Although this book is printed in the larger, non-mass-market form usually reserved for non-romance novels, I feel like it qualifies as a romance, even if it’s a little different from many of Higgins’s more clearly branded romances.

Harper James is a slightly cynical divorce attorney, though she genuinely views herself as a realist. She’s not entirely wrong, but she is a little more abrasive than a typical Higgins heroine. She’s successful and tries to not think about the mistake that was her first and only marriage. She’s thirty-four now and is ready for a husband and kids. She thinks her current boyfriend, Dennis, will fit the bill.

Dennis feels otherwise. Why change a good thing? After he gives her a soft rejection (no need to break up), Harper finds out that her little sister is marrying Harper’s ex-husband’s younger brother and she’s going to have to go to the wedding. This means she’ll see Nick for the first time in twelve years. She’s not looking forward to it at all, as can be understood.

Once at the wedding, things get complicated. Harper’s still mad at Dennis for rejecting her, she’s finding the sizzle between her and Nick hasn’t exactly faded, and she’s desperate to keep her sister from marrying a man she’s known for all of four weeks. When an airport snafu leaves Harper stranded in Montana after just having amicably split from Dennis, Nick “rescues” her by offering to let her ride across the country with him in his spiffy Mustang. Thus begins an amusing road trip. Higgins captures much of the fun of driving across the northern middle states.

Harper and Nick dance around each other for a while, not really addressing the problems that drove them apart in the first place. They’re each frustrated with the other, but also enjoying the company to a degree. Eventually they make it to the east coast. And eventually they do address their issues.

As you can imagine, Harper and Nick’s romance isn’t the only storyline in the book. Of course there’s Dennis, Harper’s sister’s marriage, her gruff father and effusive stepmother, a colleague dealing with a cheating wife, and, significantly, Harper’s mother (who abandoned her at thirteen). There are a lot of funny moments in the book, though it’s still a serious enough endeavor. Harper has some major emotional baggage to take care of.

I really enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone who likes a heavier romances, even if you need the light moments.

99 Percent Mine is Thorne’s followup to her very successful debut, The Hating Game. I was really looking forward to it because I quite enjoyed The Hating Game.

The book features Darcy Barrett, a tough woman with a bum heart. Darcy is very different from the heroine in The Hating Game, which I liked (a lot of authors write the same character over and over). Darcy’s a photographer and bartender with a habit of traveling the world. We don’t know why at first, but we soon learn it’s because she’s in love with her and her twin brother’s childhood friend, Tom Valeska, who she needs to get away from. Because he’s got a fiancé who’s perfect.

The setup for the book is that Darcy and her brother (Jamie) have inherited their grandmother’s cottage and have been ordered to remodel and sell it. Enter Tom, who’s a general contractor just starting out. This will be his first big job. Darcy is currently living in the cottage while she waits to head off to international locations (as soon as she can find her missing passport, that is). Jamie’s living elsewhere and he and Darcy have had some kind of falling out. Although it takes a little while, Darcy finds out Tom’s single again and she throws herself at him. He rejects her and from then on out, she thinks he’s not interested even though his behavior makes it very unclear whether that’s true or not.

Once Tom starts on the house, Darcy inserts herself as though she’s on his crew. I think the remodeling makes for an interesting backdrop for the story (this may be because I’m going through some house remodeling myself…).

Darcy isn’t necessarily easy to like. She’s definitely quirky and interesting but she exhibits some frustrating behavior, like not taking her rather serious heart condition very seriously. I’m also a little confused about the role of Jamie in the story—he comes off as a bit of a jerk and doesn’t seem to need to be there, in my humble opinion. Tom himself is interesting—he’s difficult to read. Like, he seems a little hot and cold toward Darcy but without his point of view, I can’t figure out why or what his real motivations are.

Still, this is a fun and I think unique read. I’ll be honest—I don’t think it’s as good (especially emotionally engaging) as The Hating Game was, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth checking out. I’m also very curious to see what Thorne does next.

Dating-ish is the second-to-last book in Reid’s Knitting in the City series. It features Marie and brings back a secondary character from Happily Ever Ninja, Fiona’s neighbor Matt. The guy Fiona used to babysit.

Marie is definitely sick of online dating, especially after her latest bad date with a guy named Derek. When she encounters him at her knitting group (he’s there to go running with one of the other men), she discovers his name’s Matt, not Derek. She also learns he’s an academic focusing on creating compassionate AI in the form of a robot. Then he manages to insult her and it looks like it’s impossible they’ll ever connect. But when Marie—a journalist—thinks of a story idea that he can help her with, she effectively forces him to do so.

Thus begins a weird relationship that turns into a kind of weird friendship. Marie’s story idea is a series involving relationship-related robots as well as relationship-related personal services. There are some wild services out there, including cuddling, dry humping, and orgasmic meditation. She and another journalist work on the series, experiencing these services (including escort service but not going as far as prostitution). Meanwhile, she’s also working on the robot stories and getting to know Matt better and better. Eventually, she finds herself totally smitten with him even though he’s told her he isn’t interested. It’s definitely going to be an uphill battle.

The book is full of computer and AI jokes and banter that should make you laugh. Marie and Matt are both complex characters with their own issues to deal with. And the cast of secondary characters, which has grown as the series has progressed, is charming as usual. At the end, we also get a taste and Kat and Dan’s story that book 7 is dedicated to. Overall, Dating-ish is another successful book from Reid that I’m glad I read. Fans of hers will have to read it.

I stumbled across this book because of the STEM-association—the main character is a freshman at MIT in the prologue and a fresh graduate at the opening of the main book. Her degree is in computer science, so I figured I’d like reading about her. And I did.

After getting stood up by her boring sometimes-date during her freshman year, Melody hooks up with Jeremy, who’s passing through visiting friends. They get along and he gives her his number in case she’s ever in LA. A few years pass and she’s looking at a few job opportunities. She interviews for one in LA and meets up with Jeremy, only to find out that he’s got a girlfriend. After she accepts the job, she learns that his mom is the CEO of the company that hired her even though he swears he didn’t intervene to get her hired. They become friends and Melody becomes even better friends with his girlfriend, Lacey. It takes a while for Jeremy to become a free agent again and even long for them to reconnect on a more meaningful level.

The book’s billed as a rom-com, and it is very funny, although you might have to be in-the-know to get all the jokes. But there’s plenty of clever and self-effacing humor to keep the less technically-informed reader amused.

Her mom says:

“Don’t be silly, baby. It’s not like it’s rocket surgery.”

When Melody’s at an fancy shindig with Jeremy, the author tells us:

It was a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman with a much wealthier and more successful boyfriend, must be an opportunist angling to marry into money.

I just loved that. And when they finally managed to get together again for the first time since MIT, it’s funny:

…he spun her around and carried her toward the bedroom.

It took them a while to get there, because they got distracted a couple times along the way. She nearly had her way with him up against the wall in the hallway. After that there was a minor collision with a lamp, but she never liked that lamp anyway, so whatever.

I have to say, this book is so tame that I struggled to really think about it as a romance. I know there’s such a thing as sweet romance, and this qualifies, but it really felt more like contemporary YA with a love story featuring older characters. I’m not saying this as a criticism, but it is a thing I felt. So. I would have liked more sexual tension, personally. You can see what I mean in that last passage—that’s about as risqué as it gets.

Anyway, I did enjoy the short book and will pick up the next two in the series. If you like nerdy heroines, check it out yourself.

This is the first book in Higgins’ Gideon’s Cove series. This book won the RITA from the Romance Writers of America in 2008, which I think it deserved. It’s another solid Higgins emotion-fest.

Maggie hasn’t had much luck in love in her adult life, even if she is a successful diner owner. In high school, everything was great with her boyfriend Skip. But Skip turned into a jerk after college, when he came back to town with a new girlfriend in tow—all without even bothering to break up with Maggie. She was heartbroken and humiliated. Then there’s the whole falling-in-love-with-a-Catholic-priest thing. This whole tale is told in the prologue and it’s funny and you really sympathize with her and how she missed what his profession was. Totally not her fault. Of course, blabbing to everyone in town about having met someone maybe wasn’t her smartest move, but whatever. Her crush on him is still there at the beginning of the story proper and it provides awkward and amusing moments.

Maggie had a few encounters with Malone (first name unknown) and they haven’t gone well. She’s sort of scared of him as he’s very gruff. But when he saves her from an awkward situation she’s been put in, she starts to look at him a little differently. And when he surprises her with a kiss—which she is surprised to enjoy tremendously—she really starts to think of him in a different light. They start hooking up, basically, and have some serious ups and downs, especially after she overhears something that makes her think he cheated on her. Naturally they get on the same page eventually, but it’s at the very end of the book. More pages of suffering than in a lot of romances (which I appreciate).

There was one thing I felt was a little unresolved. One was that Malone got really mad at her for “taking care of him” one day—cooking for him, cleaning his house up, etc.—after he’d been dragged off his boat into the sea. I never understood why he was mad at her about that specifically (I got that he was in a bad mood). I probably just missed something.

Anyway, Higgins again delivers an amusing and emotionally-drive story told entirely from Maggie’s perspective. I’m happy to report that Maggie isn’t too silly—some might think her ongoing crush on Father Tim is silly, but I get how sometimes you just can’t control who you like, so it worked for me. She’s got her requisite bad dates in there and the complicated but overall loving family. As one of Higgins’ earlier books, it’s low on the steam scale.

Overall, this is a good book that any fan of contemporary romance would enjoy. If you haven’t already read this one (I know it came out a decade ago…), go for it.

One of the coolest things about Reid’s Knitting in the City series is that each book is very different from the others, which makes it fun to read. 

Happily Ever Ninja features Fiona and Greg, who have been married for well over ten years at the opening of the book. That is, of course, unusual for a romance. And maybe this isn’t truly a romance novel for that reason, but it still is part of the series canon and anyone who likes the series will want to read it.

I read the prequel, Ninja at First Sight (#4.5), first, as is recommended. So I was already familiar with Fiona and Greg’s backstory. I think the book can still be enjoyed without reading the prequel, but if you’re a series purist don’t skip it. 

In Happily Ever Ninja, Greg is always gone because he is a petroleum engineer who works for a company that goes around the world helping to clean up processes at oil rigs. At the beginning of the story, he’s in South Africa and surprises Fiona by appearing home for 24 hours one day. They go hang out with the knitting crew and their significant others and come home and crash. Because Fiona is exhausted, being effectively a single mom of two active kids. Greg leaves the next morning. 

Three days later, Fiona finds out he’s been kidnapped. She also finds out he’s been lying about where he has been working. So Fiona, who oh yeah happens to be a former CIA operative, heads off to Nigeria to rescue him, all with the help of Quinn and some of her other friends. She gets to him and then the plan falls apart because of Greg being a bit arrogant and obstinate. Now they have to figure out how to get out of Nigeria safely without Fiona getting arrested for treason since she was explicitly told not to go. 

Fortunately, things do work out. But then Fiona and Greg have to work out their issues with each other after they’re safe and sound. It’s interesting to see how that happens in a mature relationship instead of what we usually get in romance novels—brand new, honeymoon-phase relationships.

This is another winner in the series and not one you’ll want to miss. 

Since I’m having so much trouble keeping up with my romance reading (not to mention my own novels… sigh), I thought I’d pick the shortest romance on my shelf. Ninja at First Sight seemed perfect, even if it could be read after the book it’s a prequel for (which I haven’t read yet). I still prefer reading books in chronological story order.

This novella was, of course, cute and entertaining (it is Penny Reid, after all). Fiona is a college freshman with an unusual past—she was formerly an up-and-coming Olympic gymnast, had cancer at fourteen, and didn’t go to high school but is in advanced classes. Greg is a British 23-year-old who served in the US Marines (it’s complicated). They meet in the dorms and although there’s clear chemistry at first, it seems impossible—Greg’s got a girlfriend and is desired by all girls and women in his vicinity and Fiona is a totally inexperienced hermit. She wouldn’t seem to have a chance even if she was interested in him. She tells herself she’s not.

I would calibrate my smiles and interactions to friendship or acquaintance level. No big deal.

Fiona is really cool. I always like a smart heroine, but she’s also a little quirky. She’s not shy even though she spends most her time in her room. She’s just inexperienced with all social situations, not only romantic ones. Greg is less obviously appealing at first, but he’s clever and funny and the two of them engage in several loaded debates, at least one witnessed by half the floor (which she wins).

Greg’s pretty cocky but he’s adorable when he gets drunk and goes to Fiona’s door and gives her the first real clue that he’s interested in her. Knowing that she’s never been kissed, he tells her he wants to be her first everything. And he really sees her, one of the few people to do so.

“I can’t stop thinking about you. I saw you during the first week of class last semester, and, Christ, you’re gorgeous, but you’re so… different, sad… ethereal. You walked right past me for months, but I saw you every time. I see the sorrow in you… or maybe you don’t even know…”

When Fiona thinks about what she loves about him, it shows how complex they both are:

I loved his goodness and wrongness, his unwavering priorities and mulishness. I loved his patience—granted, I also hated his patience—and I loved his wit.

This book isn’t as steamy as some of Reid’s others, but that doesn’t take away from its appeal. Even though there’s just some pretty heavy-duty kissing, Fiona’s experience of it is worth reading. The story’s simple as it’s short, but the characters are multi-dimensional and compelling and dialogue is as entertaining as ever. This is a definite must for fans of Reid.