One of my favorite romance novel tropes is friends to lovers. Best friends to lovers? Even better. But one of the things I hate about that trope is when a book starts off with all that “We’re proof that men and women can just be friends, contrary to what everyone in our lives keeps saying” nonsense. If there are still people in the world who don’t believe that men and women can be in platonic relationships, I do not want to spend time with them […]
A Contemporary Romance with 19th Century Romance Elements
This right here is a contemporary comic Gothic romance novel. Equal parts Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey, and likely other nineteenth century novels, mostly British, that I should have read while at university, Heroes Are My Weakness features a tortured hero, an innocent in over her head, schemes, machinations, a forbidding landscape, and a surprisingly unannoying plot moppet. Unemployed, impoverished, sick, and freezing, Annie has arrived on an island off the coast of Maine in January to take up temporary residence in a small […]
A Contemporary Romance Review Mostly About Furniture
Low Tide Bikini was free and yet somehow overpriced. I genuinely respect people who complete writing a book, and in this case a series, but the accomplishments of writing a book and writing a good book are two very different things. Lyla Dune’s writing is clichéd and facile, the plot and characters sophomoric. If it is the work of a teenaged writer, I commend the effort, if not, it’s unsuccessful escapism, a Lifetime movie of a novel. From Amazon: Sam Carlisle is the double bass […]
“Without Benefits”? More Contemporary Romance
These are books two and six from Penny Reid’s Knitting in the City series: Neanderthal Seeks Human Friends Without Benefits – see below Neanderthal Marries Human (novella) Love Hacked Beauty and the Mustache Scenes from the City: A Knitting in the City Surprise (novella) – also below Happily Ever Ninja – 2015 Friends Without Benefits I enjoy the unrequited love trope, especially as the romance genre always allows for the besotted character’s vindication, but having said that, Friends Without Benefits was just okay and not as […]