His curse can only be lifted with true love, but can true love come from a fake date? Being the personal assistant to a trio of cursed gargoyle brothers who sleep for a hundred years and wake up for twenty-five wasn’t a career proposed by Josh’s high school guidance counselor, ... more >
Content notes: autism, anxiety, family conflict, gaslighting, emotional abuse Dear Chloe Liese, I have a confession to make. I haven’t read Much Ado About Nothing. I haven’t seen the movie either. Yes, I am a Philistine. Two Wrongs Make a Right is an homage to Much Ado so it’s probably ... more >
Dear Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, I wonder if your debut novel, The View was Exhausting, was published as romantic mainstream fiction. If so it’s a romance regardless. There’s a central love story with a happy ending and emotional justice. That’s a definition of romance that works for me. The ... more >
On Monday we discussed the fake relationship and marriage of convenience tropes. In the same email conversation, I asked DA contributors for recommendations and/or dis-recommendations of romances involving fake relationships. Here is what came up. Layla: Some of my favorite fake relationship romances are Kylie Scott’s Lick (I think it ... more >
Janine: In our April open thread I lamented the omnipresence of fake relationships in contemporary romances so this seems like a good time to have a conversation about the trope. I’ve sometimes seen it discussed along with the marriage of convenience trope (readers compare them or group them under the ... more >
Dear Cate C. Wells, This contemporary romance came up after I did not finish the first book in this series, Hitting the Wall. Commenters on the review described this one as better and I was in the midst of a three-month free trial of KU, so I decided to give ... more >