It's Pride month! It's also the start of The Ripped Bodice's Summer Romance Bingo game/contest!
We here at Love in Panels decided to go ahead and mash the two together for some extra queer fun, and we've got recommendations for each of the squares. (Some of them we stretched a wee bit.) Some of these we haven't read and are planning to read them for our own bingo cards, but we've tried to eliminate those with problematic rep and/or give content warnings below.
Resort to Love by Priscilla Oliveras is the third book in Tule’s Paradise Key multi-author series about a set of friends who return to the Floridian island where they all met for the funeral of a dear friend. Each of the books can be read as standalones. Like Oliveras’s previous novels it features a Puerto Rican heroine and it is a sweet and sexy closed door romance that is not lacking in sexual tension. Oliveras’s recurring core theme of balancing faith, family and love in order find happiness drives this story of ex-lovers reunited as rivals in a real-estate transaction.
Tempted by the Billionaire Next Door is a sweet, heartwarming story about family, forgiveness, and falling in love with your best friend’s brother.
I first encountered Rachel Kramer Bussel on Twitter, talking about a live reading she was doing of pieces of an erotica anthology she'd edited. Reading erotica out loud, for an audience, is intimidating as heck to me, but she's managed, over the course of many years, to carve out a sex-positive, rather feminist place for herself in the erotica publishing community.
Pas de Deux: A Dance For Two is one of those books that stays with you long after you read the final page. The story of Zack and Mina is a stunning blend of chemistry, artistry, healing, and hope that pulls you into the story from the very beginning and never lets go.
June is packed with new books, just in time for summer reading! We've got a bunch of books to look forward to, plus a couple that are already out, sneaking in at the end of May. Enjoy!
June mini-reviews are here! A really mixed bag this time, with a contemporary, a fantasy/comic book/superhero mashup, and a historical.
So, this book... I have a mess of thoughts on it. And I have a lot of content warnings, and if you too are on the asexuality spectrum and want to read this book, my content warnings for you are at the bottom. There’s a lot to take in and process.
One of the best feelings as a reader is when you love a book and then realize there are another four in the series. Romancelandia Twitter tells me that we call this a "series glom," and I'm happy to report that I'm coming off of a great one. Sarina Bowen's fifth True North novel, Speakeasy, comes out today, May 29, so let's talk about the first four, shall we?
Here's what you can expect from the series as a whole:
The thing I love most about Lucy Parker’s books is that the protagonists are overtly kind to each other. This seems like it would be fairly common in romance, but I always struggle to find these books that hit just the right note. And Parker is almost guaranteed to give me characters who are gentle and kind to each other and behave like adults. All of which MAKING UP provides.
