Mini-reviews of The Aussie Next Door, The Demigod Complex,and All the Stars and Teeth, which means one contemporary m/f romance, one m/f YA fantasy (with romance), and an m/f paranormal.

Third in Rebecca Brooks's Accidental Love series, Wrong Bed, Right Man is an opposites attract romance between a marketing assistant at a corporate furniture retailer and an artisan furniture maker. They meet when Rose walks into her ex-fiancé's apartment to reclaim some of her stuff, including her grandmother's heirloom bed, and she finds Owen asleep on it. He's stopped by to pick up the furniture, since the crappy ex listed it on Craigslist and Owen fixes up old furniture for resale. (Thus the "wrong bed" part of the title.) When he rushes to jump off the bed, he hits a weak spot just right and breaks it. So then he fixes it for her and keeps finding reasons to see her again.

Leo Loves Aries is a slow burn friends-to-lovers romance about college roommates. It's low angst, especially for a New Adult romance.  Even though I don't think the word "bisexual" is used on page, Sunday has explicitly said Theo is bi and in the book he says he's up for whatever. The book sort of dances up to the Gay For You trope and then spins away. The bi rep could have been more overt, but I didn't feel it was hidden or erased as in so many other books.

The Stars We Steal, pitched as "The Bachelorette in Space," is not-so-secretly a futuristic sci-fi retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Set 40 years prior to Alexa Donne's Brightly Burning (a Jane Eyre retelling in space), TSWS stands alone but tries to cram an awful lot of plot into one book. Leonie is a Princess in a stratified society that doesn't have kingdoms but clings to notions class and privilege. Instead of countries, there are ships. Many came from individual countries or areas, so for example, the Lady Liberty is the ship from what used to be the United States (Earth is not habitable) and Leonie's breaking-down ship is a private one called the Sofi. Leonie's family has a title and a ship, but they don't have money, so her father has ordered her to enter the Valg Season to find a wealthy husband and save the family.

Am I allowed to write a review consisting of nothing other than hearts and exclamation points?

First off, you should know that I didn't finish Mermaid Inn. As far as I know, it's not a bad book. It just didn't work for me. If you want to know why, here are far too many words on the topic.

Mermaid Inn is the first in a new series about a quirky small town in Canada, Matchmaker Bay. As with most first-in-series novels, there's a lot of heavy lifting involved in building this setting and introducing characters and places. Sometimes this is clunky, but Jenny Holiday did a decent job. She had a short video in her Instagram stories about why she wrote a small town and mentioned the second-chance trope, which is apparently her least favorite. Since the story will be magically gone by the time you read this, here's the summary: Matchmaker Bay is a fictional blend of a few different small towns in Holiday's life. She wanted to write about how small towns are affected by suburban creep, urban sprawl, whatever you wish to call it. How towns on the periphery change as cities grow. All of this is fairly standard and expected.

It's February, which means we get to fend off terrible articles about romance novels all month. Never surprised, always disappointed.

But here are some books we want to read!

This post includes affiliate links.

Mini-reviews of The Bookworm Crush, Heart & Seoul, The Gravity of Us, and Prince of Air and Darkness, which means two contemporary YA romances (one m/m and one f/m), one adult f/mcontemporary, and one m/m fantasy (urban fantasy?) romance.

Tweet Cute is a wonderful You've Got Mail retelling for the age of Twitter brand wars, social apps and kids trying to decide whether or not to go into the family business.

We are SO excited to give you a chance to win an early print copy of Kit Rocha's upcoming Deal With the Devil courtesy of the authors!