Tag: contemporary romance

Recommendsday, romance

Recommendsday: Recent Romance Reads

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It’s Wednesday again and today I’ve got three reviews for you of romance novels that I’ve read in the last little while. These are all new – or relatively new – releases. The is the newest because Alisha Rai came out last week and the Jeevani Charika is the oldest and came out in November.

Enemies to Lovers by Alisha Rai*

Sejal’s got some issues: her parents were on both the wrong side of the law, also each other and sometimes her. This means that there are also some unsavoury people after her and she’s been trying to lie low. Krish’s brother has gone missing, and he’s pretty sure Sejal’s crime family have got something to do with it. So he does what any self respecting brother would do: pretends to be an FBI agent and persuade Sejal to help him find his brother. This means an epic cross country road trip where a grudging truce starts to seem like it’s turning into something else. I have a mixed record with career criminals but I love a road trip novel and I’ve really enjoyed some of Alisha Rai’s other series (including the complicated characters in the Forbidden Love series) so this was a no-brainer for me to read. However – it is the second in a series and I hadn’t read the first so I think I would have got more out of it if I had. That said it’s a twisty romantic-suspense that’s at the less scary end of the spectrum with really interesting and complicated protagonists who are both hiding plenty of things from each other and from themselves. It took a bit longer than I was expecting for me to get into it, but I did enjoy it a lot.

How Can I Resist You by Jeevani Charika*

Vidya is on a work trip to Waterloo Bay. Or at least that’s the main reason that she’s there. The other reason is that her sister came to a work party and hooked up with one of Vidya’s colleagues and can’t remember who and as the sensible sister Vidya is trying to find out who it is – based on a vague description and a shoulder tattoo. One of the suspects is Leo – handsome, furstrating and above all a colleague. This is a fun rom-com with a buttoned up rule following hero and a heroine who feels like she’s always trying to fix her sister’s problems. This took me a little bit to get into, I think because of the involvement of a trope that I don’t love (which I can’t tell you because it’s a spoiler) but it’s only a tangential thing mostly and once I got into it I was properly up and running. I liked the work trip setting – all the worrying about the HR issues that are thrown up by trying to see a colleague’s tattoo on a part of their body that is usually covered by clothing from Vidya and from Leo’s side the fact that Vidya’s a colleague and he’s been burnt by that before. Also there’s a seagull. This is the fifth book by Charika that I’ve read and although The Winner Bakes It All is still my favourite, this is pretty good too.

Falling for the Rabbi by Jennifer Wilck*

Josh is a Rabbi whose grandmother has got a matchmaker involved to try and find him a partner. Except when he turns up on the first date that the matchmaker has arranged she has bought her best friend along with her – a best friend who happens to be the same person who is buying his grandmother’s house. Emma is buying the house so that she can fulfill her dream of starting her own business and opening a bookshop. The two of them have more chemistry than Josh does with his actual date, but are there too many obstacles in the way for them to have their happy ending. This was my first actual Harlequin-Harlequin romance in I don’t know how long and I thought the premise was really promising. However it felt a little 2D in the execution – the side characters felt very black and white and you didn’t really get to know a lot about Josh or Emma’s inner life beyond her issues with trust and his with change. Now I would say that this is partly a limitation of the format, except that I’ve read some really good Harlequin/Mills and Boons that managed to flesh out the characters and conflicts really well – and this is a Harlequin special edition, so I think it actually has more pages/word count at it’s disposal than some. Still, it’s always nice to read a romance with a bookshop owner and it was a perfectly find way to pass a few hours.

Happy Humpday everyone!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: While You Were Seething

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It’s Tuesday and it’s time for another Book of the Week – and this week it’s a romance pick after a few weeks of mystery ones. And actually it could have been one of a couple of romances this week – so tomorrow’s Recommendsday has got some more of them for you. But in the meantime, my favourite book that I read last week was the new Charlotte Stein – which also came out last week. So as I said yesterday – I’m even fairly timely!

Daisy and Caleb were at college together and they’ve been enemies ever since. These days Daisy is a crisis PR specialist and her latest assignment is to try and dig Caleb out of a public relations disaster: he’s a romance author who has just told the world he doesn’t believe in romance or happy endings. She knows it’s not going to be easy to persuade him to do the book tour they’ve got planned, but she hadn’t quite realised how hard it would be. Soon Daisy’s on a road trip with him to each stop of the tour which is hard enough, but more than that people at the events are starting to think that Daisy is the mysterious woman that he dedicates all his books too – the love of his life. Soon they’re going along with the idea and now they’re also trapped in a fake relationship. Except the chemistry is starting to feel much more real than it ought to considering how much they hate each other. Because they do hate each other, don’t they?

This is the third fake relationship romance in an interconnected series from Charlotte Stein which started with When Grumpy Met Sunshine. Now my main issue (if it can be considered an issue) with that book was that it was pretty clear to you as a reader that the hero was into the heroine and it was hard to see how she didn’t see it. Now in this one it is much easier to understand why Daisy doesn’t think that Caleb is into her – she’s so beaten down by always been seen as too much that you can see how she would misinterpret or not see the signs. And as a reader it’s really quite delicious as they get stuck in these increasingly ridiculous situations being forced into ever closer proximity. And it’s so much fun – I read it in less than 24 hours and actively resented having to go to work and not carry on reading it!

In the afterward Stein says that this is the last of her rom coms – and I really hope that’s not as final as it sounds because I have really, really enjoyed reading them and I hope that she writes something similar soon. She has a small town paranormal romance series that I have my eye on for if/when prices drop because at the moment the kindle prices are too rich for my blood considering how big the to-read pile is!

My copy of While You Were Seething came via NetGalley, but as I have the other two in paperback I’m not ruling out buying myself a copy as well to give me a matching set for the bookshelves! I’ve seen the others in bookshops so I’m hoping this will be too but it’s only showing as in stock in one of the central London Waterstones at the moment so we will have to see. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too,

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Love Haters

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I mentioned yesterday that I had to crack out an emergency book over the weekend because I wasn’t feeling very well and that’s what I’ve ended up picking today: the latest Katherine Center, The Love Haters, which came out in paperback back in November. And it’s particularly good timing because it turns out that Center has written an Amazon Original story that is out today too.

Katie Vaughan is a videographer. For her day job she works for a small media company who make corporate and promotional video. For herself she makes day in the life videos about people who have done something heroic. The trouble is the passion project doesn’t pay the rent and there is a massive round of layoffs happening at the day job. So that’s why when her boss Cole offers her a last chance job she takes it. Trouble is, it’s filming a coast guard rescue swimmer and Katie doesn’t swim and the swimmer is Hutch, Cole’s brother. Hutch is internet famous after his rescue of a dog went viral, but he’s turned down every interview request since. But Katie really needs her job, so she heads off to the Florida Keys, where she finds that everything is just a bit different – and Hutch is definitely not what she was expecting either.

So I had a few qualms at a couple of points when I was reading this. Firstly there was a point where I was worried that this was going to have too much comedy based on humiliation, then there was a big third act twist that I was a bit dubious about and then I was concerned about the finale. But every time, it pulled it around – for me at least. I can see from the reviews that some people have found the plot strand around body image too much for them, but as someone who grew up in the terrible times that were the early 2000s I could totally understand where Katie was coming from and found her evolution on that front quite satisfying. Hutch is a great character – I wasn’t really aware of Coast Guard Swimmers being a thing before this book, but it was the perfect match of character and job and makes total sense for the way that the ending plays out. I don’t know that it’s my favourite of hers – I think I love The Rom-Commers the most, and it’s not a surefire recommendation for people because for reasons that may be apparent from what I’ve already written, but I read this in the space of an afternoon and evening and really enjoyed it.

This is out now in Kindle, Kobo and paperback. It’s showing up as being in stock in some of the London Waterstones so I think you should be able to get it in stores too.

Happy Tuesday!

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

Book of the Week: Love and Other Brain Experiments

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Happy Tuesday everyone, and I’m back with a new release (well it was released in February and I read it in February so that counts as new release) romance for this week’s Book of the Week.

The heroine of Love and Other Brain Experiments is Frances, a neuroscientist who has spent the last five years trying to build her career after turning down a job – and her boyfriend – to follow her own research. Now she’s heading back to New York to a conference, where she’s going to come face to face with that same ex, who said she’d never make it on her own. When an argument with a rival is mistaken for an argument between a couple, she’s flustered and inadvertently confirms the misconception and suddenly both her and Lewis’s careers are at risk – and thus starts the fake dating agreement…

My favourite Sophie Kinsella book is Can You Keep a Secret, which starts with a genius scene set on a plane, and this also starts with an excellent plane-based meeting which set me up to really enjoy this. I had a slight concern with the fake dating scenario – because as the book sets it out Frances’s main problem with the initial relationship misconception is gaining a reputation for untruthfulness in science (where falsifying data is the worst thing you can do) but then she and Lewis create a much bigger reputational risk with the prolonged fake dating scenario. However, I love a fake dating story, and an enemies to lovers plot and this is so much fun that I just decided to go with it and hope that the resolution was well thought out and satisfying enough to negate that fear – and it basically was.

Frances is a great character – I loved all the details about the different places she’d worked in around the world and her complete single minded focus on her research made a great foil for her missing some issues in her real life outside of the lab. I thought Lewis was also really well drawn, although the reason why he and Frances became rivals seemed pretty unsurmountable initially, the actual explanation made it work. There is a slight case of just have a proper conversation you two here, but ultimately I raced through this in about 36 hours and ended with a big smile on my face at the resolution. This is Hannah Brohm’s debut – and this is a really accomplished start to a romance writing career and I look forward to seeing what she writes next. And on a more basic level this was one of the first STEM romances that I’ve read recently that wasn’t completely obviously a Reylo thing…

I got my copy of Love and Other Brain Experiments from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle, Kobo and paperback – and as you can see I’ve already found it in a Waterstones – so it should be fairly easy to find in the shops too.

Happy Reading!

Book previews

Out Today: Night Rider

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Happy Thursday everyone, and I have another new book out today that I wanted to talk about. So we have a big trend of Cowboy and ranch romances at the moment, but Night Rider is adding in the famous person and normal person trope in this case a a cowboy and a Hollywood starlet. But. But. Look at this cover: Pastel colours, illustrations. Yes there is the word suspense in the Bailey Hannah quote, but does this look like a romantic suspense novel? Because this is the final line of the description:

But that dream is threatened when Nina’s past catches up with her. And when an unlikely predator strikes, she and Maverick must make a choice: to let each other go or face the world together.

So. I have a copy of this via NetGalley because I am behind with the Cowboy/Ranch trend and I wanted to get in on it, but when I was picking it out, I didn’t really peg it as being as Romantic Suspense as the Amazon page says it is. So I’m going to read it, and see how romantic suspense it is, and then go and find some more cowboys to see if they’re all actually romantic suspense and cover signalling has gone even more out the window than I previously thought!

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Totally and Completely Fine

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It’s that time again: the first Book of the Week of a New Year. And you can tell that we’re in the depths of winter purely from the photo of the book, because it’s getting harder and harder to get enough daylight to get a not-dark picture of anything. Hey ho. We’re past the shortest day now…

In Totally and Completely Fine, Lauren is still in the same small town in Montana where she grew up. She’s the widowed mother of a teenage daughter, but her reputation as a teenage tearaway still looms large in the mind of some of the town’s residents. She doesn’t really care about how others see her, but she’s still drifting through life after the loss of her husband. Then when she visits her brother Nate on the set of a movie he’s working on she meets his co star Ben. Ben is a decade younger than her and about to be an even bigger deal than he already is, but their attraction is mutual. But when Ben comes to town to help Nate relaunch the local theatre, there’s a chance that it could be something more than a one time thing – if Lauren can find a way to reconcile the different parts of her life.

Now if some of the names here sound familiar, that’s because Nate is the hero of one of Sussman’s previous books, Funny You Should Ask in which Lauren and her daughter Lena also make an appearance. I loved that previous book, and it’s fun in this to see Nate and Chani again and get some more of their story. But this really is about Lauren as the narrative switches between parts of her past – her teenage years, her marriage to Spencer – and her present. Lauren and her husband were happy, she is heartbroken by his death and this is about a new way of living with grief as well as about finding a new love.

It’s a bit of a tearjerker at times, and if I really just wanted Lauren to use her words to her therapist to help herself more, I get why she didn’t and it made for a great payoff at the end. None of the characters here are neat and easy, they’re all messy and complicated and have baggage – which is what makes it so satisfying when they work things out in the end. I enjoyed reading it, and it reminded me why romances with Proper Grown Up Characters are so good, after what feels like a bit of a string of romances with leads who were exasperating in their inability to adult properly!

My copy was a paperback, but it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo and should be fairly easy to find in a big enough bookshop – I’ve definitely seen it in a few.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Christmas books, reviews

Book of the Week: Season of Love

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It’s the last Tuesday of 2025 and that strange period between Christmas and New Year where no one is quite sure what day it is, where we’re all still eating meals at strange times and there’s a box of chocolates just open on the counter. So before the Christmas mood is completely over, I’ve got a festive BotW pick for you.

Cover of Season of Love

Artist Miriam Blum hasn’t been back to her aunt’s Christmas tree farm in a decade, but when she hears that Aunt Cass has died, she heads back to Carrigan’s to sit Shiva. Her plan is to be in and out as quickly as possible – avoiding her family and having to deal with the difficult emotions that being back there bring up. But that’s all thrown up in the air when she discovers that Cass has left her a share in the business – and it’s at risk of going under. Noelle is the farm’s manager and she really doesn’t want Miriam around – she’s spent years dealing with the fall out from Miriam’s flight and she thinks Miriam is nothing but trouble. But sparks fly as they’re forced to work together to try and save the Christmas tree farm.

There is a lot of trauma in both Miriam and Noelle’s backstories – Miriam’s father is absolutely terrible in ways that I can’t really go into because: Spoilers, and Noelle has severe abandonment issues, so although this is billed as a rom com, the plot and underlying conflict here are less frothy and fun that that might suggest. But don’t let that put you off, because there is a lovely found family in the Carrigan’s community, there are people who use their words to sort out conflicts (well mostly) rather than them being fixed by magic sex. In fact this is pretty closed door on the actual romance front as well as being pretty slow burn, reluctant attraction in trope terms.

I really enjoyed this and read it in less than 24 hours. And as you might expect from a book about a Jewish-owned Christmas tree farm, the actual Christmas content here is mostly decoration and baubles (rather than church and Jesus) because the characters are only really interested in Christmas as far as it is needed for their business to work – and part of the plot sees them looking at how they can become less dependent on Christmas as a money earner. There are now two more books in this series, and I really want to read them!

This is available on Kindle and Kobo and allegedly in paperback although I haven’t seen it in the bookshops (and believe me, I’ve looked).

Happy Reading

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: The Art of Catching Feelings

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Happy Tuesday everyone, I finally made a start on the Alicia Thompson backlog last week and here I am reporting back!

When Daphne goes to a baseball game days after she’s signed her divorce papers, she’s doing it because her ex wanted the ticket. So she gets drunk and then she heckles a player and seems to make him cry. The moment goes viral and she reaches out to him on social to apologise… except in all the drafting and redrafting she edits out the bit where she says she was the heckler. And so when Chris unexpectedly replies to her message it all gets complicated really fast. Chris is struggling with his own issues and finds himself strangely drawn to his new online friend. But how long can Daphne keep her secret and what happens when he finds out?

Let’s get the big problem over with right away: yes she’s basically catfishing him. And we’re meant to be fine with it – or at least get over it by the time it’s all resolved because: romance reasons. And so your mileage on this one may vary depending on your tolerance for that. I was mostly OK with it, but it took far too long for Daphne to come clean with Chris and I think there were ways that the book could have worked better if the dual identity situation had been resolved sooner.

And I realise that that sounds like I didn’t enjoy this, but I actually did – I read it in about 24 hours – and I liked the banter and the baseball setting and the development of Daphne’s character. I just wanted it to be better in a couple of areas. I wanted to see Daphne’s ex getting his comeuppance for his awful behaviour – which would have helped the reader understand her a bit better (and thus help with the deception thing) – which could just have been as simple as him being really annoyed at the success she sees as part of the plot.

I’ve seen this in Big Foyles and the Waterstones with the romance sections, so it should be fairly easy to get hold of this one (compared to some of my choices I mean) but it’s also on Kobo and Kindle.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews, romance

Book of the Week: Finders Keepers

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It’s Tuesday and I’m using this week’s BotW to report back in on the new Sarah Adler, which came out back at the end of June, but which I bought in paperback which hampered my reading of it what with having started it right before I went to Ghana.

Quentin and Nina were best friends when they were at school, right up until they weren’t. But now they’re both back in their home town for the summer and living next door to each other again. Nina was expecting to be moving in with her boyfriend and getting ready for the new term as a professor. Instead she’s single, homeless and jobless. Quentin is back from Europe and also newly single and suggests resurrecting the treasure hunt that that they were trying to solve that last summer when they fell out. Surely after nearly two decades they can figure out what went wrong that summer – in the hunt and between the two of them?

Is it a second chance romance if they weren’t ever really together the first time and they just had massive crushes on each other? Because that is what we have here. It should also be noted that I absolutely loved Mrs Nash’s Ashes, and really liked Happy Medium despite the presence of ghosts and fake mediums. This is making the hat trick of BotWs for Adler’s first three novels but I liked this the least. But that’s because it turns out two of the main things it’s doing are not really my favourite tropes: this has got an incredibly oblivious heroine with anxiety problems that make me stressed and the two of them need to use their words more. If they had done that then they wouldn’t be in the mess they are and I wouldn’t find it so stressful to read and could probably deal with the cringey bits of their treasure hunt better.

But I’m still recommending it because I know that this is very much a me thing and I know other people are going to really love this. Yes I’m hoping adler’s next one goes back towards the vibes of Mrs Nash’s Ashes and gives more sunshine-but-quirky but given where we are in romance at the moment with a lot of college age pairings and early 20s heroines who are learning to adult I will still take it. Because that’s not where I am in my reading life at the moment and you just need to look at my post from The Works on Saturday to start seeing why that’s a problem right now!

I’ve got this in paperback so I’m hoping it will be one of my easier picks to get hold of and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too for £2.99 at the moment (but who knows how long that will last given that it’s nearly the end of the month.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and I’m back with the quick reviews. And for the first time in ages I actually finished all of the books I had from NetGalley that came out last month. Who knew I was even capable of that. Anyway, here we are with a quick round up of three books – two murder mysteries and a romance – I haven’t already told you about.

Murder in the Dressing Room by Holly Stars*

This is a cozy mystery set in the world of drag performers in London. Our “detective” is Misty/Joe who discovers the body of her drag mother backstage at a club night and starts investigating because the police seem more focused on the stolen dress that Lady Lady was wearing. I really liked the setting for this – I walk around Soho quite a lot as it’s near my office, and lots of the locations were familiar to me. I liked Misty and the way you could see how her persona changed when she was Misty compared to normal life as Joe. However they were a little foolhardy/too stupid to live at times. There’s a big hanging plot thread for the next one which I’m not sure about, but overall I enjoyed this and would read more in the series if it came my way.

The Tube Train Murder by Hugh Morrison

This was another new(ish) release – that came out in early January, but that I didn’t spot straightaway. This is a new standalone mystery from the author of the Reverend Shaw mysteries, which I binged my way through last year. This sees a young woman murdered on a tube train, and the investigation taking in the residents or the boarding house where she was living while she went to secretarial college. Those residents include another student at the same college who is unhappy at the progress the police are making. The mystery is good – and the boarding house setting is well drawn. It’s in Kindle unlimited so like yesterday’s The Ten Teacups worth a look if you’re a member.

Book Boyfriend by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka*

I really, really enjoyed The Roughest Draft which I bought two years ago and was a BotW. I was then disappointed and puzzled by The Break Up tour last year – which was the husband and wife duo’s Taylor Swift inspired romance. This is set at an immersive experience based on a romantasy novel, where two work colleagues and sort-of-enemies unexpectedly encounter each other. I was hoping this would be closer to the Roughest Draft than The Break Up Tour, but sadly it’s another puzzler for me. I didn’t understand why the two leads hadn’t just had a conversation to clear the air after their initial misunderstanding, and the heroine was just really immature for how old – and established in her career – she is meant to be. Frustrating. I still have the book that came in between Roughest Draft and Break Up tour on the Kindle waiting to be read and I’m starting to worry that that first one I liked was a fluke…

And that’s the lot for this month. Given how short February is, I’m pleased with myself for even getting to free!

Happy Humpday!