Melancholy and sexy in turns, a neo-Victorian love story that puts reproductive rights at the heart of a romance.
A Victorian apothecary finds chemistry with the investigator she hired to retrieve her stolen medical formula.
In the first installment of Everett's Damsels of Discovery series, private inquiry agent Jonathan Thorne meets Lucinda Peterson as she's asking his colleague to murder her former lover. Having inherited a small London apothecary, Lucy is shouldering the family business, with its working-class clientele, while being hounded by a moralist group that denounces nontraditional gender roles. To make matters worse, her ex, the son of a rival, decamped with the sore throat remedies she created. Though he had promised that their sexual relationship was a prelude to marriage, he dumped her as soon as he got her formula, even claiming that her enthusiastic sexuality made her unsuitable for marriage. When she hires Thorne—really to get back the formula, not kill her former lover—she doesn't know that he's the son of a baron, a once-dissolute boxer who turned his back on his aristocratic family to raise his biracial child with his late mistress. Devoted to his daughter, he now lives rigidly to guard against his alcoholism and venal tendencies. Meeting Lucy rouses his fierce passions as well as his wariness about beautiful women. Though he is discomfited by her stance on contraception and abortion, her devotion to her patients and her family forces him to question his dogmas about “good” women and examine the behavior of men. Lucy, in turn, has to decide if loving Jonathan is worth the risk to her heart and body. Scenes of their charged sexual interactions featuring light kink are interspersed with fraught conversations on bodily autonomy and balanced out by warm Dickensian family episodes.
Melancholy and sexy in turns, a neo-Victorian love story that puts reproductive rights at the heart of a romance.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593550465
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.
Two people with bad luck in relationships find each other through a popular Reddit thread.
Emma Grant and her best friend, Maddy, are travel nurses, working at hospitals for three-month stints while they see the country. Just a few weeks before they’re set to move to Hawaii, Emma reads a popular “Am I the Asshole” Reddit thread from a Minnesota man who thinks he’s cursed—women he dates find their soulmates after breaking up with him, and the latest one found true love with his best friend! Emma has had a similar experience, which inspires her to DM the man and commiserate. She’s delighted by her witty, lively interactions with software engineer Justin Dahl, and is intrigued when he suggests that if they date each other, maybe they’ll each find their soulmate afterward. Emma upends the Hawaii plan and convinces Maddy to move to Minneapolis for the summer so she can meet Justin in person. The overly complex setup brings Emma and Justin together and the two hit it off, with Justin immediately falling head over heels for Emma. Jimenez then pivots to creating romantic roadblocks and melodramatic subplots centering on each character’s family of origin. Justin’s mother is about to serve six years in prison for embezzlement, which means Justin must move back home to care for his three much younger siblings. Emma was traumatized by her own mother for much of her childhood, left to fend for herself and eventually abandoned in the foster system. When her mother shows up in Minnesota, Emma must face her traumatic childhood and admit that she has prioritized her mother’s well-being over her own. There is little time devoted to Emma’s painful efforts to heal herself enough to accept Justin’s love, which leaves the novel feeling unsatisfying.
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781538704431
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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