13 minute read
ROMANCE
When Celestial soldiers almost discover her, Xingyin runs away, promising not to reveal her parentage and determined to reverse her mother’s punishment. Alone in the Celestial Kingdom, Xingyin has the remarkable good fortune of becoming Prince Liwei’s companion, attending his lessons and learning not only herbology and magic, but also the fighting arts. Xingyin and Liwei grow close, but as Liwei is the son of those responsible for Chang’e’s imprisonment, Xingyin must continually hide a part of herself. As Xingyin pursues her goals, others plot against the Celestial Kingdom, and the emperor and empress are not without their own machinations. Packed with magic, dragons, and plenty of scheming, this novel features many expected tropes, freshened up by the well-developed setting and strong basis in Chinese mythology. Xingyin is sometimes frustratingly successful and spends much more time with her male love interests than her female friends, but the plot delivers what it promises in a quite satisfying, though predictable manner. The prose is lovely and fluid, lush descriptions of magic and immortal life buoying the narrative.
A standard court fantasy, unique in its expansion on the story of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
RAMÓN AND JULIETA
Albertson, Alana Quintana Berkley (304 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-593-33622-9
Star-crossed lovers struggle to reconcile romance and gentrification in a Hispanic community. Julieta Campos, a trained chef, is managing her family’s small Mexican restaurant in the historic Chicano neighborhood of Barrio Logan in San Diego while supporting her recently widowed Mexican immigrant mom. When she enjoys a flirtation with a costumed man who serenades her with mariachi love songs during a Día de los Muertos celebration, little does she know that he is Ramón Montez, the scion of her family’s sworn enemy and an imminent gentrifier. When she realizes who he is, she runs off. Ramón is puzzled by her sudden flight from his beachside condo, but he focuses on the expansion of his firm’s watered-down Mexican food empire. His plan to buy a block of Barrio Logan proceeds, but once he learns that it includes Julieta’s restaurant, things go south. Worse, he learns of the history of his father and her mother’s failed romance, which was followed by his dad’s stealing her mom’s fish taco recipe and building a franchise out of it. Gentrification, conflicts among family members with different values, and the history of state annexation of Chicano community land provide the backdrop to Julieta and Ramón’s pull-and-push relationship. Can they find their way to a happy ending despite all the bad blood? Since this is a romance, we know the answer. The author uses the Shakespearean premise to dramatize the characters’ conflicted loyalties and differing relationships to their Mexican American heritage. Ramón’s worries about his connection to his community have an autobiographical ring, as an author’s note suggests. A heavy-handedness in establishing Ramón’s stratospheric wealth makes him feel like a caricature, while Julieta’s strength as a character is undermined by her choice not just to get involved with a gentrifier she resents, but to join his franchise as an employee.
Despite the freshness promised by a modern Chicano rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the happy ending is unsatisfying.
HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER
Bailey, Tessa Avon/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $14.39 paper | March 1, 2022 978-0-06-304569-9
A playboy fisherman learns he can be more than just a pretty face. Fox Thornton is a king crab fisherman and the resident Casanova of the small coastal town of Westport, Washington. He’s the life of the party and has convinced everyone—even himself—that he’s not capable of anything more. Imagine his surprise when he strikes up a friendship with Hannah Bellinger. They bonded over a shared love of music when her sister fell in love with his best friend, and Hannah and Fox continue their friendship via text after she returned to Los Angeles, where she works as a production assistant. Hannah doesn’t even think of Fox as a romantic possibility: He’s unbelievably handsome and effortlessly self-confident, while she often feels like a supporting actress in her own life. When the film she’s working on begins shooting on location in Westport, Hannah crashes at Fox’s apartment. It seems harmless enough—she fancies herself in love with a co-worker, and she can’t imagine Fox would ever see her as anything but a friend. Living in close quarters ratchets up the emotional intimacy and sexual tension, leaving Fox and Hannah to each question longheld assumptions about their own worthiness as romantic partners. Fox has never had anyone that values him for who he is rather than how he looks, and the major arc of the novel is his journey to accepting that he has value beyond being handsome and charming. It’s an unflinching look at how toxic masculinity harms men, for Fox must unpack the weight of cultural norms and expectations he’s been internalizing since childhood. The romance between Hannah and Fox unfolds slowly, with side plots that keep the reader entertained while the main characters do the hard work of figuring out how to be together.
A slow-burn romance showcases characters trying to become the best versions of themselves.
a perfect equation
LEASE ON LOVE
Ballard, Falon Putnam (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-593-41991-5
Opposites attract as a grieving man and an excitable woman become roommates. For six years, Sadie Green has been working overtime as a financial analyst, and now a senior position in her firm is up for grabs. She thinks she’s a shoo-in, but when it’s revealed that her boss’s soon-to-be son-in-law is getting the job, Sadie’s profanity-ladened rant about nepotism and sexism gets her fired instead. She goes out drinking with friends, who commiserate and encourage her to get back into the dating scene now that she doesn’t have a job to demand so much of her attention. She goes online and quickly matches with a guy named Jack Thomas, but the two get off to a confusing start—and it soon becomes clear that while Sadie thought she was on a dating app for singles, it was actually an app to match up potential roommates. Jack has a whole brownstone in New York City to himself due to the sudden deaths of his parents. He offers Sadie cheap rent— which she now needs, badly—in return for help getting out of his isolating rut of playing video games and watching movies in his basement. Readers may not match with Jack and Sadie right off the bat, given that their introductions make Jack seem rather joyless and Sadie, a handful. It takes a while for both to mellow out and become less caricatured. Once they do, however, the romantic beats and the slow-burning attraction between them are things to savor. With Jack and Sadie both in a transitional period, Ballard sweetly explores the ways they complement one another and also how they hope to reinvent themselves following catastrophic personal changes.
A balanced romantic comedy, once it finds its footing.
COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS
Bellefleur, Alexandria Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-06-300088-9
Former best friends—and one-time lovers—meet again more than a decade after their relationship fell apart. Margot Cooper doesn’t need romance to be happy. She’s perfectly content with her single life in Seattle, filled with her work at astrology business Oh My Stars and her close friendships with business partner Elle, Elle’s girlfriend, Darcy, Darcy’s brother, Brendon, and his fiancee, Annie. But with Brendon and Annie’s wedding right around the corner and Elle and Darcy more committed than ever, Margot can’t help feeling like the fifth wheel, always in danger of being left out—and someday left behind. Recently divorced Olivia Grant has just moved to Seattle to pursue her dream of becoming a successful event planner, and she’s finally got her chance. Brendon Lowell, one of her boss’s biggest clients, is getting married in just three weeks, and if Olivia can pull the wedding off, she’ll be promoted. When Olivia shows up to tour a venue with the happy couple, she meets Brendon’s best woman—Margot, the high school best friend she spent one romantic week with 11 years ago and never spoke to again. When Olivia’s apartment floods and Margot offers her a place to stay, the two fall quickly into old patterns and bring up old hurts. And they’ll have to finally face the past to look toward the future. This third installment in Bellefleur’s series of interconnected rom-coms—following Written in the Stars (2020) and Hang the Moon (2021)—features her trademark wit, heartfelt friendships, and steamy romance. But the plot hinges entirely on several overblown miscommunications and misunderstandings, which some readers may find grating. Margot and Olivia, too, are less well rounded than Bellefleur’s other characters, and their relationship focuses more on their physical than their emotional connection.
A sweet, though uneven, conclusion to the series.
A PERFECT EQUATION
Everett, Elizabeth Berkley (336 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 15, 2022 978-0-593-20064-3
A single-minded duke and a lady mathematician make two halves into a perfect whole. Where were all the female scientists and mathematicians in Victorian England? Hiding in plain sight, it seems, at Athena’s Retreat, London’s only social club for ladies. Miss Letitia Fenley—Letty to her fellow geniuses—is their erstwhile leader, but she just wants to focus on preparing for the upcoming Rosewood Prize for Mathematics competition. Having made one public misstep years ago, she’s now happy to be a spinster and focus on proofs. Unfortunately, in keeping the raucous ladies’ club from (literally) exploding, she has a partner: William Hughes, Viscount Greycliff. Grey and Letty have some history and do not care for each other at all, despite an obvious attraction. All they have to do is keep the chaos to a minimum and avoid each other, but when Grey’s nomination to a leadership role he’s worked toward for years is at stake, he agrees to close the club entirely to please the Guardians of Domesticity, a men’s group that blames “unnatural” women for the ills of the empire. This announcement stokes the chaos to maximum levels and forces Letty away from her Rosewood preparations to the Retreat’s defense. In trying to convince Grey that her colleagues must be allowed to stay, she grows even closer to him, resulting in more sparks than the experiments upstairs—but they cannot have both each other and their individual long-cherished dreams for the future. The second book in Everett’s Secret Scientists of London series stands out among recent feminist historical
romances thanks to a fierce enemies-to-lovers plotline and a sexual tension that is built slowly and expertly. The story can be read alone, but first timers will be inspired to go back to her debut, A Lady’s Formula for Love (2021) thanks to the smart writing and charming storytelling. Though Letty and Grey are standard romance characters, the series introduces readers to a diverse group at the Retreat, which hints at a promising future direction for the series.
An enchanting feminist Victorian romance.
THE RAKE GETS RAVISHED
Jordan, Sophie Avon/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $8.99 paper | Feb. 22, 2022 978-0-06-303567-6
The friends-to-lovers trope is inverted in the second installment of The Duke Hunt series. When Mercy Kittinger visits The Rogue’s Den, a London gaming hell, to steal back the voucher promising the Kittingers’ farm and home, which her brother gambled away, owner Silas Masters catches her in his room. Acting as if she was there to seduce him, she realizes she indeed wants to do just that. After a passionate night of lovemaking, she sneaks away before he awakes, voucher in hand, believing she’ll never see him again. When Silas realizes Mercy stole from him, he’s angry but still determined to find her. He arrives at her country home and demands to stay until she knows whether or not she is with child. As they wait, a friendship naturally develops in the forced proximity. They have both experienced loneliness and had difficult childhoods that forced them to become responsible at a young age. Now, they discover the joy of companionship and support while their attraction continues to sizzle. Mercy and Silas are both soft-hearted people with tough exteriors. They are highly deserving of one another, and the ways they care for each other as their feelings grow are lovely. Big conflicts near the end don’t fit with the introspective tone of the rest of the book, but they’re exciting nonetheless. The country setting is a nice change of pace from the typical ballroom-set historical romances.
A satisfying romance between hardworking characters who ease each other’s loneliness.
HOW TO LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR
Sullivan, Sophie St. Martin’s Griffin (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 18, 2022 978-1-2506-2418-5
A real estate developer learns what it truly means to build a home when he’s forced to negotiate with an interior design student. After a childhood spent in trailers with a mother who saw her as a burden, Grace Travis is excited and anxious when she moves into the house she’s inherited from her grandparents. She has a clear vision for the house and for her life: gradually bring the house back to its former glory and graduate as an interior designer with flying colors. But businessman and new neighbor Noah Jansen throws a wrench in her carefully laid plans. Noah wants to buy Grace’s house, and he has his own reasons for wanting the property. He believes that the added space will enable him to re-create the kind of home in which he spent his happiest years as a child. He’s tempted to use his considerable business acumen to manipulate Grace into selling him the property, but her natural charm and determination to hold on to the house force Noah to reconsider. They mend fences (literally and figuratively) after a few initial altercations, but they must confront several home truths if their instant chemistry is to lead to a real relationship. Grace and Noah map the enemies-to-lovers trajectory with just the right amount of novelty and sweetness. While their interactions with each other are pleasant, their banter with their respective families and friends is especially charming and fun. Noah’s family issues seem underdeveloped and perfunctory, but Sullivan is at her best when she focuses on the building of meaningful relationships between Noah and the several new entrants in his life, including the space he hopes to call his home.
Intricate details about home renovations jostle for space with matters of the heart in this lighthearted romance.
YOU CAN RUN
Zanetti, Rebecca Zebra (400 pp.) $8.99 paper | Jan. 25, 2022 978-1-4201-5432-0
An FBI agent and profiler returns to her hometown to catch a serial killer. Laurel Snow was a child prodigy who started college at the age of 11. Fast-tracked through graduate school and the FBI, Laurel is an accomplished profiler even though she’s not yet 30. Meanwhile, in the remote Oregon valley where she grew up, teenagers discover several decomposing bodies. It is quickly determined to be the work of a serial killer, and Laurel is sent to investigate
because of her knowledge of the area and community. Due to the location of the remains, the responsibility for the investigation is shared between the FBI and local authorities. Laurel partners with Fish and Wildlife Officer Huck Rivers to investigate who in the town might have had access to the remote mountain site. Laurel and Huck’s investigation is compromised when the killer accelerates his pattern, kidnapping and killing fresh victims in order to taunt Laurel. Zanetti is a master of romantic suspense, creating tightly plotted mysteries with delicious twists and turns. Laurel’s interactions with the locals create a large pool of suspects that will keep the reader guessing. As is often a hallmark in the romantic suspense genre, Laurel uncovers long-hidden personal secrets of her own as she works the serial killer case. This first book in a new series follows more of an urban fantasy model, with the main mystery being solved by the end of the novel but several subplots left dangling for future books. Romance fans should be warned that this includes the budding romance between Laurel and Huck, which does not have a happily-ever-after in this installment.
