psocoptera | Entries tagged with romance

Heated Rivalry, 2024 six-episode TV series hockey romance. Season one, I guess, since I guess with it such a hit they're going to do more. I was just as delighted by it as it was a safe bet I would be. An excellent exception to my general TV non-watching. (I guess that's a weird thing to say at a time when I've been watching enormous-for-me amounts of television watching Stranger Things, but there's like Family Activity Watching and then Personal Watching and they are different.)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Malinda Lo, 2021 YA historical. This one's been on my list since 2021 and I'm not sure what made me decide that now was the time. (Looking for some f/f to balance my m/m media consumption watching the gay hockey show, maybe.) Really well done - you can see why the cover is covered in awards - but also kind of wild to read at this moment in history when our fascist government is so desperate to take us back to this time of police raids on gay bars, criminalization of cross-dressing, and taking people's papers and threatening them with denaturalization and deportation. But I guess it's hopeful to think that Lily and Kath of the book are going to make it to Pride parades in their 30s and the 2004 San Francisco marriage licenses in their 60s, and maybe it won't even take us quite so long to work our way back this time. Anyways, Lo does an amazing job bringing a time and place to life, so much great detail here, highly recommended.

Copperscript, KJ Charles, 2025 romance novel. Having just read several of these I wasn't going to indulge again so soon, but then I got it from the hold queue, and then I ended up in a Direct Tire for a couple of hours and was like "am I going to use this time to make progress on the book I am bogged down in? no I am not", so here we are. This one is back to the post-WWI timeframe like Think of England (but I don't think had any character cameos)? A police detective gets involved with a handwriting analyst with supernatural-level powers of handwriting insight. I thought Charles did a nice job walking the line of "this *is* unlikely, the characters are aware of that, and in fact that skepticism drives a bunch of the plot" and "it works exactly how it needs to for plot purposes". Fun!

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, KJ Charles, Regency romance novel. Longer and with a more complicated plot than the last couple things of hers I've read - I learned a bunch about different kinds of smuggling during the Napoleonic wars and also a part of England (Kent) I had basically never heard of (except that you can park two Jutes there for a bunch of turns of Britannia), which is very much what I personally want from a historical romance. I'm sure some people were like "there is too much smuggling, the smuggle/fuck ratio is off" but it worked great for me. Also some interesting complicated interpersonal dynamics between the leads (local/outsider, gentry/commoner, smuggler/lawful) giving them some real conflicts to work through. And one of them gets into naturalist observations and is excited about beetles and we got to hear a little bit about the beetles, which, like, icing on this already-delicious cake!

Wanted, A Gentleman, KJ Charles, romance. (Not actually sure if it was a novel or novella.) I'm behind on writing up books so I'm doing them easiest-post-first instead of chronologically. The publisher of a personal-ads newspaper teams up with a formerly enslaved businessman to find the eloping daughter of the latter's former enslavers, with a lot of attention to what it might have felt like to be trying to make long rapid journeys by stagecoach. Charles is so good at making her characters people (and people who I feel like I haven't met before, even if they are also tropey or types).

Unfit to Print, KJ Charles, romance novella. I often find novella-length romance a little funny - like, what, that's it, they sorted out their differences that easily? - but this one was pretty good, a childhood friends/sweethearts second chance romance between a lawyer and a porn seller, both men of color in Victorian England. A nice little read.

Rules for Ghosting, Shelly Jay Shore, 2024 novel. I was still playing Hugos hooky, after also reading two-thirds of Asunder which got interrupted when my ebook expired, but I have a paper copy as of this afternoon so expect to hear about that soon. I came across this book in a couple of different contexts (a book group I'm not in but am adjacent to was reading it, etc) and was intrigued - queer (m/m) romance, literal ghosts, Jewish funeral customs? Sure! If that sounds good to you you will probably also enjoy it, although I felt like it was stronger as a family drama in some ways than as a romance - it almost felt like some of the early "getting to know each other" scenes might have been deleted for length, since there was a kind of weird jump to them knowing more about each other than had happened on the page. Pluses: learning about taharah and shmira, interesting low-key take on including paranormal elements. Minuses: dog squick (really hard for me to enjoy a schmoopy scene of the couple kissing and cuddling if one of them just kissed his dog, ew ew ew), author mentioned in a Q&A at the back of the book that she was picturing one of the couple as an actor whose face I hate, which kind of ruined the ship for me tbh. I mean, at least I had already finished the book, but it killed any post-romance-novel afterglow. Maybe don't read the Q&A if you have any actors whose faces you hate. Could be a plus or minus: I am not qualified to evaluate how good a job Shore did writing in a trans POV, but it seemed reasonable to me? But also seems plausible that a review by a transmasc person might point out things I wouldn't catch? (Shore herself is a she/they person.)

Swordcrossed, Freya Marske, 2024 novel. This is a classic sweaterboy/absolute nightmare romance novel set in a vaguely-early-modern secondary universe (or maybe I mean late medieval?) with a plot centered around rivalries between merchant families in the wool industry. Is that romantasy, or does romantasy specifically have to have magical elements, or even more specifically nonhuman love interests? Anyways, if you wanted Swordspoint to be cozier, this is the book for you. "High Heat. Low Stakes. Crossed Steel." as it says on the cover. (I really liked it but I am pretty much exactly who this book was catering to. People on goodreads were like "too many wool facts" and here I am delighted by a book where I can read dudes banging and falling in love and also learn some wool facts. I would read one of these a year set in a different late medieval industry until the end of time, or until running out of industries forced the introduction of the industrial revolution and the world got less fun.)

The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan, 2024 fantasy romance novel. (Is this the romantasy I keep hearing about?) It wasn't good and honestly I mostly kept reading it out of a sort of perverse curiosity to see whether it might pull an interesting ending out of nowhere. Gorgeous Kuri Huang cover though.

I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.

My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.

I Shall Never Fall in Love, Hari Conner, 2024 graphic romance. A queer loose retelling of Emma and an absolute delight. Gorgeously drawn with appealing, expressive faces and beautiful, detailed, thoroughly researched costuming and settings. We're still Regency here but the Knightley character is nonbinary/transmasc and Conner has thought very hard about what kind of masculine-leaning clothing choices someone in that position might be able to get away with in what settings, and in what circumstances they could go further. The romances were lovely, the central one was just delicious but the secondary ones were nicely done too. The art reminded me a bit of Baldwin's work in Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, or maybe Dylan Meconis's in Queen of the Sea, although a richer/less limited color palate. Highly recommended if you like romance at all.

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho, 2024 romance novel. Cho is better known for fantasy but this is a straight-up contemporary het romance, and while I liked it a lot (and thought it was fun seeing Cho genre-hop) I would probably only recommend it to people who like het romance in general and not so much anyone who was considering whether they like Cho so much they would follow her across any genre. I, like I said, liked it a lot; I enjoy the Malaysian-English voice of her characters (here a Singaporean Chinese woman and Malaysian man living in London) and I thought the subplots about difficult family and business corruption wove together nicely with the core second-chance-romance plot.

The Pairing, Casey McQuiston, 2024 romance novel. Exes meet up again on a food and wine tour of western Europe. Your enjoyment of this book will likely depend heavily on how much you enjoy reading about other people eating and going places - for me, I do basically none of the things lovingly described in this book (I don't drink wine, don't like fruit, can't handle much sugar, dislike organized tours and tourguides, struggle with meeting new people, don't hook up with strangers) so for me the whole thing was a sort of vicarious vacation in a life so alien it was practically science-fictional. (Although I did enjoy it when they went places I've been like Barcelona or Florence and I got to play "oh, I've been there! I've seen that thing!" along with their tourism.) Early on I was tense because McQuiston has a history of writing drunk scenes and there was clearly going to be a lot of drinking in this book, but in fact the characters were such connoisseurs and experienced drinkers that I was able to stop worrying and trust them to not embarrass themselves. As implied, both members of the central couple have a variety of hookups with other characters, played various ways (competitiveness, voyeurism, substitution) which is a trope I enjoy and don't see in a lot of romance novels. McQuiston did a good job of making it part of the emotional journey of the couple without getting into un-fun jealousy/territoriality. (But if you prefer strict monogamy in your romance this is probably not the book for you.)

Spoilery additional comment: ( Read more... )

The Earl Who Isn't, Courtney Milan, 2024 romance novel. Third of a trilogy (1, 2) of het historical romances set at the end of the 19th century in a British village of expat Asians, with Chinese and Japanese main characters. I was in a library queue for it but decided I was having the kind of week that justified an indulgent book purchase (and rereading the first two, which turned out to be useful - I would read them in order if you're interested, to see how characters get introduced). Exactly what I was looking for. I liked the couple, and this whole series has had lots of neat details about different crafts and trades. Gardening and printing presses in this one.

The Last Binding, Freya Marske, 2023 novel concluding the Last Binding trilogy (previous book here). I might have liked this least of the three of them - the second one is *such* a romp, and this one was more constrained by having certain setup/connective work it has to do, so the pacing early on was a little less propulsive. And I didn't love the pairing as much as either prior. Still, the last act had some great drama and momentum, and I liked how she landed the plane. I would definitely still recommend the trilogy, and am pleased with the second-place vote I gave it on the Hugo Series ballot.

A Restless Truth, Freya Marske, 2022 novel, second in the Last Binding trilogy after A Marvellous Light. This series continues to remind me very strongly of certain HP stories, like, Resonant's Transfigurations or Astolat's House Proud or The Compact, except original and not retroactively tainted by association. This particular novel takes place entirely on a large ship crossing the Atlantic (a fun setting for this sort of thing, and Marske makes good use of it) and is f/f (primarily m/m writers vary wildly in how much interest they can get up for f/f - I thought Marske did great). I couldn't resist going straight into book three. :)

A Marvellous Light, Freya Marske, 2021 novel. I've had this on my to-read list since before it came out - the author is in fandom, and I have no idea now whether I heard about this as "fan author I like has a pro book coming out", or just fandom talking about the book as something fannish people might like in general, or what; my list note didn't say. Anyways, despite my slowness in getting around to it, it is very much exactly the sort of thing I like, and you might also if you like, oh, post-Hogwarts Harry/Draco, or maybe Arthur/Merlin, or if we want to get away from fanfic, KJ Charles. Edwardian magicians and house parties and magic as an additional overlapping/complicating axis of social class. I'm very eager to read the rest of the trilogy (and then her new unrelated book coming out in the fall), although I have other stuff I ought to read first. I guess we'll see whether I have the willpower to stick to that.

The Sugared Game and Subtle Blood, KJ Charles, the rest of the Will Darling trilogy that started with Slippery Creatures. I really liked these - some nuanced character work, some great moments, we continue to get various little nods to Peter Wimsey and Jeeves and Wooster, yay.

Thornhedge, T Kingfisher, 2023 novella. Spoiler cut. ( Read more... )

I guess any three points define a triangle, but in this case it must be a pretty big triangle, because gosh these are three extremely unrelated books (related only in that I happened to finish all three today).

The Awakened Kingdom is NK Jemisin's 2014 post-Inheritance-trilogy novella that I somehow misread as being a 2024 work and moved to the upper ranks of my reading list before I realized. I don't *think* I ever read it in 2014? It was fine. Bit heavy-handed - Jemisin seemed determined to hit us over the head with the point to a degree that actually took me out of the story somewhat - but it reminded me how much I liked the trilogy, and I thought it was a neat epilogue.

Slippery Creatures, KJ Charles. The first book in of one of Charles' many historical-romance trilogies. This one is a working-class soldier home from WWI and an aristocrat and there is ~espionage~. I somehow still haven't binge-read everything Charles ever wrote, but gosh I eat this stuff up. I feel like the aristocrat character here might be exploring some Peter Wimsey-adjacent territory (if you had a Wimsey who was actually gay, I mean, not just sometimes gay on AO3).

The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht. 2023 picture book. Let's be real: I would not have been especially interested in this if it didn't have Watterson's name on it, and, having read it, I think my biggest takeaway was "huh, I guess I'm glad Watterson is still out there exploring as an artist". Something like 35 two-page spreads, where the lefthand page has a sentence, and the righthand page has a black-and-white illustration, which I guess are a mix of photographs of sculptures (Kascht) and drawing (Watterson). The story is an ambiguous and inconclusive fable; you could read it a few different ways. I didn't, on a first read, find any of them hugely compelling or memorable (although who knows, occasionally something ends up staying with me much more than I would have guessed from the initial impact), but it was a fine little interval of contemplation. (Not comics but I'm tagging for comics because I might later think that's how I would have tagged it...)

The Marquis Who Mustn't, Courtney Milan, 2023 novel, het romance. I loved 99% of this book, with one exception that I found upsetting and out-of-character as I had understood the character. I vaguely recall not liking her novella Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure for what I think might have been similar reasons. But, anyways, aside from being thrown and put off by that one part of that one scene, I loved the characters and the way their relationship developed, good stuff.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

Paladin's Faith, T. Kingfisher, 2023 novel. Book four of a planned seven (previously here). I have some thoughts. Very spoilers. ( Read more... )