One of the 18% of romance readers who are male. Perfectly OK not being the target audience. Here to geek out about what I’m reading and find recommendations. Yes, I have a spreadsheet.
@willaful To be fair, I was not that impressed with the first two in the series - I wouldn’t even have picked this up if the second (“Wildfire”) hadn’t been better than the first IMO. Grace is a competent writer, I suspect she’s just not telling the kind of story I’m looking to read. @bookstodon @romancebooks
@willaful I seem to have hit a bunch of sports books; I’m reading Grace Reilly’s “Wicked Serve” which is fourth in a series, this one a volleyball player and a hockey player. Just finished listening to Hannah Grace’s “Daydream” which wasn’t really for me; it felt more like it was for people who liked Grace’s last two and just want to hang out with the characters for 11 hours (or 400+ pages, depending on how you read). The pace is glacial. @bookstodon @romancebooks
@willaful Now that’s done I’m picking up Chanel Cleeton’s “Fly With Me” which I haven’t read enough of to talk about yet…@romancebooks
@willaful I just finished reading Serena Bell’s “Hott Take”, the second in her “Hott Springs Eternal” series; it’s a good fake engagement/marriage of convenience book, definitely not the expected resolution of the “faking it” part, but really sweet characters. Bell’s Rush Creek setting is a fun place to go back to, as well. @romancebooks
@willaful oh, I’ve got that on my “look out for” list. Actual characters of my age is a major selling point. I’m listening to Susan Lee’s “The Name Drop” which started delightfully but is reaching the hard part of the plot now. @romancebooks
@willaful I’m listening to Rebecca Yarros’s “The Things We Leave Unfinished” which has an interesting dual timeline structure, 1940 and present day, but I’m still not sure I care about the present-day characters very much. Reading Tarah DeWitt’s “Savor It” in which not much is happening but I could read the characters (especially the FMC) bantering *all day*. I like the style. @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful In print I’m reading “The Nanny” by Lana Ferguson, which is a real tangle of a probably-shouldn’t-be-doing-any-of-this story even though both MCs are very likeable. Ironically I picked this up because I was reading Ferguson’s “The Fake Mate” which I just couldn’t get in to - maybe it was the wolf shifters? @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful I am within a few minutes of finishing listening to “This Other Eden” by Paul Harding (which, I should be clear, is not a romance). The setting and story is based - loosely - on real events not far from where I grew up, and it’s both poetic and deeply, tragically sad, both fictionally and historically (OK, the history is a lot less poetic). Not a happy ending. @romancebooks @romancelandia
@willaful I agree, not my favorite O’Leary. I finally finished listening to Elle Maxwell’s “Us, Again” and I don’t know why I didn’t DNF it; it really wasn’t what I was after and I didn’t like the MMC much (or understand the relationship, I suppose). Now on to listening to BK Borison’s “Lovelight Farm” which I like more already. @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful Now I want to listen to Evvie Drake (even though I read it) to see if Whalen’s Downeast accents are as faithful as Holmes’s setting was. @romancebooks @romancelandia
@pretensesoup @willaful Katherine Center’s latest (“Hello Stranger”) leans hard on prosopagnosia for the plot, but apparently Center did a good bit of research to back it up. (Also kisses only, which is not usually my preference, but I like Center’s books too much to mind.) @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful Anyway none of this in any way affects the quality of the story or the relationship between the main characters, and Kennedy is good at a lot of the things that make romances which are fun to read. It’s just like those moments in a movie where the background scenery is clearly from a different city, and you’re like, wait a minute… @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful The hardest thing to swallow in this book is one of the major hurdles; supposedly one of Briar’s fictional rivals collapsed financially and was absorbed by Briar, so now their hockey teams need to be combined (and somehow this is a problem for the men’s team but not the women?). This isn’t a thing that happens often, so I can’t say it’s not accurately portrayed… but it’s not a thing that happens often.
@romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful Briar is supposed to be “Ivy” but then Yale - one of the most recognizable Ivy League schools - “isn’t in their conference.” The courses of study and the fraternity-centric campus culture also aligns more with big state universities than typical Ivy atmosphere; it often feels more like a Southern football school inexplicably plonked into New England. One game description alternates the opponent between Northeastern and Northwestern.
@romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful I have friends who are scientists who said they couldn’t enjoy e.g. Ali Hazelwood’s “Love Hypothesis” because the way the science is portrayed kept knocking them out of the story. So far I’ve been able to get along with the fictional universities in these college hockey series, like Kennedy’s invented Briar U, but for some reason in this book I feel like there are more holes in the scenery than usual.
@willaful In print, doing a re-read (30+ years later) of James Clavell’s Asian Saga, triggered by a comment from someone on another forum. Expecting the books to be horrifically racist, and indeed the characters are, but the books are more just… about people who are various grades of awful. Listening to Elle Kennedy’s latest, “The Graham Effect”, which, if you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you would like. Very on-brand for Kennedy. @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful I was lucky to get a low number in the holds list for Ali Hazelwood’s YA “Check & Mate” which released on Tuesday. It lines up with the observation I’ve read that “YA is trending older” (the characters are largely 18+) but aside from that it’s good to see that PG-13 Hazelwood is as engrossing to me as NC-17 Hazelwood. She can really draw you in to the story *and* move the story along; I could chuck a chess set through the plot holes but I barely care. @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful @romancelandia @romancebooks @lenoreo I’ve had Dax on my TBR for a while, I’ll be curious to hear what you think of it.
@willaful @romancebooks I ❤️ Jenny Holiday and how she experiments with tropes and styles. Canadian Boyfriend almost felt like it was Abby Jimenez at times (maybe that was the setting). But her books are always memorable in a way not every book is.