Tag: small town romances

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Fresh Starts

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Happy Wednesday everyone, I’m back with a few more book recommendations for you, and because it is starting to feel spring like, which means spring cleaning and clear outs, this week’s theme is books with people making fresh starts.

Obviously romance novels are full of these, with tonnes of heroines moving to small towns to start over, so that’s where I’m starting! there are a lot of small town romance series that have elements of this, but it’s not a given because lots of them feature people finding love with people they’ve known all their lives. So if small town fresh starts are what you’re after, try Jill Shalvis’s Simply Irresistible, the first in her Lucky Harbor series, which actually has a fair few escapes to a new place type plots. This one has a heroine who has left LA for a fresh start and to claim an inheritance. The hero is the contractor she hires to help fix up the inheritance. And Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series also features some new starts, although I’ve only read the first one and found the hero a little too alpha-y for my taste. If you want something really gentle, Debbie Macomber’s Dakota series from the early 2000s is very low stakes from what I remember, and super easy to read.

If you want a historical romance with a fresh start, Beverly Jenkins’s Tempest features a heroine who moves across the country to marry a man she’s never met, on the strength of their correspondence with each other – I’m not sure starts get much fresher than that! Anyway, Regan is a fantastic heroine and I really enjoyed both the romance and the bits where she was establishing herself in the new town. Jenkins did this so well – earlier in the same series is Tempest, is Forbidden, whose hero is a little too alpha for me and heroine a little too sweet, but I know that is personal preference. And Jenkins of course wrote the Blessings series, where the heroine buys a whole town and brings it back to life.

There are also loads of cosy crime series that start with the sleuth moving to somewhere new – Jenn McKinley’s Library Lovers is one of these for a start, as is M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, although a warning on the latter, I can’t read too many (or even more than one now) in a row because the formula is very strong in these and you notice it a lot.

There are a couple of former books of the week that fit here to – like Well Met by Jen DeLuca, the first in her Renaissance Faire series, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph – which is completely different to anything what I have mentioned in this part so far. And then there are a bunch of books that feature fresh starts that I still have on the to read pile, waiting for me to get around to – like Linda Holmes’s Flying Solo, Jasmine Guillory’s Party of Two,

Happy Humpday!

binge reads

Bingeable series: Fool’s Gold

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I finished the new Jill Shalvis this week and it got me to thinking about reliable romance authors, which got me thinking about when the next Susan Mallery is due out (turns out there was a woman’s fiction novel that came out on Tuesday and there is another non-series title out in May before the next wishing tree in October) which made me think that Susan Mallery’s Fool’s Gold series makes for an excellent binge read. And so here we are. You’ve had an insight into the way my mind works, so now on to the books!

Fool’s Gold is a small town romance series set in a community at the foot of the Sierra Nevada hills. Across the series you’ll find an above average number of world class athletes living there and also that it’s big enough to have its own radio station – but this is small town romance, all such things are allowed. In the first in the series, the town is short of men and heroine is a city planner brought in by the town’s Mayor, Marsha (who is a great recurring character through the series, a bit like a fairy godmother), to try and bring things around. There are 20 books in the series and they come in groups. So in the first book you get meet the character who will feature in the next couple and then you move to a fresh group of people. You get the idea. It’s charming.

Looking back through my reviews, there are more pregnancy/baby plots that I would usually go for, but they are all still fun. I think my favourite set are the three books about the Hendrix triplets, but I also like the set about the ex NFL players and their business. Anyway, there are 20 full length books to chose from as well as about the same again in novellas – all of which means you can have a good old binge on them. And it looks like they’ve all had a bit of a cover redesign since I last read them too – I suspect because of the success of Virgin River on Netflix and people looking for similar books to read.

My goodreads ratings for these are fairly consistent – I’m not giving any five stars, but they’re mostly threes, with a few fours and they only drop off towards the tail end of the twenty. In fact romance series like this make for a perfect binge to be honest. When I was writing about Sookie Stackhouse last week I talked about spotting the formula. Well you don’t have that problem with a series like this – because each book is about a new couple and you can do different tropes each time. You don’t even need to read them in order because it’s different characters in each book. The only thing that’s going to happen is spoilers for previous books when you encounter them in their happily ever afters – but as you know from the blurb of a romance that they’re going to end up together, that’s not much of a spoiler really! As long as the writing and the characters are good you’re all set for many happy hours of reading.