Tag: second chance romance

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!

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Recommendsday: Low Angst Second Chance Romances

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This whole post was inspired by the first book – which I’ve already mentioned on the blog so I’m breaking my own rules again, but hey, who cares!

Knowing Me, Knowing You by Jeevani Charika*

This is a second chance romance with a sciencey twist: Alex spent a perfect New Year’s Eve in a bar together five years ago – but for what we shall call Romance Reasons it went no further and now New Year’s Eve guy is the one who got away. Until he turns up in her lab as the man charged with trying to get the medical tech start up she works for out of trouble. There was a little bit of “a simple conversation have solved all this” air to some of the conflict in the novel. That said, it’s charming and because you have sections from both the hero and heroines point of view it’s pretty low stress for the reader (even if maybe not always for Alex!) and as a bonus if you’ve read the previous two books from Charika you get to see some of the characters from those again.

The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling

Cover of The Ex Hex

This one has magic and a curse – but actually turns out to be less dramatic and angsty than you would expect from a plot like that. Rhys comes back to his old town because the key lines are running out of magic – but once he gets there the curse Vivienne put on him when he broke her heart. This has banter and is really quite sweet – much less angst and violence than you usually get in paranormal romances.

Count Your Lucky Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur

This was a BotW back in 2022 (you can read that review here) but this is a second chance romance between two former high school best friends who meet again a decade after their friendship turned into something more for a week and then end up temporarily living together for some more of those Romance Reasons. This suffered a bit from Just Have A Conversation syndrome and One Too Many Conflicts, but it also has wit and warmth and is a lot of fun to read.

And that’s your lot for today, but I’ve realised I have a ton of second chance romances still on the tbr pile – so you never know, I may be back with this trope relatively soon!

Book of the Week, books

Book of the Week: The Roughest Draft

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It may be a new month, but for the second week in a row I’m picking a contemporary romance with a then and now strand to it. Admittedly I did finish this in March, so maybe it’s not the start of a trend, but hey, it’s nice to imagine that there’s some rhyme or reason to my reading!

Katrina and Nathan used to be writing partners. But three years ago after they had finished their second book together, their partnership broke up for reasons neither has ever spoken about. Since then, they haven’t spoken and have moved on with their lives – including Nathan writing a novel on his own. But it didn’t sell as well as the books they wrote together – and now his publisher has passed on his next novel and says they want the third book on his contract with Katrina. And so the two of them end up in the same house they wrote the last book in, trying to write another best seller. But it’s hard to write a romantic novel when you hate the person you’re writing with and the two of them will have to try to work through their differences to get it done.

The book jumps backwards and forwards to show you what went wrong between Nathan and Katrina as well as them in the present day. So it’s sort of friends to enemies to lovers. The reasons for the break up are sort of what you expect they might be – or at least what I was expecting – and the pace of it all is quite slow. It’s very close focus on the two of them – but also manages not to give you much detail about either of their personalities beyond that they are writers. Emily Wibberley and Austin Sigemund-Broka are a married writing duo and have written a few YA romances – which perhaps explains some of the above. And I know that sounds like I didn’t like it, but I actually really did. I read it in less than 48 hours and bought the next book from them to see how they handle something that’s not writing about a couple writing! Given that this was their debut rom com and only came out in October, I was surprised they already have a second out but who knows the mysterious ways of publishing in the TikTok algorithm era.

If you are only going to read one of the picks from the last two weeks, I would probably go with Funny You Should Ask, but if you like YA or New Adult romances then this might be the one for you. I read this on Kindle, but it’s also on Kobo. I haven’t spotted it in a bookshop yet, but that doesn’t mean you won’t.

Happy Reading.