what i'm reading right now

Keeping it short and sweet this week as my baby turns FIVE (!!!) today and two essays in a row was really asking a lot of me. I am just going to talk about what I have read recently (meaning January to February 2025). These type of short reviews are what I hope to write frequently with this newsletter. Enjoy and please please email me if you want to chat books! I always want to know what everyone is reading all the time.

The Ministry of Time - I read this per Leonor’s suggestion because I do want to mix some fiction in…sometimes? Maybe? This is still a romance to me, it ends with that option at least. It made me immeasurably melancholy. It was beautifully written. I cried a lot! It was probably the combo of time travel, a very accurate portrayal of a biracial Asian woman, and just the general apocalypse mood. I would recommend this book to anyone interested but It was a good reminder that I can make myself plenty sad on my own…I’m not sure I need a book to do it too. It is no wonder that immediately after this, I housed an entire backlist series of Loretta Chase’s. 

Loretta Chase’s Dressmakers series - Chase is SO FUN. I think on the whole I have read more blue collar historical romance heroes (Kleypas and Maclean come to mind) than heroines but reading a series of seamstresses as heroines felt revolutionary. Similarly to how I felt reading After Dark with the Duke by Julie Ann Long (absolute banger of a opera singer heroine). In the fourth book of this series, Dukes Prefer Blondes, the barrister hero wages an all out mock court battle for the right to marry the heroine. SQUEE.

Showmance - Short and sweet MM romance featuring community theater and big dumb former jock. There’s a general air of “he could never be interested in me!” that I always love to see. The real centerpiece is the cast of characters working in the community theater. 

Quicksilver + The Shepherd King Duology - Two relatively famous pieces of recent romantasy. What I loved about these books: short chapters (all fantasy should use short chapters to keep the plot moving at a clip! Let’s go!), interesting magic systems, books that feel like they could have easily been YA but the authors chose definitely to make them for adults, hot sex scenes!, a full cast of fun side characters. Gillig does a fun thing in the Shepherd King duology of shifting the initial single POV of book 1 to 4 total POVs in book 2 in addition to another romance entirely. I hope Quicksilver’s second book does the same for our dear Carrion (yes, I enjoyed this book even though a character is named CARRION!)

Bridge Kingdom - I finally caught up on this series. The first book, Bridge Kingdom, starts a little slow as you have a lot of political maneuvering to learn about and general world building. I think it is worth it as The Traitor Queen (book 2) is a high stakes angst fest. Inadequate Heir (3) and The Endless War (4) are absolutely the enemies to lovers of my dreams. They are sworn enemies, they have great chemistry, he is an absolute shit, and she gets exiled at one point to a prison island full of cannibals. Maybe that is for you too. 

Anne Stuart’s Ice Series - Every once in awhile I need to reset my brain by reading a very old school romance  series. This Ice series I heard about on the DifficultWomanReads instagram and I can’t rightly recommend it to a newer romance reader…there is some, shall we say, less than great behavior on behalf of the Jason Bourne-esque heroes. However, one of the books features a “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD! I KILLED YOU” reveal that is unfortunately very sexy to me specifically. 

Not Another Love Song - Love to be several years late to a popular contemporary romance. This might be a Reylo book? I don’t care. It was a very sensual journey to the world of classical instruments. There is a scene with a cello that is worth the price alone. I had a fun time, I kicked my feet, I got mad, I got titillated. All in all, 5 stars for the experience.

Wild Side - I skimmed/speed read Elsie Silver’s latest to answer one very important question: Does they have sex while the hero is wearing his professional wrestler outfit? The answer is a resounding yes. Unfortunately, Silver does a sort of indefinable ethnically ambiguous hero. He’s super tan/golden brown! He has tribal tattoos! A luchador mask and at least three times in the text someone calls him Jason Momoa. ?!?! (Legitimately, I guess he is supposed to be The Rock or Roman Reigns). As someone who gets told “you’re so tan!” on a monthly basis…I refuse to believe that no one in the whitest small town in Canada said “so, like, what are you?” to Rhys at any moment. Silver, I suppose, is solving this by having him be a mysterious former foster child who never knew his parents. Kind of a yikes there for me but still I end up speed reading these books on Kindle Unlimited. If you know of more pro wrestler romances…I am listening. It would behoove me to mention that Sarah Maclean’s Temple involves sexy times in a boxing ring. Do with that what you will. 

Tessa Bailey’s Au Pair Affair and Dream Girl Drama - Tessa Bailey is my slump buster. Are there things about her romances that I feel like I have grown out of? Yes. Have I read every single book she has ever published? Yes. I know what to expect and she always delivers exactly that. I got a good laugh about the fact that the hero in Au Pair Affair could zipline, cliff dive, play hockey, and go to poundtown while recovering from a ruptured disc in his back. As someone married to a man who ruptured a disc in the last year…that feels unlikely. Dream Girl Drama is a soon to be step siblings book which gets somewhat resolved in a weird ROMANCE REASONS way by the end. Naima Simone did this in a series called Sweetest Taboo (step siblings as a sequel to a my brother’s widow banger) and let me just say, those books will blow your eyebrows off much more than these. 

The Tribune Temptation - A lot to love here! This book is a historical romance that takes place outside of England, includes a hero born enslaved, now a freedman, and running for office, AND a heroine who was divorced by her shit husband for being infertile. Her infertility is looked at head on and she doesn’t magically get pregnant with a new husband (some hist rom does this…). Unfortunately for me, some of the aspects of Roman life took me out of it. We go to a gladiator event for fun and sort of gloss over the death, we have slaves in all homes (even some owned by our hero and heroine), and no real talk about abolition, even though the hero does want to materially improve their lives with his political office. Perhaps I am used to historical romance, usually pirate stories, that do lots of gymnastics to show that their pirate heroes are not part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Is that better or worse? Like I said, there is a lot to like here and I plan to read more of this author’s work but I spent a lot of time wanting to reread Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union. Also, shouldn’t more people in an Ancient Rome romance be queer?

On deck:

The current state of America feels like the perfect climate for me to be in a reading slump. I am fighting it hard. Periods of high anxiety and periods of frequent migraines (I wonder if these are related???) tend to make me read less or more slowly. Mostly that’s why I caught up on Bailey and some fun and different stuff on my Kindle. Right now, I am reading Rachel Reid’s latest, The Shots You Take. It feels a lot like her other work, which I love, closeted hockey players. Imagine the beloved Heated Rivalry but they’re in their 40’s now and they hurt each other much more. I feel like this book may test all my preaching about messy characters…not sure I am feeling forgiving in this redemption arc. I am very much a mood reader and cannot for the life of my make myself follow a clear TBR (to be read list). I tend to shuffle around and stack books here and there with the hope that I will choose one of them next.

Talk soon,

Britt