There was a lot of buzz about this book—I saw it on several high-profile writers’ recommendation lists. So I finally bought it even though it’s still in hardback. I pulled it off the precarious stack of TBR books in my bedroom and cracked it open.

And I’m glad I did. Although it wasn’t at all what I expected. Let’s face it—a lot of romances (even exceptionally good ones) are a little fluffy. People have problems, but you wonder if maybe they aren’t overreacting just a little to be swearing off relationships for that particular reason. But in this book, I completely bought Cassie’s aversion to relationships, and I also completely bought (and loved) her aversion to all things girly. I also liked that she does not forsake everything she worked for to become some super-feminine flower at the end. She’s still her badass self.

Because Cassie is a badass. She’s a tough firefighter/paramedic who dives boldly into dangerous situations when it involves the opportunity to save someone. She’s only 5’5” (if I’m remembering correctly), but she works out and is very strong. I mean, she can dead-lift 200 pounds and do twenty pull-ups.

The book opens with Cassie at an awards ceremony, where she’s supposed to get an award for rescuing a bunch of kids from a schools in a river. This goes a little wonky when the guy they send out to give her the award turns out to be someone from her past who had done a great deal of damage to her (she doesn’t tell us what he’d done, exactly, but I guessed right) and then chooses that particular moment to grab her ass while they’re behind the podium. This is not a good choice on his part, because she goes ballistic and beats him over the head with the award.

Somehow she escapes punishment from this (she rightly guesses he won’t press charges). But the city wants her to apologize to him and she refuses. So her choices are to be fired, or to transfer to a fire station far, far away. As it happens, the latter works out well because her mom has requested that she go live with her in Massachusetts. So she does, but not before getting some advice from her (female) captain:

If your captain says to run a mile, run two. If he wants you to dead-lift one fifty, do one seventy-five.

Don’t even act afraid. Don’t even hesitate. Don’t ever admit when you don’t understand.

Don’t back down from a challenge, … and if you go up against somebody, make damn sure to win. No fear! If your hands start to shake, sit on them.

New rules: Never admit to being hurt. Pain is for the weak.

Don’t have feelings.

Typical. Cassie’s captain wasn’t wrong about what she’d face as the first woman firefighter in this fire station. It’s rough. A rookie starts the same day she does and they bond a little, but she keeps her distance because she finds herself attracted to him and knows that’s the biggest risk of all for a woman firefighter. But they spend a lot of time together, both getting pranked and on more productive things like training. She faces a lot of trouble, with the pranking, the actual secret harassment from one of the guys (it takes a while to figure out which one), and her new captain being a real hardass. But eventually she earns the respect of the crew, by following her old captain’s instructions—for the most part. She doesn’t manage to quite keep away from the rookie. But then everything appears to be lost when the rookie gets injured in a fire. I won’t give away how that exactly works out because it surprised me.

If you like genuinely tough characters, especially a woman trying to make it in a male-dominated profession, then you will like this. But even if you’re just looking for a tame romance (heat-wise) with some real struggles, you should also appreciate this book. I really enjoyed it and recommend it without reservation.

I know I’ve been seriously neglecting this blog. I have been busy and haven’t read a romance lately, so I’ve had nothing to review. But I think I’m over my reading slump, so I’m going to try to do a review at least every three weeks. Starting with one from my favorite author this week.

Moonlighter is the first in a new series, but it stars Eric Bayer, who you may remember from the Brooklyn Bruisers team. His brother and father run a top-notch security company (this also featured in at least one earlier book, too) that occasionally exhibits quasi-legal behavior. While he’s off from hockey, Eric gets guilted into being a fake boyfriend on a short trip to Hawaii for one of their clients.

Alex Engels is the CEO of a big cable company that is expanding into new territory (technology-wise). She’s young and she and Eric have a bit of a history. As kids, they spent a summer together and had a lot of fun, and when they ran into each other as adults, Eric tried to talk to her and she dismissed him coldly because she thought he was hitting on her and didn’t recognize him. So it’s a little awkward when they meet again in the security company office.

This book was full of unexpected twists. The reason that she needs a fake boyfriend is because she’s pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, who hit her so she had broken up with him, and he’s going to be at the conference in Hawaii. But things get more surprising from there. The technology she’s put everything into is a smart speaker called the Butler, which is smarter than any other smart speaker out there, but more importantly, it’s also got the best security on the market. Things go a bit haywire from there, in ways I didn’t expect. It actually almost turns into a romantic suspense after the first half.

The chemistry between the two is hot, and Eric is such a great guy that you can’t help but adore him, even when his first declaration of love is quite juvenile. Alex herself is very cool because she’s worked her way up (sort of—it was her dad’s company, but she didn’t exactly start off as CEO) and she regularly has to deal with the sexism of the industry and the world in general, which she does with style.

Especially if you’re a fan of Bowen’s hockey romances, check out this new series. But any contemporary fan should enjoy it.   

I don’t know what’s going on, but I didn’t read as much as normal over the past year, so my consumption of romance and other adult contemporary is way down. Looking back on the year, I only reviewed seventeen books, when I used to read a romance every week. I’m hoping I can get back to normal. I did still manage to reach my Goodreads challenge—110 books—but a good chunk of those were nonfiction that was work-related, and the others were mostly young adult (I write YA under a different pen name).

Anyway. So I decided to pick the four books that stayed with me the most from this year’s reviews.

One of my earliest reviews, done in January, was for Catch of the Day, by Kristan Higgins. She is one of my favorite authors because she handles character emotions—and consequently reader emotions—so adeptly. It’s just hard not to be moved. In this book, the main character has an awkward and pointless crush on a priest (probably because she knows nothing will ever happen and she’s trying to keep her heart safe) when she gets to know a local and very taciturn fellow who turns out to be a pretty great guy. I’m not saying it’s not a little cliche, but the characters stuck with me.

Another book that really moved me was Superfan by Sarina Bowen, which I reviewed in July. She’s another of my favorite authors because of her masterful ability to handle emotions. When I reviewed it, I said this was one of her voiciest books yet because she does such a great job with two characters in very different places (both very successful in different careers) who of course have very different ways of speaking (and thinking). Although there are some dark things that happen, overall the book is one of her lighter ones.

The second-to-last book I reviewed, Good Luck with That by Kristan Higgins, was another of my favorites. This one isn’t a strict romance, falling into my non-genre category of contemporary adult fiction, but there are two romances that take place in the story. This is a really deep book dealing with body image in a way that I found so powerful. And it’s no coincidence that Higgins makes it on the list twice—her characters experience the ups and downs of emotion that keep the reader going.

The last book I’ll mention is The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai, which was the last book I reviewed, in November. This one is kind of interesting—I didn’t really relate to the heroine, but I liked her and rooted for her. And I especially liked the hero, who was a really good guy who cared about a variety of things that made him very sympathetic.

And there you have my favorite four from the books I reviewed this year.

Although I’ve read Alyssa Cole before, I found out about this book because it was selected by a local library for a summer romance book club. I actually didn’t make it to the book club meeting because I didn’t manage to finish the book in time (me=busy) so I don’t know what everyone else thought of it. But I can tell you what I thought of it—it was great. Now, I love Scotland, although my taste leans more toward Glasgow, but Edinburgh will do.

American Portia Hobbs is a hot mess. At least that’s what her family would have you (and her) believe. I actually could really relate to her hotmessedness (I’m declaring that a word). She loves to learn and has flitted around the academic world and real world while soaking up experiences, none of which have given her a career as she approaches thirty. Her most recent thing is that she is going to be an apprentice to a master swordmaker in Scotland.

Tavish McKenzie is the swordmaker in question. He’s a bit on the gruff side and when she first gets there, he doesn’t like her because she’s rich and he assumes she’s pompous and all the other things that go along with being rich. Also, as it happens, he’s very attracted to her, and he blames her for this and avoids her.

This gets her apprenticeship off to a rocky start. It’s hard to learn to make a sword from someone who refuses to spend time with you. And unfortunately, this really kicks Portia’s self-doubt into high gear. This is despite the fact that she already has done a lot for the armory in terms of social media and other less metallic tasks. So when her expert skills dig up a ducal title for Tavish, things get interesting. She might know nothing about the peerage in Britain, but she does know something about behaving around rich people. It’s a start.

I really like Portia and her lack of self-confidence because it gives her a lot of room to grow (and lets me really relate to her). And Tavish is a good hero, too, because his growth from a grumpy self-described wanker to a caring person is totally believable (mostly because he was caring in the beginning and just had to learn to express himself a little better). One of my favorite quotes from the book is near the beginning, when Tavish’s younger brother says,

He’s always been like this, you know. I’m pretty sure my first words were ‘Mum, Tav is a right wanker, aye?’ And her reply was, ‘Yes, son. Su hermano is the one true wanker, the wanker to rule them all.’

The book has a lot of diversity in it, too, with Portia being black, Tavish’s mom Chilean, Tavish’s stepfather (the one he considers to be his true father) also black (if I recall, I think he was from somewhere in the Caribbean). This trend continues in the secondary characters, who aren’t as lily white as you might picture Scotland being (the book is being realistic).

Anyway, I really liked it and highly recommend it.

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.