38. Fire Touched by Patricia Briggs (audio: Lorelei King) I’d originally skipped this one because none of my libraries had it. But it was fantastic, & I understand why Silence Fallen felt like a let down to some Great relationship/pack/family dynamics #bkbrk

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) April 28, 2018

The Mercy Thompson series is one of the series I depend on the library to read. The sticker price is just so expensive.  For some weird reason all the libraries I have access to did not own Fire Touched, so I skipped over it when I was working on catching up on the series since they did have Silence Fallen.

I scandalized quite a few Briggs fans by doing that, so I decided to use my next Audible credit to buy the audio. And they were right. The book was worth paying for and was full of fantastic Adam and Mercy time.  I can now understand  how Silence Fall felt like setback after seeing Adam, Mercy and the pack working so well together. I really loved the cognitive dissonance Mercy and Adam have to wrestle with as they get to know Aiden. He looks like a child, but is super old and dangerous. He has been abused and alone for a long-time, and in the end he needs Adam, Mercy and the pack just as much as all their wolves do. 

40. Steel’s Edge by Ilona Andrews A healer’s self-imposed exile in the Edge comes to an abrupt end when her found family/home is destroyed by Slavers hunting for the man she healed. Emotionally wrenching, Epilogue is so necessary #bkbrk #audiobook https://t.co/swMklBXNkn

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) May 15, 2018

This is a rare miss by Ilona Andrews. I usually love their books and while the Edge series has always been grim, dark and gory, I've never needed a Epilogue more. There was just so much wrenching emotionally tragic choices through out this book that just could not be wrapped up by the last page of the final chapter. Without the Epilogue and the extensive period of time in covered  this book would have been a tragedy.

Honestly I regret reading book because it was just so unrelentingly sad. I never quite recovered from the violent end suffered by a beloved supporting character in the series.

Powerful people using power to abuse, regular people letting things happen and good-hearted people making too many of the sacrifices.

CW: Heroine is infertile, her first husband left her because of it. She carries a lot of pain related to that.  There are also lots of references to sexual abuse, past and present to supporting characters.  

23. Ocean Light by Singh (eARC, June 18)Jumped the gun reading this but it was a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency kinda of week! I loved it. Bowen meets his mate at the worst moment of his life. They might only have days but it can’t be denied. #bkbrk #rombklove :underwater city

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) March 12, 2018

Ocean Light is the second book in Nalini Singh's second Pys-Changeling series, Psy-Changeling Trinity.  While Silver Silence was successful in becoming an accessible new entry point for readers intimidated by the expansive original Psy-Changeling series, Ocean Light is a much more demanding book.  This book deepens the new series central mystery, expanding the players, establishing new relationships and continuing to grow the world, while at same time having to find way to catch new readers up on Bowen Knight's backstory. I am curious to see how successful this was for new readers. As an established reader, I was well acquainted with Bowen Knight, who has been a long-running secondary  POV characters in the Psy-Changeling series. I felt we got to see a whole new side of him as he falls in love with Kaia, especially learning new information about what has driven him to be so passionate about seeking a way to protect Humans from unscrupulous and predatory Psy via technological interventions.

As a romance, I loved how play played a huge part of Kaia and Bowen's courtship. While Kaia starts out deeply suspicious and wary of Bowen, just like the rest of BlackSea, she gets to know him better challenging and teasing him. His natural curiosity pushes him to try to figure out Kaia and make sense of her relationships with other BlackSea packmates.

I loved meeting the BlackSea changelings, and comparing and contrasting their way of behaving as pack and how it differs from the SnowDancer and DarkRiver (both more communal and more individualistic) and exploring the ways the Human Alliance has grown into its own kind of pack under Bowen's leadership.

Once aspect of the story that I am going to have to sit with a bit longer and tease out my feelings about was the way Kaia's long-term anxiety issues was used narratively. While I loved that her anxiety issues were not easy to resolve and were not simply something she could will or power away for the sake of love, I wasn't entirely comfortable about how contained and specific it was.  I wish her struggles with Anxiety had been introduced less obliquely earlier in the novel rather than packed into an already frenetic second-half as an unexpected obstacle to their HEA.

As a long-time fan of Nalini Singh's Psy-changeling series -- I've been reading her books for as long as I have been reading romance -- I love that we are exploring parts of the Psy-Changeling world that had not been previously explored, and that she continues to correct the erasure of queer identities in her previous books by making little mentions here and there.  I really liked the casual way Kaia's mom explicitly acknowledges and accepts that Kaia could fall for a boy or a girl, as she whispers a loving warning to her baby about her family's predisposition for falling hard and fast in love. These little mentions are small steps, but they make feel more welcomed in the world that I've read for so long and it affirms that the changes she made in Silver Silence were not one offs.

I received a ARC for review consideration from the Publisher via NetGalley.

44. Shadow of Doubt by Linda Poitvien. (ARC, 5/10) RomSuspense. Started out promising but too much of the emotional conflict was the MCs arguing if it was too risky for the RCMP heroine to keep helping the framed DEA agent hero on the run. #ttr #bkbrk https://t.co/0rfLpBBgLs

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) June 3, 2018

I really loved the start of this book. A RCMP officer find a bullet-ridden man on a rain-soaked back road on a stormy night and is forced to bring him home.  Kate Dexter is all business, practical, wary and very very suspicious. She doesn't have time to ogle the handsome and extremely well built victim.  She worries about how dangerous it makes him.

Poitevin captured the extreme tension within Kate as she tries to decide how to respond to situation. Her instincts are at war with the police procedures and every minute she hesitate the bigger the cost to her career.   Poitevin carries that tension over  to the intense action and suspense scenes.  

However while the action kept Jonas Burke, a framed ATF agent on the run, and Kate ricocheting around Ontario and the Northeast United States,  the romance stalled.  I was frustrated by the repetitive nature of Kate and Jonas arguments.  While Poitevin eventually gives us the backstory as to why Jonas is so fiercely and stubbornly independent, I was too bored with Jonas continued insentience that Kate stop helping him, and his doubts about her abilities even though she consistently proved herself extremely capable.  Jonas's realization of the errors of his ways came much too late for me and while the epilogue was sweet and perfect, I still think Kate should have smacked him and walked away, because she endured too much from Jonas as he tried to push her away. I thought Kate should have hooked up with her ex or her fabulously supportive partner instead.

Shadow of Doubt had a fantastic heroine, gripping action and a frustrating lug of a hero, who tried to pushed away the best partner he could have ever hope to have found.

I received a ARC from the author for review consideration.

I accepted Suzanne's invitation to join the Love in Panels Review team.  I will be reviewing one or two books a month for them. 

Ever since RT announced that it will be closing, I've been trying to figure out it I wanted to join another group venture or just write for myself.  This is the best of both worlds. I have total freedom of what I choose to review for Love in Panels, and I get to support a review blog I respect. 

I'll always link to my reviews here too, but I hope you add Love in Panels to your  bookmarks!

We are thrilled to welcome @anacoqui to Love in Panels with her first review! Ana talks about RESORT TO LOVE, a new contemporary romance from Priscilla Oliveras that's a second-chance, enemies-to-lovers story set at a resort! https://t.co/bAUMfMQHh1

— Love in Panels (@LoveinPanels) June 12, 2018

Resort to Love by Priscilla Oliveras is the third book in Tule’s Paradise Key multi-author series about a set of friends who return to the Floridian island where they all met for the funeral of a dear friend. Each of the books can be read as standalones. Like Oliveras’s previous novels it features a Puerto Rican heroine and it is a sweet and sexy closed door romance that is not lacking in sexual tension. Oliveras’s recurring core theme of balancing faith, family and love in order find happiness drives this story of ex-lovers reunited as rivals in a real-estate transaction.

Sofía Vargas grew up spending her summers with her Tía Mili on Paradise Key, eventually joining her aunt as a summer worker at the Paradise Key Beach Resort. It was at Paradise Key where she first met Nate Hamilton, son of the resort owners, sent to Paradise Key to learn the family business from the bottom up. Always aware of the huge gulf between them, Sofía set up the boundaries for their romance, as simply “no strings, just fun”. They spent their summers sharing picnics on the beach, and dances in the moonlight. Eventually after they both left Paradise Key for college and then careers in the hospitality industry, flirty texts, frequent phone calls, romantic getaways weekends kept their connection alive if undefined until the day that Nate came to let her know that his family expected him to propose to daughter of business partner as a way of solidifying a potential business merger. Never wanting to be the cause of division in his family she cut ties with Nate then and there.

Two years later and newly freed from the engagement he never wanted and once again on the outs with his overbearing father, Nate finds himself exiled back to Florida. Sent on fact-finding mission, to assess potential real estate targets for acquisition, Nate is sidetracked when he runs into Sofía outside the shuttered and storm-damaged Paradise Key Resort, which his family had sold off many years earlier. The awkwardness of their uncomfortable reunion is magnified when they realize they are both planning on submitting rival bids to re-open the resort. While Sofía hopes that Nate will once again walk away, the quicker the better for her hurting heart, Nathan sees it as an opportunity to re-write history and stop letting his family dictactate his actions and reclaim his life and love.

Oliveras does a wonderful job portraying Sofía’s Puerto Rican heritage, and how Sofía’s sense of family extends beyond her immediate family, to include her friends and can even encompass her relationship with her boss and business mentor Sal and his wife Vivi. By contrast, Nate’s is a loveless business venture masquerading as family, where his father seeks to dominate and micro-manages rather than encouraging and supporting. I loved how this came to play in the resolution, especially as Sofía has to reconsider how certain assumptions, omissions and decisions in both their parts were results of their very different senses of family. The reconciliation is not easy gained but Nate puts in the work through the whole novel by being there for Sofía when she most needs him, never wavering, showing his maturity and determination and taking the emotional risks. It earns him the trust that lets him pull of a big romantic gesture with a high potential for failure at the 11th hour.

The one sour note in this novel is the cartoonishly stereotypical (although not mean-spirited) portrayal of Paul, the sole gay character in the book. Paul is Sofía’s trusted assistant hotel manager, who is juggling managing several properties on his own while Sofía is away yet his flamboyant and gregarious personality is played for comic relief. Had there been more LGBT characters in the book, it wouldn’t have stood out, but there is only one other character, Vida, the spacey-hippyish town planning board member, that has their mannerisms or way of dress are singled out in this way. It was disappointing but mercifully brief.

The one stand-out supporting character in the novel is Sofía’s Tia Mili, who I hope returns in her own solo novella or novel. Widowed young, she has built a life for herself in the community she shared with her beloved husband David. Despite the loss she is vibrantly joyful and wise, and successful small business owner. I would love to see her find love again.

Resort to Love was a emotional read that balanced angst with humor for sweet and hopeful romance about valuing family and knowing when to risk it all by laying everything out on the table.

Resort to Love by Priscilla Oliveras (Book 3 in the Paradise Key Series), Tule Publishing Group, May 15,2018, ($8.99 print, 3.99 e-book). 978-1949068283 214 pp.

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration.

Content Warnings: Medical drama for a father figure secondary character, references to the unexpected death of a friend, subpar gay rep.

Rep: Allocishet M/F Contemporary, Latina heroine, White hero.

43. The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz. #RomBkLove rec D17 STEM.(f/f ace)Globe-trotting AI-mechanic Clara falls for Sal, a Tea-shop running robot, one of the last of her kind.Emotional story about grief, trust, routines & new beginnings. #ttr #bkbrk https://amzn.to/2GQf93e

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) June 3, 2018

Clara is a gifted programmer and AI-tech, whose highly-coveted skills facilitate her nomadic lifestyle. With wanderlust always spurring her to move on and try living and exploring a new place, she never gets too comfortable or attached, always ready to pack up and move on. 

Sal on the other hand has bound herself to her Tea Shop, seeking to live out her beloved owner's wish that it celebrate 300 years in operation.  She is one of the last remaining true AI's, created before the manufacture of sentient and sapient AIs was outlawed.  Having outlived her original owner by centuries, she struggles to remain operational, to adjust to the ever-changing world, to survive the increasingly frequent acts of vandalism and not simply sink into nostalgia and melancholy. Her life is one of routines, and the safety of the familiar.

I loved the gentleness of this story, the time it spends on the quiet moments, the companionship that grows into affection and love.  I was swept away by it and the way they took care with each other, determined as they are not encroach or override each other's wills and desires.

There is plenty of meaty science-fiction content to sink one's teeth into, and I loved the world building but most deeply this story was about all the little things that go into slowly falling in love and wanting the best for our partners.

I am thankful for Ruby Lang's mention of this story on #Rombklove Day 28. I will be looking to read more Meredith Katz in the future.

#RomBkLove Day 28 Unrequited: Meredith Katz's The Cybernetic Tea Shop. F/f ace futuristic novella, carefully paced story of a robot technician pining for a widowed robot who is tied to her mandate and her memories.

— Ruby Lang (@RubeLang) May 28, 2018

37. Rome’s Chance by Joanna Wylde. 2nd chance-ish Dental Hygienist heroine, hero is not going to miss his moment. My night was weirdly emotional/drama filled offline tonight, so I don’t have a lot of perspective but it held my interest when I really needed the distraction.

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) April 26, 2018

Joanna Wylde's books are really hit or miss for me usually. I either love them or I hate read them but either way I rarely put them down because they are really emotionally engrossing.  This was a second-chance at love/reunion romance for two minor characters in a book I hate read (Reaper's Fire), yet I really liked it.

Randi has been taking care of her siblings since she was just a kid because of her mom's addiction issues. The warring feelings of love and resentment Randi feels for her mother were very well portrayed as were Randi's creeping awareness that things have been going terribly for her youngest siblings while she has been away at school in a different town.   Despite Randi's complicated feeling for her mother, Wylde was surprisingly compassionate in the portrayal.

Rome is a classic caretaker hero, thankfully without the asshole bossiness qualities that often comes packaged with the caretaker alpha character type in Biker novels. He truly cares for Randi, and put in the effort to be there for her when she can't cope. He understands the ups and downs of her grief and sticks even when she lashes out.  Randi's self-protective, self-denial and a real sense that she just doesn't have the energy for a a relationship, doesn't faze him, because he is there not to get something for himself, but because he wants to take care of her.

“We’ll date later,” he told me, dropping back down in front of me. “Maybe next year. Until then, I’ll be the guy fucking you. And the guy who bandages up your feet. You can cry on me, too, but I’m not gonna let you dump me until we’ve had a real chance. Sooner or later, you’ll be ready to live again. I can wait.” -- Rome's Chance by Joanna Wylde

I won't recommend this widely because biker books just aren't for everyone, but if you like biker books, I liked this one.

39. Peter Darling by Austin Chant Peter returns to Neverland after spending 10 years living as Wendy again for the sake of his family. But Neverland is not the same or too much the same.The romance was beautiful, gentle & exhilarating. Just fabulous. https://t.co/ZLkdeU3cvO

— Ana Coqui (@anacoqui) April 29, 2018

In Peter Darling, Austin Chant does something magical. He transforms a story we think we know into something wholly new by translating  the theatrical convention of Peter Pan being played by a young woman, into Peter actually being trans. As someone who had never much liked the Peter Pan story and Peter in particular, this reinterpretation felt incredibly right,  It gave new depth to original and helped me understand Peter like I never had before.  The impulsive imp is not merely a sullen boy unwilling to face growing up but one for whom growing up has real dangers, for growing up means abandoning the freedoms of childhood and having to abide by gendered expectations a family is unwilling to understand him. Fleeing to Neverland is finding refuge from the oppressive nature of that daily trauma.  Tinkerbell is not simply a wish-granting fairy, but a rescuing angel, who saves Peter from soul-crushing despair by providing a way out when he most needs it.

Chant's Peter is still brash, blood-thirsty, and the brazen attention-seeker he is the original Peter Pan but it isn't as effortless as it used to be. As eager as he is to reclaim his throne as the leader of the Lost Boys as soon as he arrives back in Neverland, Peter can't sink into the pure escapist adventure and adoration as he once been able to.  Memories of home increasingly intrude as he tries to distract himself by indulging in aggression against Hook. Although shocked by his return, Hook does recognize in him as his old enemy and worthy rival, shaking Hook out of his own ennui.

"That was it. Everyone else had followed him at best, at worst tried to stop him or change him. Hook had matched him, and had never tried to protect Peter, had always done his worst. That was what felt so good."

pg 141 -- Peter Darling by Austin Chant

Peter Darling is a true enemies to lovers story, as Peter and James move from being the bitterest of enemies to slowly falling in love after being trapped and lost together. I just loved how clearly James saw Peter when Peter didn't quite see himself, let alone recognize the desire that hides under his angry fascination with Hook. I really loved Hook and how Hook slowly became James to Peter. Chant humanizes Hook slowly and believably, peeling back the layers to the romantic, flamboyant, heart-broken man that needed Neverland just as much as Peter did, yet can't stay in it any longer.

I loved how hard it was for Peter to let go of Neverland and how James could not make that choice for him.  I held my breath for the last quarter of the novel, waiting to see when Peter would recognize that he could have a future and a life outside of Neverland. I loved that in this book Austin Chant is able to affirm the both the need for escapism and withdrawal and the need to face hard truths and make hard choices. Leaving Neverland is hard, adjusting to life outside of it isn't simple or easy, but there is also joy and beauty to be found there. 

I am so glad I have all Austin Chant's books in my TBR already, as I relied in the recommendations of trusted reviewers enough to buy them all, even as I hesitated to start Peter Darling. I have so much goodness waiting for me.  I hope you try Peter Darling.

Dear #Rombklove, thanks to all of you, For showing up and sharing the books you love.

Finding fellow readers & celebrating the incredible diversity of Romance is what this month was about for us.

I hope you keep using the #RomBkLove tag to share your love for books you discovered this month so we can continue to have these conversations together.

If you missed some of the fantastic rec posts put together by my fabulous co-bloggers, you find them all listed here: http://www.anacoqui.com/2018/04/rombklove-2018-celebrating-the-anniversary-with-daily-prompts-from-a-fantastic-group-of-bloggers-and.html along with our daily tweet archives.

I adore the #rombklove team. They made this month amazing by sharing the load of hosting, and by being incredibly generous with their time and experience. Check out their blogs and TL, as they will continue to share their love of books even as this event end.

and I would also like to invite you to join a big group of us for #readRchat , the first Saturday afternoon of each month for an hour of Romance chat.

 

Our next chat is Saturday June 2nd at 4 pm EST/10pm CET
The theme is Reading Romance: New Choices