Dear wonderful reader,

Now is the time for all those post-poned May books... I guess?  In any case, it's a lot of books and I'm sorry. (Not really.)

*

This post contains affiliate links.

Recently, my nine-year old daughter and I had a very lengthy conversation over breakfast one morning. “Mommy,” she began, “are you a Kristy or a Mary Anne or a Claudia or a Stacey?” Before I could even begin to wrap my head around her question, she’d answered it herself. “I think you’re a little bit of Kristy and maybe a little Mary Anne.” My mind had caught up by then, aware that we were maybe having our very first unofficial, mother daughter book club meeting, about none other than The Baby-Sitters Club books. A staple of most young girls' bookshelves in the 80s and 90s, this series resonated with me when I was her age and watching her discover these books three decades later has made me wonder what it was about these books that appealed to me so much and how it informed my reading choices as an adult.

Mini-reviews of The Court of Miracles, The Henna Wars, Beach Read and What I'm Looking For. So that's a YA alt-historical (not a romance), a YA f/f contemporary and two m/f contemporary romances.

It’s a pretty well known fact that I dig slow burn romances. And while this book definitely qualifies as the slowest of slow burns (the two main characters don’t even share their first passionate kiss until the 77% mark), there are a few things that left me wanting more from this book.

After a strange, upended spring, we now find ourselves in a strange, upended summer with most of us wondering what the heck autumn will bring. How much is my budget going to tank at the library? Will the kids be back in a traditional classroom setting come September? When might life feel normal enough to take a couple of vacation days again?  Uncertain times call for snatching moments of joy when you can - and I think I speak for most of Romancelandia when I say books are a great way to find some joy.  Here are some unusual historicals releasing in June that caught my eye:

This post contains affiliate links which support the site.

I live in a state where fireworks are legal, sold on the side of the road, in the dang grocery store... I have a love-hate relationship with them. That said, I've loved Erin McLellan's So Over the Holidays series, so I was excited to read Bottle Rocket. These erotic romance novellas follow the Holiday siblings and are set around Christmas, Valentine's Day and now Independence Day and they're packed with sex toys, a bit of kink and queerness.

Confession: I've never read a romance set in the 1980's. It's always seemed too recent to be historical and too historical to be modern. But here we are in 2020 and 1980 is forty years past.

If you're looking for a book in which two people who split up as teens are reunited 13 years later for a week of lots of "no-strings" sex, this is the book for you. As you might expect, the no-strings thing doesn't work. Darn those feelings.

I've been seeking paranormal romance with lighter plots and not so much murder and suspense, so I've gladly sailed through each of Abigail Owen's re-issued Brimstone, Inc. novellas. The first pairs a demigod and a nymph, the second matches up two alpha werewolves and the third hooks up a witch and the warlock/coven official looking for her. Heads-up: all three are connected and I'm not sure they'd work as stand-alones.