Woooooooo August! 'Tis the season for peaches and school/office supplies, so get yourself some fancy Post-Its, a smoothie and some wonderful books.
Here's the thing about 2018: I have a NEED for rom-coms and really absurd paranormal or sci-fi bananapants books. I don't want to read about someone's emotional journey through depression and how they learned to love life and blah blah blah. I need to get the hell out of present day United States of America.
I don’t need to tell you that books are the best, especially those with kissing. But sometimes? Sometimes my budget tells me that I need to slow my book-buying roll.
I have a love/hate relationship with July. I love fireworks (well except when my idiot neighbors are still shooting them off on July 14th…), it’s my birthday month, and I’m generally able to attend the Romance Writers of American annual conference (this year held in Denver). However, it is also my busiest, craziest month at my day job. This entails a lot of time doing math and looking at spreadsheets (yes, it’s just as glamorous as it sounds!). I come home from work mentally exhausted and looking for anyway to unwind. Which leads us to this latest batch of unusual historicals! Who doesn’t love to unwind reading and browsing for new books?
Editor's Note:
Some of us are having a hard time reviewing lately, so when Andrea offered a post full of "cool jobs in romance novels," I was more than happy to post it. I think we're all looking for the book that lights that little spark in our reading brains and it's sometimes hard to find that book by genre or trope. Perhaps a cool job will help you find the book your heart needs right now!
~ Suzanne
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To My Muse is inspired by Cameron’s real-life brush with celebrity. Lily is a tech writer, but her real passion is romance writing. She has a successful self-publishing career that’s rarely discussed by her somewhat conservative Indian family, and her new fantasy series is taking off. The latest book’s main character is inspired by actor Tom Morrison, who is on a Western sci-fi TV show that sounds a lot like Westworld. One night Lily gets drunk, sends a copy of Feast of Lovers to Tom, and what happens next is on the level with a 90s rom-com movie. Lily breaks into Tom’s hotel room to try and get back the book and to dissuade a coworker from hitting on him, and Tom makes Lily his fake girlfriend. Tom is already impressed with Lily’s writing, having devoured her latest romance novel, and offers Lily a job adapting a biography into a screenplay. As they work, travel, and get to know each other, the whole fake relationship thing starts feeling more real by the second.
Veronica Scott gives us five, yes FIVE, top Sci-Fi Romance reads for June!
Whenever I stumble upon a romance with an asexual or a-spec character, I’m always a mix of “I need to read this to judge!” and “It’s probably a mess.” And because, more often than not, they are messy with the a-spec representation, these books are a challenge. Add to that seeing your sexuality as the primary conflict in a romance, which always stings a bit. I had been circling Perfect Rhythm for a few months, but jumped in when I saw the audiobook on Hoopla.
And Perfect Rhythm got asexuality mostly right, and it’s also a pretty good book. It’s not perfect, but it’s not the disaster I feared.
