Heartbreaker is a Best Romance of 2022!

Thrilled to see the Kirkus Reviews best of the year list includes Adelaide and Henry -- Heartbreaker is on the list along with so many of my own favorites this year!

See the whole list, and fill your TBR!

A Haunted Heart...

A charming innkeeper falls in love with the spirit haunting her historic bed and breakfast in this cozy contemporary romance! Click HERE to read for free.

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I, like many others, am not immune to long haired Fjord with his tits out, thank you Travis sir 🙏

You are the first man I confessed to. I am not lying.

Granger sighed. "All right. Goodbye, then." "Granger." "What?" "Tell your cat I said pspsps."

thank you Rachel Reid 🥹😭

If you enjoy hockey romance novels and/or hrpf and u haven't read heated rivalry and the long game yet..!! pls. Stop depriving yourself of good great best things. Ilya Rozanov is the best character ever written. and Shane Hollander is precious.

also aaahhhh Luca!!!

Was browsing ebooks on Libby, clicked at random on a romance novel, and words fail to describe my disappointment at reading a plot summary that begins with "Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up" and then goes on to reveal that the "eerily attractive swimmer" she is "entranced" by, a character described by the summary as "a figure of Sirenic fantasy," is, in fact, a merman.

cringe failwoman boyboss

The Kingdom of the Wicked/Princes of Sin books (I know Princes of Sin is the Adult Standalone Spinoff Series, but come on now... KotW was Adult and I stand by that) have genuinely fun high stakes plots that are like "my boyfriend is the devil, actually; thoughts?" and "my people are crumbling into madness and now I have to do a supernatural scavenger hunt to fix it" HOWEVER Kerri Maniscalco is also DELIGHTFULLY good at engineering the WILDEST Romance Reasons moments, and there are like 10 per book.

Among them:

--"you must go into the Lake of Naked Honesty, which means y'all get naked and can't tell lies, especially if the question is 'are you turned on right now'"?

--"we must travel through the SIN CORRIDOR to get to my house, and during that time you will be tested by all the sins, including lust, which will make you super horny and ready to hop on my dick, I'm sorry, I don't make the rules"

(at one point, it could be argued that one of the heroes probably DOES in fact make the rules, but he's not fighting them)

--"oh no, I caught you committing murder! Quick, let's fake an engagement to save your reputation!" (?????)

--"my brothers said the only way we would pass the test would be if we fucked in this cage, maybe with them watching"

--"shucks, we must stay in this tiny shack together in the cold, with only one bed, which is made out of pine needles I braided together, I sure hope you don't shove your ass up against my dick" (the braid detail is so important to me)

--"we must travel on these Lust Gondolas, and if you want to suck my dick on the Lust Gondolas, DON'T DO IT, I'm telling you, DO NOT, get UP, STOP--"

hate it when the character is like "and i... i don't know what me and (their important person) are yet... but i want to survive long enough to figure it out" and then what they are is always heterosexual monogamous romantic relationship. i want characters who get WEIRD with it

no sorry, i actually only believe in should i tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams

On Kate Clayborn

Ok. So I know everyone knows how fabulous Kate is. Besides being brilliantly funny on Twitter (RIP? Are we saying RIP for this yet?) and also having a tremendous Substack that you should subscribe to, she just so happens to be one of the best contemporary romance novelists writing right now.

This is not hyperbole. Every time I sit down with a Kate Clayborn book, I think, "Good God. She is fucking great." (Her heroes also fuck great, iykwim)

It's hard to choose a favorite of her books -- I adore Love Lettering, which is lingering and romantic...and Love at First is so gorgeous...the writing, the romance, the wonderful world she builds for us to get cozy in for the duration of the book (both free right now in KU!). And Georgie, All Along, which is coming in January, is for sure one of my favorite romances of all time (preorder it right now is what I'm saying).

But I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the Chance of a Lifetime series, which follows three best friends who go in on a lottery ticket and win. It's not enough money to quit jobs and buy islands (Did y'all see that $2 Billion dollar jackpot? Wild.), but it's enough to change lives. And each of the books in the series follows one of the friends making the choice to change her life. My favorite is Luck of the Draw, in which the heroine has to atone for her actions and, in doing so, trips into a fake relationship/forced proximity situation with a hero who is absolutely ON FIRE SEXY.

In very fun news, the first two books in the Chance of a Lifetime series are getting new covers! Kate revealed them today -- Beginner's Luck and Luck of the Draw -- and you can find them on shelves starting in December. LOOK HOW CUTE! They will make the best holiday gifts to the romance readers in your life!

Anyway. All this is to say, Kate writes bangers. And if you haven't read her, you should. Immediately.

Fighting my way through the Legend of Drizzt books at a terrifying pace, just started The Silent Blade... I love everything about them it's unreal

URO PHANTASTICA HOW DO YOU HAVE SO MUCH HEART AS A TINY LITTLE LIZARD

My boy out here living his best life *wipes tear* I’m so happy for him

I know for a fact that this boy would kill to attend a masquerade ball like this

Bonus:

Proof that Jason has ways loved ballet and ‘the arts’ since before he was taken in by Bruce

I'm Sorry, You Packed HOW MANY Tropes into that Hoopskirt???

So...I'd be lying if I tried to tell you that I picked up this book for any reason other than the big poofy 1850s ball gowns on the cover. I'd also be lying if I said I had any expectations beyond cute, fluffy, wlw romance.

Then we got stuck into the book and suddenly I was like...I'm sorry, this cover did not prepare me for the ANGST and GROUNDING and WEIGHT and POLITICAL DIMENSIONS of this book. Not to mention that it manages to pack a metric ton of tropes into not that long a book, including but not limited to second-chance romance, parent trapping, friends-to-lovers, and the power of friendship. AND it's LGBTQIA+. I was not expecting to cry over this book, but here we are. Let's talk Don't Want You Like a Best Friend.

This is your SPOILER WARNING because I'm running on three hours of sleep and don't believe for a second that I'm not going to be randomly tossing SPOILERS all over the place. Be warned.

Oh, and this is a CONTENT WARNING for marital and domestic abuse. For both this book and this review.

Gwen is a debutante in her fourth season with no interest in marriage and the biggest rake of a father in London.

Beth is a first-season debutante on a mission to marry well, because her cousin is repossessing her and her mother's house at the end of the season and they will be homeless and penniless.

So naturally they plot to get Gwen's dad and Beth's mom together.

This is not as wild as it seems, because before Lady Demeroven's father forced her to marry Beth's dad (who is both an abusive asshole and thankfully super dead), she was deeply in love with Dashiell Havenfort. When she broke his heart. Lord Havenfort went off, got drunk, partied, and then there was Gwen--who he raised as a single dad because Gwen's mother died in childbirth.

So we have that little powder keg to begin the story, and it's set against the increasingly critical backdrop of Havenfort and the father of the aggressively vanilla boy who decides to marry Beth (yeah, they have names, I don't care. It's vanilla boy and his dickhead dad from here on in) going toe-to-toe in parliament trying to pass and prevent, respectively, a piece of legislation that would allow women to divorce their husbands for reasons other than being beaten bloody. This really underscores the situation that Beth and her mother had been in, and the one that they might be in again if Beth goes through with the marriage to vanilla boy. Thankfully she doesn't, but honestly, the number of men just waltzing around in this world going "women are property and I should be able to beat the snot out of them if I want to" was really depressing. And that depression just intensified when Beth and Gwen finally realized they wanted a sapphic relationship with each other.

The patriarchy sucks, guys. So hard.

Watching Beth and Gwen try to parent trap their respective parents was a lot of fun, and once they realized what they wanted, their relationship was also fun. That's not to say that the book was perfectly executed, though. The first half of the book is slooooooooooooow. Like slow enough that I considered DNFing the book. I'm glad I didn't, because once the "Oh, I'm sapphic" realization hits, the angst of being sapphic in a patriarchal world where marriage was women's only real hope of financial stability hit true and hard. Trying to find another way to live in a world that didn't want you to exist was really interesting.

The other thing that I wasn't a fan of--and your mileage may vary--was that while the setting and politics and fashion were extremely well-grounded in the 1850s, the character dialogue and language is jarringly modern. At one point, someone said to "put that energy out to the world" and I just had to put the book down for a minute and take a few deep breaths. So depending on how real-feeling you want the history part of this historical romance to feel, your mileage may vary with the language.

Now, the thing that I truly loved about this book is that is faces abuse and its effects full in the face, and refuses to continue a cycle of abuse. The MCA passes, and then women help each other recover and get out of abusive situations. Lady Demeroven's first marriage was abusive and violent, although she hid the extent of it from Beth. She tries to ensure that Beth ends up with a man who will be kind to her, and vanilla boy might have been...but his dickhead dad wouldn't have been, and dickhead dad might have influenced vanilla boy to become abusive. Lady Demeroven ultimately refuses to allow either the cycle of accepting abuse or the cycle of abusive men teaching their sons that abuse is acceptable or *shudder* somehow their marital duty. Lady Demeroven goes on a whole journey to heal her own trauma enough to stop the cycle and protect Beth, and she does. She shuts that shit down, and they walk.

Like the door slam in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the door slamming behind Lady and Beth Demeroven heralds freedom and happiness. It is the end of a cycle that devalues women and that tells other women that they can make a different choice. And this book does it gently, acknowledging that doing so is HARD, and it takes courage and help and support. Honestly, I was SO HERE for Lady Demeroven's journey and her finding happiness with Dashiell at the end of the book.

Overall, this was not a perfect book. There were pacing and execution issues, and Lady Demeroven and Lord Havenfort kind of steal the show from their daughters' romance. But this book had THINGS TO SAY, and those things are important to say, and perhaps say even more loudly now in 2024 than they were back in the Victorian era. So this book was fun, it had clear things to say, and honestly it was a fun read.