Dr. Strange Beard (Winston Brothers #5) by Penny Reid

Dr. Strange Beard book coverAt 26, Roscoe Winston is the youngest of the Winston clan and a vet(erinarian) in Nashville. We’ve also seen him to be a bit of a flirt in previous books. We come to learn why he’s that way, and how he’d had his heart broken in high school by Simone Payton.

Simone’s a cool chick—she’s currently working as an undercover FBI agent even though that’s not really her calling (which is in a research lab). It’s a temporary assignment. There’s been a string of murders in East Tennessee that the FBI knows are being perpetrated by the president of the biker club the Winstons’ father is in. The fact that Simone’s from there gets her assigned to the case. She’s working at the diner her mom runs in Green Valley. Simone is focused on her career and believes that the whole idea of love is stupid. She doesn’t like feelings and never has. But unfortunately for her feelings, her assignment brings her in contact with Roscoe.

Roscoe, for his part, isn’t happy to see her because she rejected him in high school after they’d been best friends forever, and the memories still pain him. He has a fantastic memory, so he relives the whole rejection any time he sees her. And he keeps seeing her pop up inexplicably everywhere he goes.

What Roscoe doesn’t know is that she’s trying to protect him and break the case at the same time. He’s become important because his father wants to talk to him for some reason. And Simone can’t let that just happen without inserting herself.

Dr. Strange Beard does start off a little slow, I have to admit. Simone in particular was hard to get into because she’s very logical and tries to deny emotion. But by a quarter in, it started to pick up more and then got good—and Simone is great. Roscoe’s sweet and different from his brothers. The book leans a bit toward romantic suspense, especially in the second half, which isn’t surprising given Simone’s profession. The build-up with the suspense delivers with an emotional and riveting grand finale in the diner.

My recommendation is pretty much the same as it is for all of Reid’s books: read it if you’re a fan or if you like quirky and smart heroines.

Hate to Want You (Forbidden Hearts #1) by Alisha Rai

Hate to Want You book coverHate to Want You is a complex novel with a bucketful of family secrets.

The grandfathers of Olivia (Livvy) Kane and Nicholas Chandler were best friends and started a grocery store together that became very successful. Livvy’s was even in a Japanese internment camp during WW II and Nicholas’s didn’t take advantage of that situation. They continued managing it once he was back out.

Livvy and Nicholas grew up together and dated for years, all until a tragic and fatal car accident involving Livvy’s father and Nicholas’s mother. Then, somehow (how was never entirely clear to me), Nicholas’s father bought/cheated the Kanes out of their share of the company. After that, Nicholas and Livvy broke up. They each have a different story about how that went down, however. Livvy left town afterward and hasn’t been back except for a couple exceptions.

It’s been about a decade since the accident and Livvy is back in town. Nicholas goes to visit her at the tattoo parlor she works at in the opening scene. This is breaking all their rules. They’ve been seeing each other once a year (on Livvy’s birthday) for casual sex and Livvy skipped the last one. The sexual tension between them is off the charts the second they’re together. This isn’t a good thing for either of them, really, and just highlights the unhealthy approach they’ve taken to their relationship. Neither of them has really gotten over the other but each of them has reasons to stay away. But with them back in the same town it’s hard to keep them apart. They try to keep it casual, but that’s as unhealthy as it was over the past decade. There’s a lot of work for them to do before they can be together in a meaningful way.

There are many things that set this book apart from other second chance romances. First, one of the characters isn’t white and this is totally normalized, doesn’t even come up as worthy of mentioning. I think the only thing that made it certain to me was the mention of the internment camp. Second, Livvy (and probably her mother) has clinical depression. The way Rai dealt with this was nice—very realistic. She addresses the fact that it’s always there, but the severity of the current state can vary depending on certain triggers. Nicholas also has his own issues even though they’re not as significant as Livvy’s. He’s very closed off mostly because of the way his father has always treated him. He has to learn to overcome that before he and Livvy can really go anywhere. Still before and after that, there’s plenty of sexytimes for the reader to enjoy.

Another thing that sets this book apart is that we get a healthy dose of Rai’s feminist observation:

The world was unkind to women. It was devastating to women who didn’t believe in themselves.

and

The quickest way to get a dude to stop hitting on you was to say you’re with another guy, because men respect other men more than they respect a woman saying no.

If you enjoy complicated romances between characters with lots of painful history, this one might just be for you.

Let Us Dream by Alyssa Cole

Let Us Dream book coverLet Us Dream is another slim but packed novel like Cole’s Let It Shine—and it’s equally good. This one’s set 50 years earlier, in 1917 Harlem. The heroine is Bertha Hines, a cabaret owner who has a secret that keeps her constantly nervous and a past that keeps her fairly buttoned-up. Amir Chowdhury is a Muslim Indian in the U.S. illegally, trying to make his way.

Bertha isn’t satisfied with the status quo at all and is trying to participate in the suffragette movement, but the white women who run it aren’t welcoming to a black woman cabaret owner (ostensibly because of her career choice, but probably really because of her race). So instead she educates her employees on politics and encourages them to advocate for the vote for women among their male clientele.

Amir is an experienced cook, but his options are limited because of his status, so he ends up washing dishes at Bertha’s establishment. They butt heads early on. However, they find they each have something the other needs—Bertha can teach him about American politics and he can teach her how to dance more authentically (she does an Indian-inspired dance for the club). Working closely together brings their simmering attraction to the forefront. And when Amir and Bertha help one of Bertha’s employees give birth, they bond over the moment and realize there really is something between them.

But it’s not easy. Bertha’s got the police wanting to shut her down and Amir’s illegal—and they’re not even the same race. That last point was an interesting one for me—could they even marry (or were the laws written solely to protect the “purity “—ugh—of whites?)? Because nowadays, they could marry and Amir could come in legally (I mean, it would take some work, but could be done). But I wasn’t sure how it would work back then. Cole doesn’t even go there, but it didn’t stop me from wondering.

There are some fairly heartbreaking moments, like when Amir sees a white man outside the club and instinctively calls him “sir.”

He cringed at how the honorific slipped out. Why should he call some White man lounging in an alley like an urchin “sir”? The only power that the man held over him was the color of his skin, but that was all that was necessary in America, it seemed. Back home, too, now.

Overall, this is a nice book. Not too steamy but full of interesting historical details in another period you don’t see much (especially in romance). If you liked Let It Shine, definitely check this one out, or if you’re just curious about a different time.

Let It Shine by Alyssa Cole

Let It Shine book coverLet It Shine is a slim book, coming in at a little over 100 pages, but it doesn’t feel short. I mean that in the good way—it’s complex and substantive and I really enjoyed it.

Sofronia Wallis—Sofie for short—is a young black college student in Virginia during the heart of the Civil Rights movement in 1961. Cole does a fantastic job of painting a realistic and detailed picture of the movement with just a few spare details. She makes it personal. Sofie’s a good church-going girl who always does what she’s supposed to do. But she’s finding this role stifling: “…when people described her, they used words like nice and quiet and docile as if they spoke of the cows on Harris Withers’ farm instead of a young woman.” But that’s all about to change as she finds herself in the cause.

Ivan Friedman’s family escaped Europe just before WWII, although many of his extended family members did not survive the Holocaust. He’s in an odd position. The U.S. is still anti-Semitic in a lot of ways (though the book doesn’t go much into that), but he’s still white, which puts him in a better position than Sofie. In fact, when they were young, Sofie’s mother worked for his mother and he and Sofie were good friends who played together. That came to an abrupt end when the kids were twelve because Sofie’s mother suddenly died (of an aneurysm) while trying to save Ivan from some bullies.

They haven’t seen each other in the six years since then when they run into each other at a protestor’s organizing meeting (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC). When they meet, it’s clear that what used to be a childhood friendship has turned into a very adult attraction. But it’s not as if they can just start dating or even hanging out, as at at time such a relationship was not only socially frowned upon, it was actually illegal in the South until 1967 (there’s even an ugly word for it that I want to pretend I never learned).

However, this is a romance so you know they’re going to figure out a way. But it sure isn’t going to be easy, and neither will be the individual paths they choose. All of which makes for a very engaging read.

If you want a good book with a few bites of heat set in a period you rarely see in romance novels, this one’s definitely for you.

It’s Your Move, Wordfreak! by Falguni Kothari

It's Your Move, Wordfreak! book coverI stumbled across It’s Your Move, Wordfreak! on a list of Indian romances. The book has a lot going for it. It’s a cute premise—Alisha and Aryan meet online playing Scrabble. They really hit it off and decide to go on a semi-blind date. Alisha’s a smart and successful divorce lawyer who’s a little commitment-phobic due to her own parents’ failed marriage. Aryan’s a hot man-about-town who also happens to be a wildly successful architect.

The characters are interesting and likable enough. It’s all a nice setup for the story, but I think the fact that the date is the opening scene is a critical problem. For one, we don’t get to see any of the original courtship, which is a shame. We know from later that their online chats were witty and at times risqué. It would have been fun to see this. Then, the date itself goes very well. She meets his family and they love her. He meets hers and they love him. Etc. There’s basically no conflict at all until about halfway through the book. The seeds of later conflict are set in the first half, sure (Aryan has issues with his father and Alisha has a difficult client). But everything goes swimmingly until a sudden breakup. That’s where things finally really get started.

Once that happened, the book got more compelling because it finally felt like things were happening. (Reading it was kind of an interesting lesson in plotting. Even though lots of ”stuff” happened in the first half, it didn’t feel that way because of the lack of conflict.) The subplots are interesting and get resolved nicely. As I mentioned, the characters are good—they’re compelling and believable and I definitely rooted for them once things started going wrong.

I did have to make some allowances for cultural differences, especially because one of the subplots has to do with domestic violence, and it’s just not handled the same way it would be in the US. Something happens to Alisha at one point and Aryan’s and the others’ reactions were hard for me to stomach. His ultimate response was to sort out the problem with old-fashioned testosterone-fueled violence, with some Indian bribery thrown in for good measure. Still, the novel stayed fairly cute as that was somewhat glossed over.

In summary, this book could easily appeal to fans for English romance set in India (Mumbai to be specific). Just beware a slow start.

Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde

Queens of Geek book coverQueens of Geek is technically a YA romance, not something I usually review here (generally they’re too tame, but I made an exception because it was what I read this week and the characters are all eighteen so it could be considered New Adult, which I would review here). So.

As the title implies, there are some serious geek themes in this book. First of all, it’s set at “SupaCon,” a fictional ComicCon, that’s in San Diego, I think. It’s about three best friends from Melbourne, Australia making the journey to the US for the first time. It’s narrated by the two women, Charlie and Taylor.

Charlie’s an upcoming movie star with a popular video blog. Her parents are from China, though her race has no relevance to the story from what I could see. It just makes everything more realistic, as Australia is diverse, too. Charlie also has pink hair and is bi, though her last relationship was with her male co-star, making it a very public one. The breakup was painful and also public and she’s a little gun-shy now. She has a crush on another up-and-coming star, Alyssa, who’s also going to be at SupaCon.

Although Taylor is one of Charlie’s best friends, they aren’t very alike—Taylor is shy and anxiety-riddled. She’s also on the spectrum, having been diagnosed with Asperger’s only a few months earlier. But she’s hoping to step a bit out of her comfort zone at SupaCon, even if she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t have a lot of confidence in general, but especially body confidence because she’s not some stereotypical sexy mama. She’s a little “curvy.” She credits Charlie with helping her to avoid falling down the well of self-loathing.

The third friend is Jamie, who also happens to be the guy Taylor’s been in love with for ages. Not that she’s going to say anything, because she doesn’t want to ruin their friendship, which she values dearly. The friends all plan to move to LA in the fall. Taylor and Jamie have applied to UCLA and Charlie is moving there for her career.

A lot of reviewers have admired this book for its positive messages about women and girls. Throughout the book, they support, protect, and help each other out. And it is great, since a lot of books show a more negative view of female relationships. At times, I did think the book got so caught in all the good it was trying to do that the story itself suffered. Nothing ever got too dire—things mostly went at least okay for the characters.

Also, I have to mention that this book has some of the best two-way communication I’ve ever seen, even between Taylor and Jamie. Much of the dialogue could be sample conversations in a self-help book about how to communicate effectively. People say what they feel and what they mean and they actually understand each other. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I noticed it.

Charlie and Taylor are both good characters, though I think Taylor is a little more complex and developed than Charlie. This is probably because her anxiety is explored in great depth. Jamie isn’t as developed as the other two, which I thought was a bit of a shame. I’d liked to have seen more of him. He’s also Hispanic and originally from Seattle but we don’t get much of him except to see how supportive he is of Taylor.

For those who live in geekdom, this book’s a dream. There are so many pop culture references that you’ll have to appreciate it. I’m not as in the mix as I used to be, but even I got a lot of the references. Overall, this was an enjoyable read with a lot of positive representation of things that frequently get a pass in the romance world. Still, it was light and fun.

A Distant Heart by Sonali Dev

A Distant Heart book coverI enjoyed Dev’s first three books and was looking forward to this one. It features two minor (but important) characters from A Change of Heart, so I was excited to see their story.

Kimi was confined to a sterile room for most of her childhood. As a result, she doesn’t really have friends—except for the boy who clean bird crap off the side of the house. Rahul lost his father at fourteen and became the man of the house. Kimi’s father is a wealthy ex-Bollywood star and because Rahul’s father died protecting him, he tries to help Rahul’s family out. But Rahul is stubborn and doesn’t like the handouts, so he does work around Kimi’s house (”The Mansion,” as he calls it). 

Their friendship develops over time and although Kimi is clearly in love with him, he’s holding back for some reason. She doesn’t know why and it frustrates her. When the book opens, Kimi has recently had a heart transplant—and professed her love for Rahul and been shot down. But for some reason, a particularly vile gangster who ran a black market of organs from people he had killed has it out for her. As Rahul is a police officer, he ends up protecting her and they get out of Dodge. There’s more to it than escape, but I won’t give that away. Still, it forces them to be together even though Kimi told him to stay away after he rejected her. 

This one is more or less a romantic suspense. But I’m not sure it’s all the way there, partially because of Dev’s chosen narrative style. It’s a little different from her others because it relies much more heavily on flashback in order to show the development of Kimi and Rahul’s early friendship. That may be the reason that the book was slow to get going for me. I read her others fairly quickly, but I was only doing a chapter or two a night with this one until I got about a quarter in. But then it picked up.

Anyone who’s read the others, particularly A Change of Heart, will enjoy this one. You don’t have to have read her others, but I think you’d get more out of it if you have. 

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory

Wedding Date book coverThere’s been a fair bit of hype about The Wedding Date. So I went into it wondering if the book would live up to it. I think it does.

The main reason the book was so hyped up is that it features a black heroine and white hero. They’re definitely not the first multiracial couple to people romances, but this is the book that sort of broke through. Probably because it’s good (though I’ve read other good ones too—chalk it up to luck). And it addresses the race issue directly but doesn’t hit you over the head with it. The issues are sort of subtle and cleverly integrated with the plot. Also, I should mention that there aren’t that many romances featuring black heroines, regardless of the race of the hero. So seeing a book like this going mainstream is exciting. I hope it’s the beginning of a trend because I love reading about different kinds of people.

Alexa is chief of staff to Berkeley’s mayor and she has a lofty goal at the beginning of the book: to get a new program for at-risk youth going. She’s got to first convince the mayor and even after that, she’ll have to deal with the council of mostly privileged people. Drew’s goal at the beginning of the book is more mundane: survive the wedding of his ex-girlfriend and work buddy. Awkward. And he’s even in the wedding. Alexa and Drew meet when they get stuck in an elevator at the hotel the wedding party is staying in. Alexa’s heading up to visit her sister with a snack haul, and she and Drew teasingly fight over her cheese and crackers. By the time the power comes back on, Alexa is going to be Drew’s date for the wedding since his bailed.

Their chemistry’s great and it goes where you’d think it might (and good for Alexa—she was due). Neither of them has any intention of making this a long-term thing, but they start up a long-distance relationship anyway, flying back and forth (he’s in LA). Initially they spend time only with each other, but the longer it goes on, the more entrenched in each other’s lives they get. Eventually, Alexa goes to party with Drew at one of his ex-girlfriend’s houses. Alexa, who is “curvaceous,” is intimidated by all the beautiful, thin white women (who are also mostly blonde). I loved that part because I could so relate—I’ve never been one of the beautiful people either.

Race comes up several other times in the course of their relationship. First off, she asks Drew if she’ll be the only black person at the wedding. It hadn’t even occurred to him. Later, she cracks a joke about coffee and skin color and Drew reacts like a lot of white people would—he’s awkward and apologetic. The most significant moment is when they’re discussing the program she’s trying to get started in Berkeley. She has to school Drew on why it’s different when brown kids get up to the same shenanigans white kids get away with, with maybe a slap on the wrist. Not so for the brown kids. Another thing Drew just hadn’t thought of. It’s clear that he’s a good guy at heart, just kind of oblivious of the privilege his whiteness (and maleness and money) has granted him throughout life. The way we know he’s decent is that he listens to Alexa when she explains these things to him, rather than getting defensive. So there’s a lot of serious stuff in there, but there are also plenty of funny and light moments, too.

There was one thing that I found a little lacking in the book: the love scenes. They were basically nonexistent. Well, that’s not quite true—but there were few details. We get a little of the foreplay, but then we get told more or less what happens between one sentence and another. I’m used to a play-by-play. And I miss that because I actually think what they do in the bedroom (or wherever) really does matter to the story. But plenty of people will be more than satisfied with what’s there.

So, if you want a nice contemporary with an interesting storyline involving two smart and successful people, you’ve got it in The Wedding Date.

Night Song by Beverley Jenkins

Night Song book coverThis is Jenkins’ first novel, the one that the publishing world didn’t know what to do with and amazed everyone. A story about post-Civil War black people? What? Who’d want to read that.

Apparently loads of people.

It was also my first Jenkins novel, even though I’ve been hearing about her for a while. And when I was at RT, she came into the hotel restaurant while I was having breakfast and stood about 10 feet from me, which was kind of cool.

Specifically, the book is set in 1882. But the prologue occurs 18 years earlier, when 9-year-old Cara Lee Henson watches her free grandfather killed by Union soldiers who beat him to death for not pointing them to a master he didn’t have. Apparently that happened some back then. The Civil War was clearly more complicated than Good vs. Evil. I’d say it was more Kinda-Okay-Sometimes vs. Evil.

Jenkins infuses the novel with history. And actually, the bulk of the book takes place during (or on the cusp of, depending on the historian you choose) what’s considered the nadir of post-Civil War race relations in the U.S. So there is a lot of interesting history that most Americans aren’t familiar with to convey. Some reviews I’ve seen complain about the amount of historical information included in the book, but I enjoyed it. Jenkins has really done her research and it’s interesting to learn more about the post-Civil War period all while reading a good story.

Cara is a 27-year-old Oberlin-trained schoolteacher working in a small town in Kansas. Two years before the story starts, she had a run in with an arrogant—but highly attractive—soldier named Chase Jefferson in Topeka. So she’s shocked to see him leading the procession of the arrival of the Tenth Cavalry, a famous all-black Army unit. She hadn’t known he was that high in rank and certainly never expected to see him again, despite the fact that she hadn’t stopped thinking about him.

Chase, for his part, hasn’t been able to stop thinking about Cara, either. Things proceed from there, with a lot of back and forth between them until Cara finally caves. But it’s not all roses after that (it wouldn’t be a romance if it were).

For me, the historical nature bugs me like historicals always do. The guy’s a womanizer until he meets this wonderful and feisty virginal woman, who totally changes his habits and mindset. She suffers from the strict moral expectations everyone around her forces her to meet (or try to meet), while he cavorts however he wants. And when he marries her, he owns her and she’s okay with that. And there’s loads of prostitution that’s more or less acceptable. I know this is historically accurate, but reading about it stresses me out a little. However, if you’re a fan of historicals, you’re used to it.

One other little thing that I should mention is that Jenkins is a head-hopping writer (we get into multiple characters’ heads in the same scene, in this case just Cara and Chase). Nora Roberts does this, too, so obviously this is an acceptable thing to millions of readers. I always find it jarring.

Still, Night Song is an interesting novel focusing on the late 19th century, a period a lot of historical romance readers might not have been exposed to. So it’s probably worth giving it a read. Plus, it’s by a legend of the genre and if you’re a romance reader, you should have read Jenkins.

The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev

Bollywood Bride book coverAlthough I previously reviewed A Bollywood Affair (the sequel to this one), this is the one I read first. And it really sucked me in, with its troubled characters and their fascinating backstory (they were so angsty that they could have almost fit in in a YA novel).

It starts with Ria, a Bollywood star living in Mumbai, who’s got some kind of past in Chicago that’s hinted at in the first chapter. She also apparently went through a year when she was very young where she didn’t talk at all, until a boy named Vikram charmed her into talking. Of course, he’s the hero.

In the first chapter, she gets a call saying that the cousin she’d basically grown up with in Chicago is getting married and she needs to go “home” for the wedding. She feels the obligation even though it will bring her back into contact with people she betrayed, especially Vikram.

Since she spent most of her childhood effectively being raised by her aunt and uncle in Chicago, Ria does go back for her cousin’s wedding. The wedding and preparations for it take up most of the book and they’re fun because they’re so involved and different from western traditions. Almost all of Ria’s and Vikram’s interactions occur with that as the backdrop. While in Chicago, Ria kind of escapes her identity as a Bollywood star and becomes just one of the family again, though it’s not a complete break. Life in India interferes to cause trouble, which makes for good story.

Watching Ria and Vikram figure out how to come together—Vikram has to learn to forgive her and she has to figure out how to forgive herself, as well as truly come clean about why she left—was great, because there is so much conflict there. Vikram is understandably really pissed off, because when they were young and he thought they would soon get married, she just up and left him without any explanation. He’s still mad and bitter. One thing that made him less likable than he might otherwise have been was that while I definitely got his anger, he should have given Ria the benefit of the doubt, especially as a more mature adult. He should have know that there was a reason she left, even if he couldn’t fathom what it was. But still, he’s believable and it gives him a good flaw.

The book is full of little details that really bring the setting and characters to life. Ria is a great, troubled character who has a lot to overcome. Her backstory is heartbreaking, and although many of the choices she’s made (and makes) maybe aren’t the best, we definitely understand why she makes them. Vikram is also a good character. He dealt with ultimate betrayal and made the best of things. Additionally, the background cast is great, with lots of parents, aunties, uncles and more, all colorful and realistic (also, a little stereotypical at times, but that’s forgivable). Overall, this is an interesting book steeped in Indian culture that western readers will still be able to understand, all while providing a satisfying love story with a believable HEA.