ Charles appeared first on Reading the End.

Before I get into The Henchmen of Zenda, I need to confess that I have this weird soft spot for old-time British adventure novels. There’s no defense I can or should make about this. These are horribly sexist and racist books that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I like the swashbuckling. So when I heard that one of my favorite romance authors was doing a queer rewrite of one of my favorite old-time trash adventure novels, I nearly hit the ceiling.

KJ Charles:

Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that’s Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don’t go entirely to plan—and the penalty for treason is death.

Rupert of Hentzau is Michael’s newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends—which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out what Rupert’s really up to amid a maelstrom of plots, swordfights, scheming, impersonation, desire, betrayal, and murder.

Nobody can be trusted. Everyone has a secret. And love is the worst mistake you can make.

Me:

The Henchmen of Zenda was exactly what I wanted it to be: An adventure novel packed with fun characters, a dastardly villain or three, and an all-you-can-eat buffet of machinations for the royal throne. If you’re reading romance mainly for the squishy parts, this book is perhaps not directly in your wheelhouse. The leads bang (quite a bit) and end up sharing a life (though they aren’t particularly sentimental about it), but the main dish in Henchmen is the machinations around the crown of Ruritania.

(Y’all don’t know how delighted I am to write the word Ruritania in a blog post. God The Prisoner of Zenda is wonderful slash terrible. My feelings about it are weird. I don’t know why I’m like this.)

Because there are SO MANY machinations, it’s hard to talk about the ones that specifically delighted me without spoiling other parts of the story. I really want y’all to enjoy these machinations for yourself, and I am aware that not everyone shares my cavaliar attitude to spoilers. I’ll just say, then, that while Jasper is a good time and Rupert of Hentzau is as delightful as in the original, KJ Charles does an excellent job of giving us female characters to root for. And I think that’s legitimately all I can say about that. You will root for some ladies while reading this book.

Can you read The Henchmen of Zenda without having read The Prisoner of Zenda? This is hard for me to say, because I have read The Prisoner of Zenda with such intense enthusiasm that it formed a keystone of my reading pleasure for KJ Charles’s adaptation. But on the whole, I think that yes, you can. I remembered the characters more than the plot of the original (though neither of those elements is like, earth-shattering — it’s just not that great a book apart from how fucking hilarious and silly it is), and I followed along just fine with the many machinations of Henchmen.

Can you read The Prisoner of Zenda after reading The Henchmen of Zenda? As I said, I can’t recommend any of my trashy guilty pleasure British adventure novels. I cannot recommend PC Wren and I cannot recommend Anthony Hope and I cannot recommend H. Rider Haggard and I cannot recommend Rafael Sabatini. However, should you happen to read The Prisoner of Zenda or any of the others, I would be delighted to chat with you about them on Twitter.

(I received a copy of this book from the author for review consideration.)

In news nearly equally as frabjous, one of my all-time faves, Meredith Duran, has a new book out called The Sins of Lord Lockwood. If you’re an angst fan like me, set Meredith Duran to auto-buy. This one’s about a lord who was kidnapped and transported by his very wicked cousin on his actual wedding night, and now he’s back from the prison camps of Australia, much to the displeasure of his wife, who for four years has believed that he just up and left her. She’s not sad about it. It was a marriage of convenience anyway. She’s not sad about it.

As y’all know if you’ve spent time around these parts, I mostly do not truck with romances that are even faintly Scottish. The Sins of Lord Lockwood really is only faintly Scottish, with a heroine whose Scottish wealth belongs to her exclusively. The action takes place almost completely not in Scotland. Phew.

Anna, our heroine, is tall and tough and ambitious — a Meredith Duran specialty! In the years of her husband’s absence, she’s managed his estates superbly because she enjoys managing estates. I love heroines like this. She just wants more estates to manage! Badly managed estates annoy her! Turns out she’s pretty maddened by Liam’s London house, which is staffed mainly by, as it turns out, convicts who were with him in the prison camp. So it’s a second-chance romance, the hero is angsty and has PTSD, there’s a staff full of loyal ex-cons, there’s a whole REVENGE plotline that the hero has to get against his scummy cousin. It’s tropey and fun, and Meredith Duran is honestly a really talented and insightful writer.

One of my romance goals for the year is to read more f/f, as I’ve noticed that my current methods of finding new romance books and authors have not been netting me a whole lot of f/f recs. But I’m changing all that, starting with Tamsen Parker’s In Her Court.

Van is excited to have a summer’s escape from her suffocating career in academia, but less excited when her best friend Nate breaks his leg and has to send his baby sister Willa to fill in for him as resident tennis instructor. She’s stuck sharing a room with Willa, who’s gorgeous and off-limits and in danger of making all the same professional mistakes Van has.

Oh there are so many of my favorite tropes in In Her Court, I just loved reading this — and I don’t tend to read a lot of, like, sportsy romances. Van and Willa have to share a room while secretly being wildly attracted to each other; Willa’s the best friend’s sister, which is always fun as long as the author can avoid (as Tamsen Parker does!) any sexist implications or yuckiness; they’re both charming geeks who share a lot of the same passions. In Her Court is a super fun and sweet romance that prioritizes honesty and communication in a way that I found really lovely.

Last but not at all least, I read an absolutely charming historical by Vanessa Riley, The Bashful Bride. This turned out to be the second in a series about black women in Regency London advertising for husbands.

Heiress Ester Croome has to elope as quickly as possible, to avoid the marriage her father has arranged for her. So when her friend’s newspaper advertisement for a husband brings in Ester’s favorite actor, Arthur Bex, Ester seizes the opportunity to run away with him to Gretna Green. But Bex is hiding dark secrets about his past, which threaten his happy future with Ester.

The Bashful Bride is an immensely sweet romance, most of which is taken up by the road trip that takes Ester and Bex to Gretna Green to be married. I was slightly frustrated with all of Ester’s going back and forth on whether she really wanted to run away with Bex or not, and would have liked to see her pick a side and stick with it. However, I absolutely love that Riley explores abolitionism and the challenges a black woman would face in and outside of London. Even something as simple as getting a room for the night is nearly impossible for Ester and Bex together. If you love historicals (and don’t mind “closed-door” romances) but wish they featured more characters of color, Vanessa Riley is an author to check out! I’m looking forward to read more of the books in this series.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.)

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Ruby Lang is a new-to-me author I discovered through the wonderful Romance Novels for Feminists (which has never yet steered me wrong), and I received Hard Knocks for review consideration from the publisher. Hard Knocks is about a hockey player nearing the end of his career (Adam) and a neurologist (Helen) who thinks he’s cute when he brings his friend in for a concussion check-up but does not think much of all the brain damage sports can wreak upon their players.

Oh how I love discovering a new romance author whose books are just right for me. Hard Knocks is witty and charming, with banter between the leads that is also witty and charming (in the way that so many romance novels try and fail to have their banter be, i.e., effortlessly), and I’m delighted that there’s another book in the series for me to read.¹ Things I particularly loved include how angry Helen is (I love angry heroines); the fact that nobody gives a crap that she sleeps with Adam casually; frank discussion of finances (so rare); and how angry Helen is.

Did I say one of those twice? I really love angry heroines. I can already tell that Ruby Lang’s going to be one of my go-to romance authors–very much recommended!

Charlotte Highwood creeps into the library to let Lord Granville know that she absolutely does not intend to let her mother entrap them into marrying — and kind of gets entrapped into marrying him. She’s determined to find them both a way out of it. He’s a spy. Everyone’s stuck at this manor house for one of those house parties where people are so nosy and everyone is maybe creeping away to do assignations.

Frankly, this is a delight from cover to cover. I love and revel in angsty romances (cf. my longtime love for Meredith Duran), but it was a refreshing treat to encounter a heroine as cheerful and indomitable as Charlotte. She refuses to allow herself to be caught up in anything like a Big Misunderstanding and perpetually cuts through the romance novel trope bullshit to say and do exactly what she means.

Courtney Milan was one of the first — maybe the first? — romance authors I tried when I decided to give romance novels another chance; and I’ve been a fan ever since. Her latest historicals have felt a trifle pat, so I’ve been on a break from them, but her new contemporary series — of which Hold Me is the second — has been excellent so far. In addition to thoughtfully exploring issues I care about (poverty, work-life balance, complicated parental relationships, independence v. intimacy), they lay out sincere emotional problems and show us how the characters navigate those issues.

Maria Lopez runs a popular blog where she imagines end-of-the-world scenarios in great detail. She has an ongoing semi-flirtation with one of her regular commenters, whom she called Actual Physicist and who calls her Em. When she goes to deliver a message to one of her brother’s friends (a scientist), the friend, Jay, is horribly rude to her, making immediate assumptions about her intelligence based on her appearance (girly! heels!), and she takes an immediate dislike to him. Well guess what y’all. Guess what turns out to be the case.

I liked this book a hell of a lot. Maria’s trans, and I love that it isn’t an issue in her relationship to Jay. I love that we see her as part of a group of queer friends, and that part of her emotional arc involves speaking honestly with her friend and former roommate Angela (who’s getting her own book, yay!) — in other words, that overcoming her feelings problems doesn’t revolve solely around Jay. I love You’ve Got Mail-y premises like this one, and Hold Me is a hugely satisfying book along those lines.

KJ Charles has a new series called Sins of the City that’s inspired by Wilkie Collins’s fiction, and frankly that’s all the information I needed to get excited about An Unseen Attraction. (Actually all I needed was KJ Charles’s name, but this Wilkie Collins thing didn’t hurt.) I received An Unseen Attraction from the publisher for review consideration, via NetGalley.

Clem manages a lodging house where everything is in perfect order, apart from the one tenant Clem’s noble half-brother won’t ever let him evict. When that tenant turns up brutally murdered, Clem’s tidy world is turned upside down — and so is the life of another of his tenants, the sexy taxidermist Rowley Green.

So much Wilkie Collins in this book, y’all. I loved it. Dark secrets to be uncovered, the promise of more scandal to come in subsequent books, it’s all completely up my alley. Better yet, Charles does a wonderful job of showing how Clem and Rowley learn to be ever-better friends and lovers to each other, treading gently around insecurities but setting boundaries where necessary. Clem is on the spectrum and Rowley comes from an abusive home, and they make mistakes with each other. The tension doesn’t arise so much from a Big Misunderstanding as from the clashes that happen around conflicting motives, loyalties, and ways of being a person. Charles is terrific at depicting Clem and Rowley’s attempts to navigate all of this, and it makes their happy ending all the more satisfying.

Basically, if the idea of a story about love, taxidermy, and murder most foul appeals to you, I’d recommend you run straight out and preorder An Unseen Attraction. It comes out on 21 February and is well worth your time.

What romance novels have you been enjoying lately, friends? I always need more recs!

The post Hockey, House Parties, and Taxidermy: A Romance Novels Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Rag and Bone, KJ Charles

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.)

KJ Charles writes about half-and-half straight historical romance novels and creepy magic creepiness romance novels, and I would be hard-pressed to say which genre I prefer. Rag and Bone is in the latter category, a companion novel to her “Charm of Magpies” series. Crispin was raised by a warlock and got into bad habits, but now he has been found by good magic-users, who are trying to teach him to do magic that doesn’t skip on the raggedy edge of necromancy. Unfortunately for him, and for his (secret, cause it’s olden times) lover, a dustman called Ned, there is an old, malevolent force stalking the streets of London.

Rag and Bone is hella creepy — as are all the books in this series: come for the sexytimes, stay for the nightmare-inducing British witchcraft.¹ In his warlock days, Crispin cut off a piece of his finger and used the bone to make a pen that writes in his blood and serves as a conduit for his magic. There’s unexplained spontaneous human combustion. There’s the sound of singing, and nobody to do the singing. As always in Charles’s books, you get halfway through the book and can’t imagine how things are going to work out for her characters; but then, of course, they do. This is romance! So knowing that, it’s just fun to watch Charles get her characters into increasingly horrific scrapes, trusting that she’ll also be able to get them back out.

Mixed Signals, Alyssa Cole

The third in Alyssa Cole’s Off the Grid series, Mixed Signals is best read after the first two — but you should read the first two!² The basic premise of the series is that solar flares (I think? I’m fuzzy on the science) have put out the lights across America. The chaos is about what you’d expect, and the survivors of the immediate aftermath must find a way to make their lives in an irretrievably altered society. Since this is a combination of two things I love — romance novels and process dystopias — I am obviously in for this.

By the start of Mixed Signals, it is years on from the initial collapse of society, and the country is rebuilding. Maggie Seong was only a kid when the lights went out, and now that she’s heading off to college, there’s been enough progress to where there are, you know, colleges to go to. As Maggie struggles to work out what she wants, her campus faces attacks from Luddite groups who want to undo the progress that everyone has worked so hard to achieve. The central romance (of the friends-to-lovers type) is a little thin, actually, but I didn’t mind because Cole’s worldbuilding is so much fun. I love this series, and I hope Cole keeps thinking of new stories for this world she’s created.

Once upon a Marquess, Courtney Milan

I…didn’t really care for this one. Courtney Milan was one of my first introductions into romance novels, way back in 2012/2013 sort of time, and it was sort of a revelation to me that romance novels could be funny and feminist and great. But I haven’t loved her most recent historicals (her book Trade Me was quite good! with all the negotiating of power dynamics!), and Once upon a Marquess was heavy-handed in the way that’s been frustrating me with Milan lately. Sigh!

It’s particularly sad because Once upon a Marquess is the first in a new series, the kind where each family member gets a story, and I love those. I’ll probably read at least one more in the Worth series before giving up, though.

Listen to the Moon, Rose Lerner

If you have talked to me about romance novels in the last recently, you’ll probably have heard me say, “ROSE LERNER SHOULD BE MORE FAMOUS.” Listen to the Moon is more grist for that opinion mill. The historical world her characters inhabit feels completely lived in, and the obstacles that stand between her protagonists and their happy ending are never contrived.

Listen to the Moon is a particularly fun book because it’s that rarest of beasts, a historical romance between two working-class people. John Toogood is a gentleman’s gentleman who has lost his position through no fault of his own, while Sukey is a maid-of-all-work who drives John mad by settling for good-enough (rather than perfection). Rose Lerner has obviously done extensive research into the ins and outs of being a house servant in the 1800s. This book is a treat on every level.

What about y’all? Read any good romance lately? I need some recommendations for upcoming airplane travel!

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