Tessa Bailey is one of my fave authors—how many times have I skimmed my fave parts of her books? (please do not ask 😆)—& yet I was still stunned in the best way by Hook, Line, & Sinker.

Friends to lovers usually isn’t a trope I stand up & cheer for but for an author who writes magnetic attraction so well to also be a romance master of pacing & a slow burn? It takes it to a whole new level.

This book gave me even more than I expected. Hannah is a LEADING LADY & I loved her so much. Sweet & sarcastic & loving & loyal—I could only applaud how she took up for Fox. (BTW, Melinda I hate you.) Hannah’s actions throughout the book show again & again that she is there, that she loves Fox for who he is.

& Fox. He is a walking dreamboat. His care of Hannah is so fantastic—there’s a small line about how he’s dying to get antiseptic on her cut & I SWOONED. (Not to mention how he decorates her room or the other gestures he makes).

This book gave me everything & I can’t wait to add it to my shelves. Thank you, Tessa, for another amazing book 🥵.

I think KD Casey’s One True Outcome is maybe the softest sports romance I’ve ever read?

I already want to reread it because I feel like I didn’t fully appreciate how gentle it was going to be—I kept waiting for the romance demolition crew to swoop in toward the end and it just didn’t 😆.

One True Outcome has a veteran / rookie pairing, both of whom are hoping this year will be their year & both facing their own challenges.

When veteran Mack is asked to help give Jamie extra batting lessons they have a reason to spend more time together & the awareness of each is stoked to a cheer-inducing degree.

I prefer steam in my romance & this one has that 🔥 but maybe more than that I’m looking for evidence of care. This book has that in spades as each lead reveals in ways big & small that their heart has been stolen (much like a base can be 🥁…that’s like the only baseball joke I can make).

This is the third KD Casey book I’ve read & again, I’m a little enraptured by how striking the writing is & how lovely the romance.

Read this book, read this author. I’m such a fan!

Part of me is so intrigued by what Kerrigan Byrne is doing with the Fiona Mahoney series.

I stan her portrayal of the heroine, who’s a working-class woman who’s made a name & a life for herself as a postmortem sanitation specialist. She longs for revenge & enjoys the thrill of the chase (the person she’s chasing happening to be Jack the Ripper).

Yay for a bold and determined heroine with an unconventional job & for Byrne’s empathetic & also, I think, nuanced portrayal of the prostitutes (& prostitution in general) that Fiona tries to help in this book.

The other part of me thinks that with book 2, A Treacherous Trade, this series is veering into romance directions I’m not entirely loving. I don’t want to spoil anything but the dynamic set-up isn’t entirely working for me romance-wise—not to mention the male fascination with Fiona’s virginity. I’m hoping more direction & clarity comes with book 3 as 2 ends on a cliffhanger.

The mystery is well-done & the characters are interesting but I’m cautious regarding the romance arc. I’ll have to see how things pan out in the next book!

Natasha Solomons’ House of Gold tells a sweeping story about the Goldbaums, a huge, wealthy, Jewish family that sprawls across Europe & funds some of its greatest powers with their banks in the years immediately before & during World War I.

Set largely in Vienna, where protagonist Greta Goldbaum is born, & then Hampshire, where she moves to live with her husband—a distant relation named Albert and the man she meets only right before their marriage—the book shows what happens when those same family bonds are stressed by war & loyalty to various nations.

There are aspects of this historical fiction that work for me, like its basic portrayal on this intriguing family & how the conflicts are set up between their family & country & between Greta’s selfhood & the demands placed upon her by family.

Though I appreciated the evolution of Greta’s relationship with Albert, I did not enjoy his rigidity—the scene at the village games is particularly disturbing—& their relationship just ends oddly for me—excepting those sweet final pages.

Narrative-wise, the focus on other people throughout the book is interesting on one hand, but on the other, it feels choppy. I also feel like in the closing pages there’s a loose end for Greta, an abrupt ending to one person’s story that doesn’t seem full circle.

House of Gold has many fine moments but overall falls kinda flat to me.

It took me a little while to really get into Permanent Record by Mary H. K. Choi (probably my fault) but by the end I was really invested & couldn’t wait to see how lead Pablito’s arc resolved.

Pablito is fairly rudderless throughout much the book much to the consternation of his mother & himself. He’s sinking in debt & desperate to figure out how to get back into the college program that he dropped out of & that helped cause him to be so in debt in the first place.

Then celebrity Leanna Smart walks into the bodega where he works & besides their immediate attraction he gets a chance to see what his life could be like as the partner of a celebrity. On the periphery of fame.

The narrator is pretty self-aware, wry, & sarcastic & watching Pablito learn how to break free of patterns & speak his truth is inspiring & exciting. I loved seeing him find a path forward into a life that’s exciting to him.

In addition to the funny narration winning me over there are really striking convos about race, culture, & representation, especially about how familial expectations & wants might be affected by society’s broader expectations & prejudices.

This is a great YA contemporary & for my romance-reading friends, not a romance 😉 😆.

It’s quite the thing for a MC’s experience with anxiety to remind you of some of the aspects of your own journey…it’s both heavy & affirming.

Mazey Eddings’s A Brush with Love lovingly & fiercely shows that people with mental health challenges are loved & deserved to be loved, by others & themselves.

I know I’ve said this before but I’m (really) happy to be with someone who’s loved me when my anxiety was at its most debilitating & scary. I’m also happy to read books where characters find the same 🧠💜.

It’s not always easy to read Harper—the heroine—struggle, especially when to her, succeeding in school & in life seems predicated on control.

It’s also not always easy to see the hero, Dan, figure out how he can be happy under the weight of familial obligation.

But I love the journey they go on, how they both realize the strength they have & the life they could have.

There’s so much I really enjoyed about this book & how much it seems to pulse with empathy & heart.

If you like insta-feelings, “real” portrayals of friendship (including a toilet scene between friends 😅), a hero who’s pretty gone for the heroine from the beginning, a moment of support during a panic attack, & a sweet epilogue, this one might be for you. It’s very emotional & earnest; it’s about messy people (as in, humans in general are messy & also beloved) & hope & love, & I’ll celebrate those all day long.

There are times that I sped through the pages of Rebecca Ross’s A River Enchanted, riveted to the page. There are other times, like in some sections focusing on the two main characters, when I lost some of that urgency & wanted to return to other characters’s stories.

At the beginning of the fantasy Jack Tamerlaine, a bard, is returning to the isle called Cadence after being summoned by his laird. He hasn’t been back for ten years & he’s felt isolated from that community & his own mother for nearly that long.

Cadence is a place where magic exists. Where the spirits can be malevolent or benevolent. & where the geographic space is split between two feuding peoples.

Jack’s childhood enemy Adaira informs him of the reason for his return: young girls are disappearing & she thinks he can help with his music.

There are aspects to Jack & Adaira’s relationship—like their moments of play—that pull me in, but on the whole I wanted more communication & less stiffness between them. Or at the very least for it to have been explained more convincingly for me.

More emotionally effective for me is the relationship between married for convenience couple Sidra & Torin.

The world Ross creates is by turns frightening & lovely, & always intricate. The fantasy aspect is where the book shines for me; the romance less so.

Notes about the book: this does not end in a HEA or HFN but another book is coming.

Together We Burn by Isabel Ibañez offers an inventive story & lots of passion, drama, & thrills.

Flamenco dancer Zarela Zalvidar finds herself responsible for the Dragonador arena her family’s owned for years & years after her father—already only somewhat present due to grieving her mother—is attacked by escaped dragons at one of their dragon-fighting matches.

Zarela feels compelled to save her arena, a task made both less & more difficult by Arturo, the supremely grumpy young man she wants to hire to teach her to fight dragons.

Lots of emotions pack these pages: grief, loss, anger, sadness, & Zarela experiences them all. She’s a fierce, dynamic character who may not be for everyone, but that energy & rawness is what I love most about her I think.

The romance is more than flavored with a dash of antagonism, as Zarela—still hurting from the loss of her mother by dragon attack—& Arturo—who wants to protect dragons & abhors dragon-fighting—are on opposite sides of the fight.

Though I was glad they reached a compromise, it resolves itself somewhat too easily for me & the overall ending feels somewhat rushed.

Overall this is a compelling YA with a relationship & a heroine that I was rooting for—by its closing pages I was celebrating what she had accomplished.

Samantha SoRelle’s Suspiciously Sweet gave me everything I was looking for so I was really excited to read His Lordship’s Secret, a historical, childhood friends to estranged friends to lovers romance.

Alfie Crawford & Dominick / Nick Tripner are reunited with a bang when Alfie’s shot & realizes that his life might have actually been threatened numerous times recently.

He approaches Nick to be his bodyguard & soon after they realize that they’re each other’s former childhood best friends, separated from each other when Alfie was adopted by an aristocratic couple & passed off as their heir & Nick remained at the orphanage.

His Lordship’s Secret is a promising beginning to this series, & if I had some quibbles with Alfie & how oblivious he could occasionally be to his privilege they were mitigated somewhat by the ending, where he gains a lot of ground for me.

Featuring an intriguing mystery & a relationship that’s equal parts steam and tenderness, His Lordship’s Secret has a lot to offer—but I did want the romantic relationship to move a little slower once they were reunited.

📖 Q: If you were snowed in what are 3 things you’d have to have?

Snowed in / single parent / caretaking / charmer meets someone who doesn’t immediately fall for his charm / it’s only temporary…

Those are just some of the tropes in Annabeth Albert’s Sink or Swim, a book I’ve been so excited to read since finishing Sailor Proof, the last book in the series.

In this one, Navy Chief Calder Euler—a hyper-organized, uber competitive charmer—drives to the new house he thinks he’s won during a poker game only to realize that he’s been had & the real owner Felix Sigurd—a single parent physician—is the actual owner.

During their initial moments together Calder hurts himself & they all get snowed in & I was like this 🥳🥳, raising my fist in the air chanting “more snow! More snow!“

Maybe my fave parts of this one are seeing Calder step up for Felix & his two kids & seeing him learn more about himself & his needs & desires. I love seeing Felix make Calder comfortable in the bedroom & how much acceptance & desire there is to make each other happy, in addition to just the passion between them.

But maybe my least favorite aspect of this read is just how much Calder works for Felix & the opposite sense that Felix isn’t doing enough. On one hand I enjoy seeing Calder work hard for what he wants but on the other it starts to feel a bit one-sided to me & I wanted more of a big declarative moment from Felix.

Like I’ve come to expect from Annabeth Albert’s work this is just a warm cozy emotional read.