Category: romance

Book of the Week, book round-ups, romance

Recommendsday: Secret identity/double identity romances

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Off the back of yesterday’s book of the week, today we’re talking romances where one (or both) partners are living a double life or have a secret identity

Let’s start with Georgette Heyer – because she has a few of these of various types. The Masqueraders has a cross dressing brother and sister who are trying to lie low after the Jacobite rebellion, False Colours has one twin pretending to be his missing brother and These Old Shades – one of my all time favourites has Leon the page who is actually Leonie. And that’s before you get to The Corinthian (girl runs away from home dressed as a boy and drops out of the window into the hero’s arms), and Arabella (heroine pretending to be a great heiress). Is it any wonder I love this trope so much?

Duchess by Night was my first Eloisa James – and I picked it up at the library because it mentioned the heroine in disguise. Now it’s much, much more steamy than Heyer – but as all you get in Heyer is a kiss, then that’s not a surprise. This’ll anyway, our heroine dresses up as a man to sneak into the house of a notorious rake to see what his debauched parties are actually like. You see where this is going (and why it’s not closed door!). Anyway, as an introduction to the series it was great – although I haven’t reread it in a few years so I hope it holds up!

I came to Eloisa James after discovering Julia Quinn and after James I moved in to Sarah MacLean who I have now written about a lot but has a secret identity type – but telling you what it is is a spoiler and a reveal and you need to have read the rest of the series to get the most out of it. I had to go back and read the Rules of Scandals series again after the shock twist at the end of No Good Duke Goes Unpunished because I was so convinced that MacLean must have slipped up at some point and she hadn’t. It is a master stroke.

Let’s go contemporary! And Jen De Luca’s Well Played which has a heroine who has been emailing back and forth with someone all year who actually turns out to be someone else. It just about manages to stay on the Cyrano side rather than the catfishing, the latter of which is the risk in all the modern day twists on this and obviously I love the Ren Fair setting because I made the first book in the series a BotW – and I read Well Matched (which is the third book) in two giant gulps last week. And maybe the aforementioned catfishing situation is why I can’t think of any other contemporaries to include here – it’s hard to come up with a twist on this that doesn’t create an insurmountable issue on the romance. Which is maybe why I was so impressed with Playing with Love! So please – if you have more, put them in the comments!

Happy hump day!

Book of the Week, new releases, romance, romantic comedy

Book of the Week: Playing for Love

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After a few weeks of murder mystery picks of various types, I’m back with another romance book for this week’s BotW – and it’s even a new release! Check me getting new books read in a timely manner. I know. Astounding

Ever since her mum died, Samadhi has watched YouTube streams of video gamers to help her destress. Sam plays games herself as well, so when she’s selected in a contest to partner her all-time favourite streamer, Blaze, in a competition to promote a new game, it’s her lucky day. Except that in real life she’s trying to get her fashion business off the ground and she needs all her time to do that. Blaze is a swashbucking pirate type – with a big following and as well as wanting to make sure she doesn’t embarrass herself in front of the internet, she’s also got a bit of a crush. Ok, make that a lot of a crush. But what she doesn’t know is that in real life, Blaze is actually Luke – the shy guy from her office who has been helping her with her crowdfunding campaign. And of course Luke doesn’t know that Sam is Bravura. And every day as Luke is working up the courage to ask Sam out, Sam is falling a little bit harder for Blaze. How will the competition end – and will Sam realise who Luke is before it’s too late?

So I love a double identity/mistaken identity romance which is something I could list a whole bunch of historical romances with that trope but I’m going to save that til tomorrow (!) and obviously there are also films like You’ve Got Mail, Pillow Talk and Some Like it Hot. And this is a delight. I really appreciated that Luke never took advantage of the fact that he realised who Sam was first (which is my problem with You’ve Got Mail and Pillow Talk if I think too hard about it) and there is also plenty of competency porn and calling out of people being icky to women in the gaming world and in the bottom half of the internet. But the slow burn romance is the main attraction here – and it’s a delight to watch especially as I wasn’t quite sure how it was all going to work out.

This is the first book that I’ve read by Jeevani Charika – but she also writes as Rhoda Baxter and I’ve heard her interviewed before on the Smart Bitches podcast and have been meaning to try and read some of her books. And I enjoyed this so much that I’ll definitely be doing that. If they’re all as much fun as this, I’ve got some really good reading in front of me. I complain a lot about wanting more romantic comedies and how hard it is to find them – so I really enjoyed finding one and I’m hoping that the act of buying some of the back catalogue will help the algorithm put some more my way!

My copy of Playing for Love came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and is a bargain 99p on Kindle and £1.99 on Kobo as I write this. And it’s also coming out in paperback, but not until April – and don’t worry Foyles will let you preorder it.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: The Love Hypothesis

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I read a lot of books on holiday last week including a lot of mysteries but breaking with recent trends I’m going for a romance novel. But as I said yesterday there were lots of things I want to talk about, so I suspect you’ll be hearing about more of them soon anyway.

Olive needs to convince her best friend that she’s over her ex (because her best friend fancies him and won’t date him until Olive has found someone else). Because they’re all PHD students, Anh is demanding empirical proof of this, so Olive has a bit of a panic and kisses the first man she sees. Unfortunately the man in question is Adam Carlsen – a rising star in the science world, a professor at the uni and also known as a tyrant towards his PHD students. But for some reason, he agrees to her proposal that he be her fake boyfriend. But the more time they spend together, the more Olive finds that she may actually quite like him. But that wasn’t the deal was it? But what really is going on between them – and can it survive a science conference where Olive’s career takes a bit of a turn?

Goodness me I love a fake relationship romance and this one works really well. It’s all told from Olive’s point of view, which I wasn’t expecting, but it means that you *think* you know what’s going on with Adam, but you’re never quite sure. I don’t know a lot about the world of academia, but I did like the fact that the book explicitly addressed the issues of a relationship between teacher and a student and spelled out the reasons why it was ok and what they had done about it. I was worried for a little while that the denouement was going to rely on a Stupid Misunderstanding or People Not Having Basic Conversations which are two of my pet peeves in the romance genre, but it doesn’t and it’s actually really neatly done. I raced through it in an evening and was really sad when it was over. I was always an arts and languages person at school and not a STEM one, so I loved the details about what it’s like working in labs and working in higher levels of academia. This is Ali Hazelwood’s debut novel and I am really looking forward to seeing what she writes next.

My copy of The Love Hypothesis came from the library, but it’s out now in paperback, Kindle, Kobo and audiobook. The paperback isn’t showing any click and collect on Foyles’ website, so I suspect it may be an order it in thing – at the moment at any rate. One last thing: helpfully there are some content warnings for the book on Ali Hazelwood’s website – mild spoilers ahoy.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, romance

Book of the Week: All the Feels

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Welcome to post two of this week’s start of month extravaganza. As it’s a Tuesday, this is Book of the Week as usual but it’s also a new release – that dropped onto my Kindle on Tuesday last week and was in front of my eyeballs soon after. I’m slightly inside my year rule for author repeats, but this is a different series of Dade’s and as I said I’m being timely for once!

All the Feels is the follow up to Spoiler Alert, set in the same world and with an overlapping timeline – if you care about spoilers you’ll want to read Spoiler Alert first. Our hero, Alex, is one of the stars of a Game of Thrones-esque TV behemoth. After a fight in a bar while filming the final season of the show he finds himself with a new minder – Lauren – who is going to watch his every move until the last season airs. He is not very keen on the arrangement, but once she’s living in his guest house, he discovers that he actually might like hanging around with her. Lauren was in holiday in Spain when her awful cousin roped her in to babysitting one of his misbehaving actors. Burnt out from her job in the ER, looking after a spoilt star should surely be a breeze. But what she discovers behind the bad headlines is a man who cares – really very much – about the people around him and who doesn’t always think before he jumps in to try and rescue them. Then another scandal puts Alex in even more trouble and loses Lauren her job. But Alex isn’t ready to let her go and starts trying to figure out a way to keep him in his life.

This is fun and sweet and was exactly what I needed last week. Alex is the hero equivalent of a big friendly puppy – maybe a golden retriever – who bounces around causing chaos with a flick of his tail. If you’ve read Spoiler Alert, you’ll know what the scandal is that loses Lauren her job and you’ll also know that like Marcus, Alex likes to write a bit of fan fiction. You get extracts of that, plus the delightful group messages between the God of the Gates stars at appropriate points between chapters of the story. I didn’t reread Spoiler Alert before I read this, but if my memory is correct this is probably a little less… explicit than you might expect from Alex’s very frank disclosures in that. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have any bedroom action – because it does, but it comes later in the story than maybe you would expect based on what you already knew about Alex in the last book.

Flicking through the goodreads reviews (always dangerous I know), I can see that this has divided opinion somewhat, with some people feeling like it didn’t live up to Spoiler Alert and not buying the chemistry or liking Alex. I liked them as a couple but I can see how people would have taken a dislike to Alex – based on seeing him through Lauren’s point of view at the start. But I think that sorts it out once you get into his POV and also realise a bit more about how Lauren sees herself and the way that her family treat her. And as for not living up to Spoiler Alert – that probably depends on which tropes you like and possibly on the steam level you’re expecting from this. Spoiler Alert missed out on Book of that Week here – mostly because I read it very close to Well Met which was just glorious and has a slightly similar feel in terms of fandoms and the like.

So All the Feels is out now in the UK – on Kindle, Kobo and in paperback. But because of supply chain issues, its release in the States has been pushed back a few weeks – sorry not sorry that for once the UK readers have got something first!

Happy Reading!

American imports, Book of the Week, romance, romantic comedy

Book of the Week: Second First Impressions

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After yesterday’s little essay at the start of my Week in Books I feel a little bit like I’ve already talked way too much this week. But I’ve got plans in my head for a summer reading post and a couple of last weeks books are likely to feature in that. So this weeks BotW is a fun and frothy romance, perfect for reading any time of year, not just in a sunny garden in summer.

Ruthie has been working at Providence Retirement Villas for six years. That’s her whole adult life – and she’s turned the job into her entire life. She’s shrunk her world so that it revolves around the residents (human and turtles) and maintaining the place. She is nervous, risk averse, acts way older than her age and her latest fear is what the property developer who has just bought the site might do to up end her life. It turns out that the first thing he’s going to do is land Providence with his son. Teddy has run out of places to stay and needs to raise money for his share of the tattoo parlour he wants to open. He’s tall, dark and handsome – and dangerous for Ruthie’s self control. So she sets him up with the one job no one has ever lasted at: personal assistant to two rich, 90 year old trouble making ladies – who get most of their enjoyment from setting their assistants fiendish tasks. But Teddy looks set to be the one who stays the course – but is his charm for real or is is all just an act?

That’s quite a long plot summary and makes this sound way more complicated than it is. It’s a charming opposites attract romance with a sweet but wary heroine and a charming people pleaser hero who have to do a lot of figuring out about what they both want in life. The retirement village provides an excellent cast of supporting characters to make you laugh as you watch Ruthie and Teddy do some cautious getting to know each other. It does suffer a little bit from the end wrapping up too quickly (oh a common theme returns to my reviews) but I sort of forgive it because it was just so charming for the rest of the book. I’ve been hearing good things about Sally Thorne for a while, but this is the first time I’ve managed to get around to reading one of her books – even though I think I may own the Hating Game. I am annoyed that it’s taken me so long. But again: what is new there. In summary: charming escapist reading.

My copy of Second First Impressions came from the library but it’s out now on Kindle and Kobo and in (very expensive) hardback. No paperback (in the UK at least) until next year.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, historical, romance

Book of the Week: Wilde Child

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As I said yesterday, a busy week in real life last week and a lot of reoccurring authors on the list. But for today’s BotW pick I’m back into my romance happy place, with the latest book from an old favourite author of mine – Eloisa James.

A little bit of my historical romance reading origin story first: Eloisa James was one of the first current historical romance authors I read back when I discovered that there were modern authors doing takes on Georgette Heyer, back in my Southend days so circa 2009 – about a decade after I first read Georgette Heyer – I know. What took me so long? I don’t know – except I suppose that back when I was reading Georgette Heyer originally there wasn’t really a section of the UK market that was historical romance that wasn’t Mills and Boon – and that was what my granny read. Then – and I know exactly how it happened – I saw Julia Quinn’s What Happens in London in the window of Waterstones on Southend High Street and went to investigate. The Essex Library system was good – and I then requested and worked my way through every Julia Quinn they had and started to look for other similar authors. And it turned out there were a few authors who had made the jump across the Atlantic – and you just had to know what to look for in the cover art. My first Eloisa James was Duchess by Night – with a blindfolded lady in a corseted dress on the cover. And I ate up that series – or as much as it as was published in the UK. Which was not all of it – and at that point they weren’t available on Kindle – even if I had had one* so I started looking at the US editions, with their very, very different covers to the UK ones and started ordering them so I could get to Villiers’ story. And so what I’m saying here is that I have a long history with Eloisa James and I see her books as reliable comfort reads for me.

This is the sixth in the Wilde’s of Lindow Castle series, and the titular Wilde Child is Joan, who the Duke of Lindow has raised as his own despite the fact that her father is the Prussian count who his (now ex) wife had an affair with. This fact of her birth has made her some what scandalous – and she has done every thing in her power to scandalise the polite society who judge her for something she can’t help or change. Our hero is Viscount Greywick, who needs sensible scandal free wife but just can’t help trying to keep Joan out of trouble. The two of them strike a bargain – he’ll help her achieve her dream of acting on stage (incognito of course) and then she’ll settle down and marry a man of his choosing. We all know where this is going, without me even saying any more than that.

Now, this is not perfect. I like others of James’ books more. I think the relationship skips a stage – they go straight from antipathy to liking each other, without really properly explaining how. Yes, there are a lot of “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I can’t stop touching your hair” books out there – but there’s usually a big revelation moment where they work out that that it’s not actually hate, it’s repressed desire – and that doesn’t quite land here. I still think James’ earlier books are cleverer and funnier, but I read it this in under 24 hours and it made me smile – and having read all the other books in this series, I’m just a touch invested and I liked seeing the previous couples reappear. I am going to go on record that I have been holding out hope throughout the series that the at some point Horatius, the dead eldest son, is going to turn out not to be dead and reappear to close the series, not just because of The Drama but also because that would solve one of the ongoing problems of one of the couples – which makes a reappearance in this story (you’ll know what I mean if you’ve read North’s book). James has her first book out under her own name (Mary Bly) soon – which is a contemporary women’s fiction novel – so I’m hoping this isn’t it for Eloisa James – but it may well be.

My copy of Wilde Child came from the library, but it’s out now on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback – and these are often spotted in the supermarkets and book stores – at time of writing, Foyles have it in stock in six of their seven stores.

Happy Reading!

* I got my first Kindle in May 2012 before I went to Poland to work at EURO 2012 – because lord knows I wasn’t going to be able to take enough books to read with me for a month.

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Love at First

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I like writing about swoony romantic books, so although I really liked the new Duncan MacMaster – I mean a murder mystery set at a Fyre-esque festival is lot of fun and I’m sure I’ll write about it properly at some point, but I just loved Kate Clayborn’s Love at First, so my inner romantic won out. Again.

Nora loves her flat, and the building it’s in. She’s loved it since she was a kid and visited her Nona every summer. Now her Nona is gone but the community of her friends is still there and Nora has taken over looking after them. She moved across the country to Chicago to live in it, she’s got her remote working situation sorted and now she just needs to make sure the building’s new occupant doesn’t change the atmosphere. For Will, the flat is an unexpected inheritance from an uncle he didn’t know and didn’t want to. He can’t imagine living in it – so he just wants to deal with it and move on. Soon Will and Nora are low key feuding as she tries to gently sabotage his plans. But it’s more like frenemies than enemies because there’s just something between the two of them…

So this has a lovely prologue setting it up, and then a delightful romance with enemies to lovers and friends with benefits stuff going on. Will and Nora both have reasons why relationships are tricky territory for them and watching them find their way towards each other is lovely. I also adored the other residents of the building with their quirks and their fun and sparky relationships with each other. I really liked Clayborn’s previous book, Love Lettering – I mean it was a Book of the Week and one of my favourites of last year – but I think maybe I like this one even more!

I borrowed this from the library, but I suspect I’m going to be ordering myself the paperback so that I can lend it around – after all I own Love Lettering in paperback and on Kindle… At the moment it’s only available as an import paperback in the UK but when I asked Kate Clayborn on Twitter what was going on, she said she thinks it’s just transitioning to a new imprint. I hope that’s what’s happening – because I have two books of a three book series of hers and I really need the third at some point, so I’ll keep my eyes open and try to remember to update you all when it’s on Kindle and Kobo again.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, romance, romantic comedy

Book of the Week: He’s Not My Boyfriend

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I said yesterday that I was having trouble picking and I did. There were a few options for today. But the Deanna Raybourn is the sixth in a series – and I’ve written about Veronica before. The Grand Sophy was a reread via audiobook and that book is the very definition of a problematic favourite. I’ve written about several Lumberjanes before (including the novelisations) as well. And when I came to write up my reading list I realised that although I’ve read eight of Jackie Lau’s books and novellas over the last year, I haven’t made one of them a BotW yet. So that made my mind up for me.

Cover of He's Not My Boyfriend

Iris Chin likes her independence. She’s a successful structural engineer and a bit of a party girl and life would be pretty much perfect if her family didn’t keep setting up up with men to try and get her married off. But her job and her home life collide when she discovers that Alex Kwong, the one night-stand she snuck out on the next morning, is the man she’s going to have to work with on a new project for work. On top of that she’s moved in with her nosy, meddling grandma and you’ve got a recipe for a disaster…

This makes for a really fun read. Alex and Iris are both convinced that they don’t want to be in relationships – Iris, because she thinks her parents and grandparents relationships weren’t successful, and Alex because his mum has died and left his family broken hearted and he doesn’t want to go through that pain again. But they have great chemistry together, and Iris introduces Alex to her family to help him with some of the female family he’s missing without his mum. Watch them work out their relationship is really good, but Iris’s grandmother nearly steels the show. She’s a 90-something ball of energy – who has learnt English since her husband died, taken a string of cookery courses to fill time and has started reading Harlequin romance novels. She’s brilliant, and I would read a whole series of her setting up her hapless relatives on blind dates!

So this is a couple of years old and the second in a series – I haven’t read the first, but the couple from that do pop up in this. The running theme in the Jackie Lau books that I’ve read are delicious food, meddling families and heroines who know what they want from life and aren’t afraid to go out and get it. So if that is your thing – and you don’t mind feeling hungry while reading, then definitely check this out. Her first book with Berkeley is out at in November and I’m really looking forward to reading it.

I bought my copy of He’s Not My Boyfriend on Kindle but it’s also available on Kobo – and it’s 99p on both of those at the moment. It’s also showing as available to order in paperback, but I can’t work out how easy it actually will be to get hold of.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, romance

Book of the Week: Rosie Danan

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Ok, so a bit of a cheaty pick this week – because I’m picking two books by the same author, one of which I read the week before – and would have been last week’s pick if it wasn’t for the fact that I really needed to talk about how pleased I was that Enjoy the View really paid off on the promise of the previous books. Anyway, here I am to talk about the latest novel from Rosie Danan – and its predecessor. Because what we need right now is fun, sex positive romance novels. And holidays. But as we can’t have holidays, lets take good books instead!

Cover of The Roommate

In the Roommate we meet Clara. Her family is notorious on the East Coast for their scandals. But Clara’s not like them – she’s the well behaved sensible one – except when it comes to her childhood crush. So when he invites her to move cross country, she ups sticks and goes. But when she gets there, her crush is not – he’s going on tour with a band he manages and has let out the other room in the house to another guy. Josh is charming and handsome – and an adult film star. The chemistry between the two of them is insane – but it would make Clara her family’s biggest scandal yet. But soon the two of them are working on a new idea – to tackle the stigma around female desire and help women get better sex. But when will Clara realise that Josh is worth taking a chance on?

The Intimacy Experience centres on Naomi. The sex-positive start up she works for (yes, but that’s only part of the link to the first book!) is a success and she’s trying to extend her work to live lecturing. But she’s struggling to get hired by educational institutions until she meets Ethan. Ethan has just been named one of LA’s hottest bachelors, but the handsome rabbi is more interested in finding a way to bring more people into his synagogue.  His congregation is aging and the shul is low on funds. Naomi’s course about modern intimacy seems like the perfect solution to both of their problems – she gets to deliver her seminar series and he gets to try and attract some millennials to the faith. Except as the two of them work together, their growing attraction becomes more and more obvious – as does the disapproval of the board running the synagogue.

Cover of The Intimacy Experiment

I’m writing about the two books together because they’re related but they do different things. And I read them in the wrong order – because of course I did – so I’m going to take The Intimacy Experiment first. The romance in it is great – but it’s also a really wonderful examination of community and service and whether religion and sex positivity can coexist. Now that makes it sound less exciting than it is – and it is actually really quite steamy. Now if you’ve read the Roommate first, you’re probably going to find this a little lower on the heat scale – but hello, the hero is a rabbi and the actual plot doesn’t centre around sex in the same way that The Roommate does – it’s examining intimacy and relationships and what they look like in the modern world.

The Roommate is a really good forced proximity, opposites attract romance – with a really high level of steam – as you might expect from a book centring on female pleasure and the adult entertainment industry. Clara and Josh together make a really fun pair who want to change the world – and who only later realise that they can’t really live without each other. To be fair, Josh realises much sooner than Clara does, but he’s a real noble gent about it!

Of the two, I preferred the Intimacy Experiment – I think because I really enjoyed the setting at the synagogue. I’ve read a bunch of books with Christian priests of various types (or their spouses) involved (like the Max Tudor series) but this is the first book I’ve read set in a synagogue and its community (if you know more, hit me up in the comments) and I loved the sense of community and how much Ethan cares about his people and trying to make the shul thrive.

I’m fairly sure I’ll be recommending both of these – but probably to people looking for slightly different things. If you’ve read The Roommate first, the Intimacy Experiment might disappoint a little on the heat front, but the level of heat in The Roommate is not for everyone – or at least not straight out of the box! My copy of the Intimacy Experiment came from Netgalley, but it’s out now. I bought The Roommate for myself. The Intimacy Experiment came out at the start of the month and is available on Kindle and Kobo, as is The Roommate. The shops may be starting to open up here now, but I still haven’t been into a bookshop, so I have no idea how easy they are to get hold of in physical copies, but Foyles reckons it can dispatch The Intimacy Experiment in a couple of days, and The Roommate within a week, so you never know.

Happy Reading!

 

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Enjoy the View

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So there were a couple of books in the market for book of the week this week, but in the end I’ve gone for Sarah Morgenthaler’s third book in the Moose Springs series for reasons that will be explained in a couple of paragraphs time.

River Lane is trying to reinvent herself. Her acting career seems to be on the wain, so she’s moving behind the camera and her first job is to make a film for the Alaska tourist board promoting the town of Moose Springs. But when she gets there, Moose Springs really doesn’t want to be promoted. She can’t get her filming permits, no one will go on camera and she and her crew end up sleeping in their truck after their accommodation chucks them out. Her last resort is trying to climb the Mount Veil. Their guide is Easton. Easton is not keen on the film crew – he got chewed out by River for ruining her shot, when he thought he was helping someone who was lost. But he loves the mountain and he’s a professional so he’s going to get them up and down safely. Except the weather and the mountain have other ideas…

I liked but didn’t love the first two books in this series and this book is why I have stuck with this series – because I knew there was a book as good and fun as this underneath it all. I feel vindicated! In the previous books there were flashes of snappy dialogue but not enough characterisation and they just generally didn’t sustain the momentum of the start. But this one has the snappy dialogue, the rounded characters, some proper peril and it has a marmot as comic relief. It’s a lot of fun.

My only real issues with it were one incredibly dumb decision from the heroine (but I sort of understood why she did it from a character point of view and from a drama one, I just think there might have been a better time to deploy that option) and that the ending wrapped up very quickly and I wanted more of a sense of what happened to the film in the end. But as we know I often think romances wrap up too quickly – so I try not to hold that against books too much! A warning though – a lot of this book is spent up a mountain in very cold and wintry conditions – so read it somewhere tucked up nice and warm!

My copy of Enjoy the View came from the library, but is available now on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback – although judging by Waterstones website, probably as a special order.

Happy Reading!