The Misery of Anna's Caretaking Experience: A Mixed Bag of Emotions

I know this is a reality that a lot of people face and I do think that this is something that needs to be present in more stories. But it took too much away from the relationship development in this book and that sucks. Like I said earlier, Quan was characterized as such a fun-loving guy in previous books and I was interested to see how this life circumstance changed his perspective. But honestly, I didn't see what he saw in Anna. It is stated at one point in the book that he loves getting to know people's quirks and he likes accepting people for who they are. Which I guess is good, but it feels a little bit generic in the scope of a relationship to just say "oh yeah, I like quirks she's quirky, I'm gonna get with her". It didn't seem like our author went to any great lengths to convince us that these two characters should be together besides Kwan just being a good guy. Which I feel like is pretty unfair since we were really, really excited for his book in particular because he's so different than the heroes of the other books.

This book was such a mixed bag for me because I really did appreciate Anna's journey. I really loved seeing Anna get her autism diagnosis and how she felt comfortable in that. And I really did like how Helen Huang tackled certain aspects of family relationships. But personally, I think Quan deserved more page time in his own romance. Three stars is the best I can give it.

Now, I could certainly leave this video here and leave us on kind of a sour note, but I thought it would be fun instead to tell you what my top five romances of 2021 are. I'm gonna go quickly and then I'm gonna leave all of these five titles in the description down below with buy links if you are interested in picking any of these titles up.

First up, we have "Twice Shy" by Sarah Hogle. I've already talked about this book, but just loved the emphasis on mental health in this book. I also just loved how sweet it was. I love Wes and Mabel, and I think if you want a really good grumpy suntrain story, you're gonna love this book.

Next up on my list is "It Happens One Summer" by Tessa Bailey. I adore the story. I think Tessa Bailey writes some of the steamiest stories out there, and this is a Shit's Creek-inspired rom-com with an Alexis Rose-type heroine falling for a grumpy crab fisherman. It's definitely an opposite attract romance, a fish out of water romance, and it was a five-star for me.

Of course, with my glowing review of this book, I had to put Actor Age Eve Brown on this list again. Fantastic story. I love a grumpy sunshine story, I love the autism representation in this book, I love our plus-size heroine. Everything about this book was perfect to me. It was sweet, it was incredibly sexy, it made me blush. I don't know what more I can say. Pick it up. I know not everybody is but I am a huge sucker for friends-to-lovers romances and I really feel like people who meet on vacation by Emily Henry did a fantastic job.

This is going to be on so many best of lists, I'm sure, and it's definitely going to be in the Goodreads Choice Awards. So if for some reason you want to be caught up on that before it even comes out, before the nominees are announced in December, pick it up.

Technically, there's two books here because I couldn't decide, and I feel like they kind of have similar vibes. We have "The Soulmate Equation" by Christina Lauren again. I talked about this one, but if you haven't had luck with Christina Lauren though, you might want to give "The Love Hypothesis" by Ali Hazelwood a try.

From my understanding, this story started out as fan fiction and you can really tell in the best possible way. This is a trope-filled science-filled story, and you've got a lot of again grumpy-to-sunshine feels with a hero who has been pining for the heroine for two whole years. So if that interests you, if you want to see all of the delicious fanfiction trope goodness, I feel like you need to pick this book up.

I read against my better judgment, uh almost 33 of the hottest romances of 2021. I had a really good time doing this. Love making list videos. This is not my first rodeo, if you want to see any of my other list videos, I will link my playlist down in the description. I've done two other ones before also romance-related. Thanks so much for watching. I know this was a long video but thanks so much for watching. I love y'all so much and until next Sunday you\\n

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ensometimes you spend an entire year reading books about people getting it on and sometimes you bring those findings to the internet hello welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new my name is chandler and i read romance in today's video i'm going to be running through a goodreads list with you i found this list at the beginning of the year i was kind of on the hunt if i'm being 100 honest for a list of new and exciting romance titles to read for this coming year i feel like i'm always kind of behind on like what's hot and what's trendy so i took this list and i said i'm going to endeavor to read all 33 of these books and tell people my thoughts on them and you know what over the past eight months i have been reading all of these romances and now i am here to tell you my findings and tell you what books i think are worth your time what books are hot i'm going to be giving you a description giving you some ratings at the end of the video i'm going to be letting you know what my five favorite romances are of 2021 so i'm gonna be running through these in a month order so let's go ahead and start with january so for the month of january we have two books that came out on this list and sadly both of those books were three star reads for me just kind of middle of the road sort of mediocre honestly i haven't given much thought to either of these books since i finished reading them but i'm going to try to tell you about them right now first up we have shipt which is pitched as the un honeymooners by christina lauren me it's the hating game by sally thorne and sadly i don't think it lives up to either of these comparisons shipt is about henley and graham and they are co-workers at a cruise ship cruise line sort of business they have both been vying for a promotion and they are pitted against each other they already kind of hate each other and now they're vying for this promotion together and they have to come up with proposals on ways to get travelers to go on this galapagos islands cruise so they end up going on this cruise taking the crews together and seeing what could be improved and obviously while on this cruise graham and henley end up falling for each other despite their previous disdain for each other it wasn't a terrible read i feel like the chemistry between the characters was perfectly average perfectly fine i think my main issue with this title was that there was so much time spent on the business component that i don't think there was much time left for the romance i feel like the romance took a bit of a backseat though this was really pedaled as a romance more so than a i'm a bad business trying to get a promotion sort of thing especially near the end of the book i was very just uninvested i did not care about henley and her shitty boss certainly not a great situation to be in the situation she gets herself in but also it's like i just don't care three stars and then we have one of the books this year that i felt had one of the best premises that was unfortunately foiled by an extremely whiny heroine and fairly awkward pacing we have the ex talk by rachel lynn solomon x talk is a book about shay and shea has been working at this public radio station for about a decade she has her own program that she produces and she is kind of living life except for unfortunately her radio show is kind of failing even though she's had a great career at this place they kind of doubt her abilities at this point because the whole radio station is kind of failing it's not all her fault but she is having kind of a bad time and on top of that she's had some pretty rough luck in love of course we have someone who's going to come and disrupt everything we have dominic who is this younger guy up and coming recently graduated from i don't know i want to say grad school he's not like super young and he comes on the scene and he is super hot which is important and then he's also someone who wants to save and revive this failing public radio station he and shea come up with this idea that they are going to have a different sort of show going on right like not just a typical boring npr type public radio station show they're going to make something more akin to a podcast and it's going to be about exes who give relationship advice and who better than to play exes than dominic and shea who already don't like each other very much but of course over the course of this sort of radio show that they put on together that is wildly successful and does revive the radio station they do end up falling in love now i loved the premise of this this is such a cool idea i love that it has this sort of like podcast format built in and i was ready to see the relationship unfold between these two over the course of the run of the show but unfortunately i feel like there wasn't enough time spent in the really cool premise and instead we are taken out of the radio station really quickly so that these two can bond and get to know each other understand why that was done you want to get shay and dominic to know each other enough to where they could be convincing exes but a lot of the chemistry and tension between the two of them was built away from the radio show it was like here go to this remote cabin and learn about each other and then come back and i know that doesn't sound super jarring but when you're in the story it feels very strange to read about and i didn't absolutely love that definitely took away from the story and i wanted more of that podcast and then on top of that shay as a heroine was pretty frustrating to read about i felt like personally she whined she just whined too much and i understood at 30 she was looking for someone to love her but it seemed more like the way a teenager deals with these sort of problems she's consistently whining about how she loves men so much and they don't seem to love her back and i'm not saying again that that's an invalid complaint but the way in which she articulates these feelings to us as readers doesn't really make her a very sympathetic character it was hard to root for her as much as i really really wanted to enjoy this book and as much as i appreciated some of the representation here i sadly had to give this one three stars now the month of february was even more of a mixed bag we have some really high highs and really low lows and a ton of different books were published in february obviously because it's the month of love so i have quite a few romances to share with you up first we have makeup breakup by lily manon and um i will take insufferable heroines for 200 alex this book is the definition of the i fear that i have girl bossed too close to the sun audio from tick tock i could i just okay this story is about our heroine annika and she has made it her life's mission to put out an app onto the market to solve something that she saw as a problem i believe with her parents marriage if i am recalling correctly basically this app is going to function as a google translate for bad relationship communication so you hear your partner say something and you can kind of type it in and it'll translate what the emotions behind that statement are right and this app is called makeup before the start of our story though annika ends up hooking up with her arch nemesis at a tech conference and she doesn't really know that he's her arch nemesis at the time she figures this out later but hudson uh who i got every time i say that name i think of the mycene doll he is someone whose app is completely the antithesis of everything that annika stands for this app is essentially uber for breakups so you can call someone up to go break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend for you and annika sees so much wrong with this right and of course once she hooks up with hudson she never sees him again he ghosts her and now she is left bitter and angry that this playboy piss her off and unfortunately as luck would have it this is not the last time they meet hudson ends up coming back into annika's life in a very big way when he ends up moving into her office building and also competes with her for funding for her app now annika's app is kind of failing to be honest no one really cares about her app and hudson's app is like very much doing well because who doesn't want an app where you can get someone to break up with someone for you i mean that would make for some pretty memeable moments and as you can tell clearly the world is out to get annika or at least that's how she acts the entire book i really couldn't stand annika and knowing that this author also penned the y a title when the bolt met rishi i am not super surprised i am all for bad heroines but menons tend to be on the irrational and abrasive side annika was really unwilling to listen to reason and her holier than that attitude about hudson's app and how he can't be a good guy because he created this app it was it was a lot to read about and she kept harping on it time and time again even when she was starting to develop feelings for him it was like that was the main issue that she had rather than anything honestly meaningful it was like oh he must be a bad guy because he created this app okay but like he's showing you he's not exactly a bad guy so what are you like latching onto i'm not really getting it and really the final straw for me was that most of the relationship was kind of told to us rather than shown to us a lot of the backstory here is at this tech conference that we don't actually get to see and so it was really hard to root for annika because she was a lot to handle and hudson was a great guy and he deserved better so two stars much ado about you by samantha young after reading my friends reviews of this after finishing i was really surprised that no one seemed to be on board with this romance i feel like sometimes you just want to indulge in something a little bit silly and a little bit unrealistic is it just me i feel like i'm usually the heartless one but i seem to really enjoy this so this romance is about evie who's passed out for a promotion at work instead of trying to find solace in her current really high-powered position or trying to find a job elsewhere she decides she's going to drop everything quit her job and go and live in england and she's going to work at a bookshop and she's going to get free room and board for doing this seems a little bit unrealistic right off the bat right and uh it continues on in that vein so if that does not excite you don't think you're going to like this book i however was able to kind of overlook it i suspended my disbelief and i had a good time with this story so once evie gets there a bunch of shenanigans take place and she decides to insert herself into the lives of the villagers here and of course everything she touches turns to gold everybody ends up being super happy whenever evie is involved and while she's there she also meets a super hunky sheep herder who she bones down with in a barn and i gotta say that was definitely the highlight of the book it was very steamy despite the odd setting i don't think that this book is um realistic in any sense of the word i don't think that a lot of people are going to like our heroine because she is constantly sunshine but i did like this book i don't know something about it reading it in the summer on a rainy day it just worked for me i gave this book four stars and frankly i don't think this book deserves the hate that it gets so maybe pick this one up the love proof keep in mind that i scripted this video chronologically and i'm not going to go back and fact check whether this is true or not but upon finishing this book i really felt like i had found the worst book on this list and i i feel like i still stand by that after reading all of the books on this list this is insultingly bad like if i had had a physical copy of this book when reading i absolutely would have thrown it across the room because it's an insult to women i'm just gonna say it okay this story is about wayward physics prodigy sophie she graduated from pretty much every school she ever went to a little bit early and she has made it her life's mission to figure out the secrets of the universe she's a little bit non-traditional she definitely is very focused on what she wants and she ends up going to yale at kind of a young age to explore more in physics and explore all of these questions that she has now while sophie is there she ends up getting sidetracked from her life's mission by a man named jake when she falls for jake her whole life changes which is so refreshing to see right we love to see young people in love however there's a big butt there whenever sophie ends up falling for jake she forgets about her life's mission she forgets about pretty much anything but jake she becomes i don't want to say subservient to jake but she focuses so much on jake so much so that jake decides that he does not like sophie anymore this really focused passionate woman that he ends up falling in love with is no longer there because she no longer likes physics she just cares about him you know i guess that's kind of him sort of but the idea that someone would be so lost that they would give up everything for a single person is kind of insulting i mean i'm not saying it never happens but it was a little bit insulting given how focused sophie was how full of direction she was at the start of the story not only is it bad enough that she ends up getting dumped by jake the story gets worse from there so wind shake makes the discovery that sophie is no longer passionate about physics she's kind of given everything up for him he decides that he is going to take her life into his hands and dump her because her love is not simply enough she needs to be a full and interesting person for him to be with her so he dumps her and sophie ends up getting back on track getting her phd she ends up teaching at yale everything is going perfectly except for she ends up meeting jake's son because of course jake ends up moving on and finding love but sophie could never possibly find love with anyone else so she ends up meeting jake's son she teaches him she gets close with him because she realizes that he is the son of jake and then jake comes back to yale kind of old i think he's balding at this point and she ends up taking him back because he's like you know what you accomplished what i wanted you to accomplish and now you are good enough to be married to me i read that i read that entire book and i i'm not proud of that fact but i am proud enough of that fact that now i can tell you not to read this book the cover in my opinion is absolutely stunning and nothing about the synopsis leads you to believe that it would go down this path and i don't think it was the author's intent necessarily to be so blatantly insulting to women but i i felt pretty insulted if i'm being honest with you don't recommend it and honestly if you haven't heard about this book before this video just please forget that it ever existed one star moving on good food is that you wild brain yes it is uh okay finally good food we have miss beverly jenkins our queen of historical romance bringing us back from the dead after reading the love proof okay this historical is set in wyoming after the civil war and we have our two main characters we have spring who we learned about in another of beverly jenkins works one that i actually read so i was really excited to read this one with spring spring is this badass gun-wielding woman who's had some pretty bad luck with the men in her life besides her brother and she is not looking for any help she wants to live her life in solitude she has her own property she owns her own land and you know she's just living until one day garrett who is a reporter coming to interview her brother ends up on her land i want to say he's injured and she ends up helping him and that's the start of a beautiful romance my friends i loved this romance i love beverly jenkins writing because it is beautiful it's set in a place other than england which is fantastic not that england's a bad place but i love seeing historical set in other settings and on top of that her stories are so low angst that they feel like a warm hug you want to read these stories when you're in a warm bath when you need some comfort like these are the romances for those times and this one particularly worked for me because i loved seeing how garrett accepted every facet of spring she was very hesitant non-traditional for the day and she didn't want kids and garrett became totally okay with that because he wanted spring i love that i think that's awesome if you're someone who doesn't want babies yourself perhaps this is a story for you four stars the only way that i like my catfish is fried so it was hard to overlook the premise for first comes like gia our heroine is an influencer and she is constantly fighting her parents assumptions about what it means to be an influencer i think her siblings are all doctors and very you know successful in their own right and so she's constantly having to prove to her family that she is successful and on top of that she's also trying to build her brand she has really no time for love until one day she ends up getting dm'd on instagram by this up-and-coming bollywood star he's a part of a really successful bollywood family and gia is a big fan she instantly strikes up this relationship until she realizes that maybe the person she's messaging isn't actually the bollywood star now it is his official account so she's not quite that dumb but she does end up getting catfished she meets the real dave or dev dave ends up meeting gia at this party and he acts like he doesn't know who she is because he doesn't know who she is and she's pretty pissed about this at first she's just wondering like why is he acting like he doesn't know who i am like we've been talking all this time and then she quickly figures out that she's been catfished she tells the real dave about it and they end up embarking on this journey to figure out who's been catfishing her who has been taking over his social media accounts and messaging women without his knowledge in this process obviously they fall for each other this was a perfectly serviceable romance but i don't feel like it did anything particularly noteworthy i really really loved that we had a hijabi heroine and that both of our characters were from south asia but beyond the representation i don't have a lot to remark upon about this book a couple of months later and i feel like that says something about how impactful the story was overall for me again not terrible but nothing to write home about three stars honey girl much like honey this book was sweet but not totally my thing this story is about our heroine grace who has recently completed her phd i think she's like 28 at the start of the story and she is kind of struggling because she doesn't know what she wants to do what her next move should be she has a father who is really strict with her i believe he's in the military and he wants her to be the best at whatever she chooses to do and grace has felt that pressure she's internalized it and now she's kind of left with this feeling of imposter syndrome and she needs a break so she ends up going on this wild adventure to las vegas with some of her friends to celebrate her recent degree and there she ends up meeting her new wife yuki they end up getting married on this wild night in vegas and this is something that impacts the rest of grace's life pretty much they kind of don't really remember much of what happened that night but she has this warm feeling every time she talks to yugi and so she decides that she's just gonna go live in new york she's going to figure out her life there and the story is really a coming-of-age story about grace figuring out what she wants and kind of unpacking some of this pressure that she's put on herself and that family members have put on her there was a lot to like about this book i think the first thing that i really noticed about this story was the writing i love romance because it is so straightforward most of the time but this story actually really impressed me with how well the prose was written it was very lyrical and lush without being too purple and i really appreciated that i feel like it really worked for this particular story i also think that if you're someone in your 20s who is looking to figure out your life and you're kind of beyond that like initial college figured out thing i think this is a really good story a lot of us grow up at different paces and figure our out at different paces so to see someone at 28 still trying to figure themselves out still trying to figure out their next move was really refreshing and i think it's something that a lot of people could relate to but i think where i struggled with this book was ultimately the romance itself i think a few of my friends have mentioned this and they're goodreads reviews but the way that grace describes yuki was not something that i totally loved 100 of the time at the very beginning of the story she gives very like manic pixie dreamed girl descriptions of yuki which i felt like was a little bit unfair and i think some of that could be attributed to again that like lyrical writing just describing yuki in this kind of like beautiful ethereal sort of way but she is a real person so it would have been nice to kind of get that feeling up front add a little bit of reality into the story and also i think i would have just you know appreciated a little bit more focus on the romance in the book i feel like i liked the coming of age aspects of this book but i don't know that i would 100 categorize this as a romance it didn't feel it didn't feel as as swoony as i wanted it to be so three stars it's been a pleasure noni blake multiple pleasures all the possible all the conceivable pleasures is what our heroine in this book is seeking full transparency this is one of the books that i started but did not actually finish and i have no regrets about doing this although i do sort of regret reviewing it on goodreads because for some reason i have the top review for this story so if for some reason this story interests you please go and read it and write a review so that your positive review can be the top review for this book cause i feel i feel guilty anyway the story is about you guessed it noni blake who has come out of a long-term relationship and is looking to seek pleasure in every possible way she feels like she's been kind of deprived of this for a while and she's gonna go and sew her wild oats all the more power to her she's plus-sized she's bi but beyond that representation i have to say this book didn't really do much for me like i said i am all for people sewing their wild oats i am all for people going out and experimenting and finding themselves however they see fit right but in terms of a romance it's not super successful when we have a heroine who is sleeping with person after person and not forming any sort of like romantic bond with them now i'm assuming that our heroine does eventually find someone to fall in love with because this is marketed as a romance but it was really hard to read her having these experiences time and again because especially the first few experiences she has they're not what i would consider sexy the people do not treat her right and i don't feel like she was making a lot of self-discovery in that first portion of the book that i was reading and again you know stories continue and stories evolve and stories grow and i'm assuming that that's what happens in this book it was just not something that i felt compelled to stick around for so i dnf'd this book at 35 love it first much like my feelings towards the four-time grammy-nominated band the fray i feel hatred for no discernable reason for this book love at first is a story about our heroine nora who lives in an old run-down apartment building with a bunch of old people and when one of these old people kicks the bucket his young stud grandson moves in and decides that he's going to fix up the unit and sell the entire apartment building obviously nora doesn't want to lose the place that she has to live and so she ends up taking it upon herself to convince this man that he should stay in this building but this building is worth it and of course nora and youngstad fall in love but it was a total snoozefest frankly i just want to know who the target audience for this book is i want to know of people who like drinking glasses of whole milk with dinner picked this up from target and were like my jollies are thoroughly jazzed because that's the only answer honestly that i'd be happy with two stars wicked all night with a title like that and chiseled abs on the cover i was pretty hyped to read this but upon going on goodreads and looking up this book i realized that it is the third book in a series and while these list videos are absolutely a sign of my declining rationality i was not so irrational that i was going to read two other books in this series just so i could read the third book for this video moving on the gentle art of putting me to sleep by kj charles i kid i kid i couldn't go to sleep while reading this book because i was so focused on trying to understand the 17 characters at play that i was wide awake this book is a historical romance mostly about robin and marianne who have gotten themselves into a bit of a financial pickle and they decide that it is time for country to come to town in this case town is london they are going to marry well and rob the hell out of whoever they marry but the story honestly got too bulky for my legging i liked the overall premise of this book when i first started reading i was very much invested in robin and marianne finding spouses but you've got marianne you've got her two suitors you've got robin you've got his mark that he is trying to rob you also have his mark's stepmom and his mark's uncle it's just a lot there's a lot going on there's a lot of characters at play and i think if you're someone who likes stories like the importance of being earnest or those sorts of multiplayer sorts of tales you might like this it was just a lot for me as someone who reads a lot of historical romance and and reads a lot of stories that really focus on two people this was just a lot for me okay it was more than my adult brain could handle on top of that honestly though i could have overlooked all of these characters if the romance had been satisfying but unfortunately that just wasn't the case for me central romance actually in the story is between robin and his mark's uncle he ends up losing in this like gambling situation to the uncle and he ends up owing him a lot of money and to pay off his debts he decides to proposition him and say hey would you like to have sex with me for money i feel like other stories have done this before and it just worked out i just feel like the consent here was a little bit weird there's consent given robin is the one who offers himself but i feel like during the actual story itself there is so much emphasis on the fact that this is an uneven balance of power they're the ones that keep stressing this over and over again that whenever they do eventually come to this sort of like romantic place and the agreement becomes more than an agreement it just doesn't feel very sexy to me three stars then we move into march which is where we start getting some of the sunnier more sunshiny romances and there's there's a lot here first up we have a float plan what do you do when your fiance dies you steal his boat and float on all right that was a lot more morbid than i had really anticipated i bet you didn't think that you would hear a modest mouse reference in this video though okay so this story is about anna and kean anna is dealing with the recent loss of her fiance and anna is really a dealing with the aftermath of this she really wondering why he did this he never really gave any explanation and i think that's hurting her more than she really knows but she decides she's going to take this boat trip that they had planned together and she's going to do it herself she goes on this tropical voyage i guess kind of in memory of her dead fiance and along the way she ends up picking up a guy to help her navigate because she's not a super great navigator because let's be honest she wasn't going to do this alone in the first place and she picks up keane a complete stranger and he helps her navigate through all these tropical islands you know i did worry for her safety a bit i did think it was maybe perhaps a little logical for her to pick up someone she doesn't know but i did really enjoy the romance that resulted and i think maybe my enjoyment of this book is really colored by the fact that i was outside gardening and listening to descriptions of this beautiful tropical setting but honestly i had a really i had a really good time with this book i loved seeing anna kind of recover from the heartbreak that she's going through having keenan kind of help her heal from that and then also seeing her make these new adventures and these new memories in this boat that otherwise would have probably left her with some like really uncomfortable memories so i liked this it was a little cheesy at times and it did have sort of a rush ending but i do think that this is a book that i would definitely pick up again i'm on a beach or i don't know i just want something easy and breezy to read it's not easy and breezy because it is a little sad but three stars accidentally engaged and i accidentally forgot what this book's about i mean hey after reading 30 books it was bound to happen i was bound to forget something but i did look it up on goodreads and it kind of jogged my memory a little bit so let's try it this story is about reena and nadim nadim ends up moving into rina's apartment building due to her kind of meddling matchmaking parents they have been trying to set her up for a really long time i believe nadeem works for rina's father and they end up kind of falling for each other pretty quickly even though she doesn't want to fall for him even though it's sort of against her better judgment she ends up striking up kind of a friendship sort of romance with him and he ends up going on a digital cooking competition with her so that she can maybe win some money to start her own business i think she was maybe a software engineer or something before this but she's trying to kind of pivot her career and do something she really wants to do and getting to see her do that was actually like pretty fun it was a pretty fun experience but ultimately i feel like there was so much going on in this book sort of similar to my complaints about the gentle art of fortune hunting god that's a long title not so many characters in this story but there are a lot of different components and i just don't feel like ultimately all of them were executed very well we find out that rina's parents have some secrets that they're keeping from her and keeping from each other and that kind of comes into the play in the book but it never really gets fully resolved and there's just a few different situations like that and i felt like if any of those had been explored more it would have been a little bit more of a satisfying read and would have had a little bit more grit to it and also i feel like the romance wasn't very memorable i mean if i don't remember the book very well it would follow that the romance isn't very memorable either i feel like i should recuse myself from reading this one but two stars now speaking of recusing myself i shall be doing that right now for this book the devil in black by lj shen i haven't had much luck with lj shen's books in past years and i especially have not had luck with her standalone novels so i decided not to pick this one up mostly for myself but also for you moving on actor age eve brown i'm going to say something really bold right now i want talia hibbert to write my eulogy i'm not asking that she know me or do any research i should have a feeling that she'd managed to make it both heartfelt and incredibly sexy which is exactly how i would like to be remembered actor age brown is the third and final book in the brown sisters trilogy and much like its predecessors it was a true delight i always hope to see an author continue to put out stories that i enjoy after i enjoy one of their books but it's another thing entirely to see an author just progressively make better and better stories it's like surely there should be an upper limit right talia herbert said that i'm going to make each book better than the last and she really really delivered with actor age eve brown eve brown is the flightiest and quirkiest of all of the brown sisters and i thought that this would annoy me but strangely it did not now eve's family are pretty annoyed with her because she has taken all of her money that she's inherited and invested it into businesses that have kind of failed not because they have been a bad endeavors but because she just gets bored and ends up moving on to the next thing but her parents are fed up after her last endeavor has failed and they have given her an ultimatum if you want this money you need to work consistently at the same place for six months eve is looking for a way out of this when she comes across a help wanted sign at a bed and breakfast and she ends up working at the spend breakfast and falling for the owner jacob it sounds like a pretty simple premise and it is in a lot of ways but the execution like just thinking about this book gives me butterflies i love this book it is equal parts sweet and sexy which i feel like is very hard to execute on well but i really did find myself just like giggling smiling blushing reading this entire book there were so many perfect moments and as always talia hibbert really executes while on the incorporation of awesome representation so five stars ladies and gentlemen i have found a tech girl boss that i don't want to yell at the dating plan by sarah desai this story is about daisy who is a software engineer and her fake dating relationship with long time crush and brother's best friend liam so at the start of the story liam is hell-bent on getting his family inheritance and the only way that he can do that is if he marries now he doesn't really know who he can enlist for help until he remembers his best friend has a sister named daisy who he famously abandoned for her senior prom but he is able to somehow convince daisy to get married i think for daisy it's about getting her family off her back and it works out pretty well i'm gonna say it works out well for both of them i loved this romance i thought it was so sweet i really enjoyed the exploration of so many different things and this story i feel like it handled family culture career romance all so expertly without having any one thing take center stage i do feel like it did a really good job at the romance component but it did again combine all of these things so excellently and i really felt like the emotions that our characters were feeling were very justified and i feel like sometimes that gets lost in romance there is so much emotion present typically but sometimes i'm like why do you feel like this like i'm not understanding where you're coming from but i really understood both liam and daisy and i really really liked how the story ended four stars moving on to april showers or not so much showers i feel like we had a lot of successes in april april was another jam-packed romance reading month for me and for this list i mean i think a lot of the titles on this list are in the months of february and april i'm just excited to share these ones with you there are some major fails but there are some of my favorite romances in here you've got some five stars that i think might be unexpected first up we have life's too short at least this one isn't about a girl who makes dog furniture if you know you know so right off the bat i think if you have read me cute by helena hunting which i know a few of you have because that one was really heavily marketed you could probably skip this book because there is a lot of overlap between the two stories this has the same heavy emphasis on a lot of life's challenges while the romance unfortunately takes a back seat this story follows our heroine vanessa whose mother and sister both die of the same illness when they are pretty young vanessa is nearing the age at which her mother and sister passed away and she's really scared that the same thing is going to happen to her now as kind of a reactionary thing to these deaths vanessa has made it her life's mission to live her life to the fullest she has been traveling and i think her job is a travel vlogger but unfortunately she is forced to stay at home and not really go on any of these adventures when her half-sister ends up dumping her baby on vanessa's doorstep and vanessa is forced to become a mom but luckily vanessa has a really nice kind neighbor named adrian who hears the baby crying one day and comes over to help vanessa so that she can you know take a shower or get things done around the house and it's really just the romance between vanessa and adrian as they sort of navigate life together and look i understand that bad things happen in real life and i don't want my romance to be completely devoid of reality i just sometimes want a little bit more escapism than romances that i've picked up lately have provided i feel like there is absolutely a way to add levity to some of these harder hitting stories and it seems like a lot of romance authors are just kind of like missing the mark for that i did feel like adrian was a superhero i did really like him as a character but i did feel like vanessa was a little bit irritating at not confirming whether or not she actually had the disease that her mom and sister died up she's spending so much time in this book focusing on her impending death when she didn't even know if she was dying there were just there were just too many things in this book that made me like become annoyed so for me this is a two-star book to love and to loathe a book title with more passion than the contents of the book love and loathe is a historical romance about our heroine diana who is recently widowed and her enemies to lovers flirtation chip with a man named jeremy jeremy has been a bachelor forever and when they're at this country estate sort of party at jeremy's house jeremy and diana have this sort of bet if he doesn't marry within the year then diana owes him 100 pounds i believe that's how the bed goes the assumption here is that jeremy could not possibly settle down and find a wife but as jeremy embarks on his journey to find himself a lady he finds himself dumped by his mistress stating his lack of corn shocking abilities now jeremy is taking this to heart because he has been tupping quite a few ladies in his day and he has never had complaints but he trusts his good old friend diana to be honest so he goes to her propositions her for sex and they engage in an intimate relationship that obviously turns too much more in the course of the story he ends up having this sexual relationship with diana while she's also trying to find him a spouse it's a little bit nonsensical and i do feel like it kind of added to the overall miscommunication of the story i think that's where my main issue lies with this book it's not terrible but i feel like there was so much time focused on these two having an intimate relationship and yet denying that they could possibly have feelings for each other i feel like diana was spending a lot of time thinking like oh he couldn't possibly want me as a wife like why wouldn't he like you are having sex and he seems to really like you when you have a good relationship like i say enemies to lovers at the beginning of this kind of description but it's not true enemies to lovers they enjoy each other's company it just it felt like needless conflict whenever i pick up a historical romance with an illustrated cover i feel like the authors are trying to do something new and fresh and modern like a new modern spin on historical romance which isn't bad i think it will work for some people and not others sadly in this case i did fall into the camp of others three stars all right bear with me i have a scenario for you have you ever found a recipe online and you thought that looks like it was pulled from my brain i feel like every combination of ingredients is coalescing here to be my perfect recipe like i feel like this is going to really be it and you set time aside you know you get home early from work one day and you're like i'm gonna finally tackle this recipe i'm going to make bliss happen in my kitchen so you make this recipe put in the oven you take it out of the oven it smells phenomenal and you go to take a taste and it's bland there's no flavor there everything that you were expecting disappears so you decide that you're going to scour the comment section of this recipe and see if you were alone in your feelings and sure there are a couple of people who thought that this was maybe not their favorite recipe but it seems like most of the people in this comment section seemed to enjoy this dish to the degree that you wanted to enjoy this dish and you feel a bit gaslighted because you're like did i eat the same thing that everybody else is eating that's how i felt with the intimacy experiment by rosie tannen i read the first book from this author earlier this year and while it wasn't a perfect read for me i really did enjoy this author's writing and i was really excited to pick up another book from her our heroine naomi is a former star-turned sex educator and one day she ends up meeting ethan a young rabbi and he asks her hey will you come and do these talks on sex and dating to entice young people to come to my synagogue because everybody there seems to be older and not a lot of people have been in attendance in general and ethan has made it his mission to make a successful career for himself i absolutely loved the setup for this story and we get so much of naomi in book one that i was so excited to see what her romance would be all about but i read and i read and i read and i could not seem to find any chemistry between ethan and naomi and since this is their romance that was really really disappointing and i will say that i'm a pretty harsh critic when it comes to chemistry between characters i don't want them to just like kind of like each other but i really do feel like this book in my opinion of all of the books on this list really really lacked chemistry between the two characters and i feel strange kind of saying that because so many reviewers actually said that they loved the chemistry between naomi and ethan i just didn't feel it and i feel alone in my feelings but ultimately i dnf this book by 50 i'm gonna say it i think everyone deserves a really grumpy really sexy man to set his dreams aside temporarily so that you can live yours twice diet by sarah hoggle is about our heroine mabel who has recently inherited a house from her great aunt who has recently passed away now this couldn't have come at a better time for mabel because she's dealing with a lot of in her life she recently got a promotion at work but she's not able to kind of put into place all of the things that she wants i think she works at a resort and she is in charge of events but no one seems to be interested in the events that maple has come up with and on top of that she is dealing with the loss of a recent friend her friend didn't pass away her friend just catfished her wow it was really heartbreaking to read about how she really really trusted this girl and how she feels completely heartbroken because not only did she lose a friend but she also lost someone that she thought that she could potentially have feelings for it's super heartbreaking and you feel so excited for me able to embark on this journey but of course it's not gonna be quite that simple when mabel arrives at her aunt's house she finds that she is not the only person who is inherited the groundskeeper of the house in recent years wesley is also inheriting the home and they have to kind of collectively decide what they're going to do with it i feel like i have to say that this book was the sweetest piece of cake for the first 40 of the book i will say that i was kind of unsure of the direction that things were going to take kind of like with sarah hoggle's first book this is told in one singular pov and when wesley kind of completely ignores mabel for the first like 30 to 40 of the book i was wondering how the romance was really going to take shape but when this pivotal pivotal scene happens i melted i swooned and then things just kept making me swoon from there i feel like these characters had such incredible chemistry and i really adored how much they accepted each other and accepted each other's flaws mabel is a really really big dreamer and she needs someone to kind of help bring her down to earth in some ways and i feel like wesley does a great job at that and wes is dealing with some pretty challenging mental health issues which mabel helps him work through in a very supportive supportive way and i personally loved it there was a scene near the end of this book where wes is dealing with his mental health and i just loved how it was handled it was one of my top moments in a book that i've ever read and honestly this book just really took me by surprise i related to it more than i possibly thought that i could five stars i really don't want to consider sally thorne a one-hit wonder but all of her titles after the hating game have been misses for me and sadly this one is no exception second first impressions is about our heroine ruthie who has been working at a retirement village and it shows she dresses a little bit conservatively like an old lady and she nearly never leaves the property until one day teddy rolls in he is a flighty himbo whose father recently purchased the retirement village and he tells teddy that if he wants a place to stay he's going to have to work at the retirement village it's the romans obviously between a teddy and ruthie now i think the intent behind this story was to have this kind of like flighty hero who's going to show the heroine how to kind of let loose and then also have this really kind of i want to say stodgy but reliable heroin who's going to teach him how to be a reliable person you know they're going to learn something from each other but i really didn't see enough growth in either of the characters for that to have been the entire basis of the story and i don't know i just felt like ruthie and teddy were not well suited for each other i understand that opposites can attract but i felt like these two were just too opposite to attract i don't know i also i could not relate to ruthie in any sense she was much much much too meek for me and again i understand that everybody has their own personality types but i wanted to see her stand up for herself just a little bit more than she did and that being said this is absolutely not the worst book on the list but it does remind me of my least favorite 80s movie say anything so three stars if you're looking for something to read every night before bed to leave you with sweet dreams i have the book for you love and color is an anthology of stories both original and retold focusing on love throughout history and mythology i personally really enjoyed this one because i ended up picking it up on audio and anytime that i had any small tasks to do around the house i turned my headphones on listened to one of these stories and just got through it in the time that it took me to do my tasks it was fantastic honestly and it was really refreshing getting to pick up something entirely different from anything else on this list four stars jr word will always occupy a pretty big part of my romance loving heart not only because she's written so many damn books but because she is the author that got me into romance in the first place that being said i'm always kind of confused when i see her titles on lists like these not because she doesn't deserve to be on them i mean she's a fantastic writer but because i feel like it kind of does a disservice to readers who might want to pick up these books i think if you're unfamiliar with her series you'd see oh 19th book in a series i can read this with no context but that's where you'd be wrong because all of these books are interconnected and if you go into the 19th book with no context you're gonna be really really confused so for that reason didn't read moving on now i will say no list cobbled together by goodreads or buzzfeed is ever going to be nearly as diverse as i'd like it to be however i was pleasantly surprised when i saw maggie beats her muse on the list because it has a heroine who is over the age of 40. which is an aspect of diversity that i feel like is not often included when we think of romance maggie finds her muse is about articular character and she is a romance author but she has been met with some bad luck and misfortune recently because she's having a really hard time completing her latest romance novel much anticipated by her readers and she's also been dumped by her boyfriend or maybe she dumped her boyfriend either way she's dealing with heartbreak and she's also trying to write this story maggie decides one day to take up her editor's offer and go and live in paris for a while so she can finish her book i mean what better place to finish a story than in the city of love while there she ends up reconnecting with her ex-husband who she hasn't seen in many many years she ends up hanging out with her daughter and also meeting a sexy frenchman max i will say i really did enjoy the atmosphere of this book and i really liked how confident maggie was as a heroine in this author's bio she talked specifically about wanting to see more mature confident women in stories and i do think she really nailed that aspect of this book i also thought that maggie and max's romance was really really cute but i did end up having some issues with this book namely the love triangle aspect and also maggie's relationship with her daughter firstly the love triangle and the story felt completely unnecessary and it did little to add to the conflict of the story we have maggie deciding if she wants to engage or re-engage i guess in a relationship with her ex-husband or if she wants to go in an entirely new direction and date the frenchman max it was just not a good fit for the story i don't think it would have been more interesting had we had a strong conflict with max instead like a reason why they could potentially not be together which i think would have been easy to come up with right like she's from america he's from france that's a conflict in and of itself we didn't really need an extra player added in and then i also didn't love maggie's relationship with her daughter maggie's daughter is described as being autistic and i definitely love when we have the inclusion of autism weapon stories if it's done well we have an adult woman with autism and unfortunately i felt like this story used that autism as a reason why maggie couldn't be close with her daughter which doesn't really make sense to me there are plenty of reasons for someone to not be close with their daughter and i get that i feel like that's something that is very common in real life just because you're related to someone doesn't mean you necessarily get along very well if anything i feel like sometimes being related means you are even less likely to get along than anyone else but i just really didn't like the way that maggie talked about her daughter she seemed to make the autism the reason why she couldn't relate to her daughter or didn't want to spend more time with her daughter she says things like i just don't understand her and it's really nice when we get to connect but i think it's better that we spend a lot of time apart as well i just didn't like it i didn't like that it was implied that maggie's daughter's autism was the reason that they weren't close i'm not autistic myself so i'm not the authority on representation it's just something in this book that personally rubbed me the wrong way two stars i'll be honest this next book is one that i am still reading and if i'm extra honest this is probably a book that's going to languish on my currently reading shelf on goodreads for a very long time if not indefinitely the devil comes courting by courtney milan now i was really anticipating this book because i adored the one contemporary romance that i've read by this author and i figured she's going to knock it out of the park in a historical setting as well because i think that's her bread and butter mostly this book was set to be published in february but it ended up getting pushed out to april which is usually kind of a red flag and i will say it did make me a little bit more apprehensive to pick up this title and then i noticed how long this book was and i got a little bit more wary and then before you know it it was the one book that i had not ended up picking up for this video i tried to read it over this past week and i have to say it was a challenge it was a true challenge to get through this story is about our hero grayson who is a black man traveling to china on business he is looking to find someone who can help him in his endeavor to complete the first telegraphic network he needs someone who is able to i believe translate chinese into morse code or like however telegraphs are transmitted i'm not entirely sure but he ends up being referred to someone named the silver fox who is apparently really really fantastic at anything like telegraph related and he ends up finding out that the silver fox is a recently widowed chinese woman and he asks for her help he asks hey can i hire you can we dominate together basically let's be the first to have a telegraphic network put into place and i was completely sold on this premise i really liked the idea and i really enjoyed from what i read of grayson he's a really really strong hero and he definitely knows what he wants he doesn't let anyone walk all over other people which was very much needed with our heroine amelia i think amelia is a big part of why i had a hard time getting through this story and why i still haven't i understand that in the day and age of this story women didn't have the same rights and freedoms as men i mean i think that's pretty obvious but when amelia is faced with a pretty easy decision in my opinion of marrying a missionary that she doesn't know or going and work for money for grayson she is left in this state of indecision amelia is such a i don't want to say flaky or flighty person but so indecisive and we have to sit and listen to her hem and haw about whether or not she should marry this man or whether she should go and embark on a journey that she really wants it just seemed so obvious to me and it seems like the author is just trying to draw out this conflict but i'm sure there are going to be even greater conflicts that play later on down the line this book is over 400 pages for a historical romance that is way too long i just feel like this is blocking the book down and on top of that amelia has this quirk where she can't remember anyone's name and it is hammered home time and time again in the 17 that i read of this book and it was just irritating now i'm not trying to totally tear this book apart because i haven't finished it and i do think eventually that this could be a really successful story but i really wanted there to be more in this first 17 to grip me and unfortunately that just was not the case since i'm not very far in i'm not going to rate it but i'm also not going to consider this a dnf i think if you are looking for a historically accurate historical romance and you want a book that's not set in england i think this could be one that could really be up your alley but for me i'm unsure we're moving through the calendar once again into the month of may in the month of may there were three stories published that were on this list two of which were five star reads for me one of which was a dnf so let me tell you what those books were first up we have people we meet on vacation by emily henry unlike miss sally thorne i really think that emily henry has proven that a not so stellar romance debut doesn't mean that you can't deliver hot nasty biscuit buttering a second time around people who meet on vacation is a classic friends to lovers mutual pining story about poppy and alex poppy and alex end up meeting in college they strike up this friendship and the way that they keep this friendship up post-grad is to go on vacations together every summer i think poppy is in the kind of like travel industry as a job so she gets to go on these free vacations where she gets to kind of write up profiles and while she's there she gets to kind of like bring a friend every time alex tags along and they just strengthen their friendship this way until disaster strikes two years ago and they have decided that they are not going to go on these trips any longer we have no idea what happened but we know that neither of them are very happy not going on vacations together until another fateful summer when poppy's life is kind of falling apart and she decides she's gonna hit alex up she's gonna be the one to initiate contact again and asks for one final rodeo and then they turn that vacation into a different kind of rodeo if you catch my drift it was hot it was angsty it was tension filled and it has me looking forward to more titles by this author in the future i'm not gonna wax poetic about this book because i feel like if you watch any other romance related content on this platform you've definitely heard someone talk about this book needless to say it was fantastic gave it five stars and i do recommend it surprises keep coming and they don't stop coming a christina lauren book that i actually enjoyed the soulmate equation the soulmate equation is a story about her heroine jess who is a single mom and statistician trying to make ends meet one day she meets a hottie in a coffee bar and she is invited to try his new startup which is a dating application he and his team have cracked the code and apparently by just a simple dna swab they can figure out who your soulmate is if they're on the app obviously from probability between zero and 100 when jess agrees that she is going to try out the app decides to make some time for herself she deserves this she ends up finding out that the founder of this application is a i want to say like 98 match for her and this is the highest match this app has ever seen so it kind of behooves her and our hero to kind of fake date for publicity for the app and then also for money for jess like she will get paid if she essentially fake dates river and um they kind of fall in love from there i really thought this book was a lot of fun i really don't tend to enjoy stories that have startup culture at the heart of them but i think this one it did a really good job at balancing that kind of like techie side of things with jess's family and found family structure she lives in this apartment building and it seems like everybody there kind of helps take care of her daughter we get to see jess's grandparents and her friends kind of rally around her to kind of raise this kid and i just liked the story a whole lot i feel like there was so much emphasis put on building fully fleshed out characters and i really appreciated that because i think that's kind of where christina lauren has failed in the past for me i will say that river was maybe not the most unique hero ever but i do think he does a really good job at kind of working on his flaws and communicating with jess whenever he has any sort of issues i really like this book and i think this is one of those romances that is best read by a pool with a drink in hand five stars i can't say that this is a problem that i've ever had while reading a book before but i grew to disagree with how this author decided to write her own characters how to find a princess is a story about makeda and beznaria makeda is a bit of a doormat at the start of the story she ends up getting dumped by her long-term girlfriend she ends up getting passed up for a promotion at work not because she is undeserving but because she is unable to stand up for herself and we also find out that she's let an ex take out loans in her name bisnaria on the other hand is on a hunt to find the heir to this throne bezarya's family has always protected the royal family but now there's no one on the throne and she's gonna go and look for a long lost heir who she believes to be a makeda i'm telling you about these characters so that you kind of get an idea and a feel for who they should be you assume makeda is going to be kind of like timid and maybe willing to do kind of whatever beznaria says and you think beznari is going to be this like strong character getting someone on the throne like she is a protector type not really the case makita is characterized as doormat in the beginning but she ends up being a complete to basnaria and has no interest in gaining any sort of like royal title i'm not saying you have to have interest in gaining a royal title i'm sure that that would be sort of a weird thing to grapple with especially if your family's been telling you for years and years that oh you're a long-lost princess like i'm sure you would want to tune them out after a while i get it but i just don't think it made sense to have her be as combative with bisnaria as she actually was and i also feel like bezaria wasn't as much of a take charge kind of character as she needed to be for the story to work out on top of that i also feel like the plot was a little bit disjointed and a little bit weird in terms of pacing there was also so much time spent on a boat and i hate stories set at sea it's just one of my pet peeves i decided unfortunately to dnf this book at 50 moving down the calendar again we're into the month of july where only one title was published it actually wasn't slated for july it ended up just getting pushed out we have isn't it romantic romantic yes romantic no this is the fourth book in a series of standalone novels wherein a group of big hunky dudes ends up reading romance novels forming a book club and using this knowledge they find together to help be better partners to their respective partners i really love the concept but unfortunately i was let down by the execution of this book this story is about vlad and elena vlad is a russian hockey player who comes to america to play and he decides that he is going to marry his childhood best friend so that she can come to america as well and study journalism they've been married for about four years or so i want to say at the start of the story and they have never actually lived together or lived as a married couple before until one day vlad ends up injuring himself in a hockey game i believe he breaks a major bone in his leg so he can't really take care of himself and elena ends up coming to his rescue i think he lives in like nashville or something she ends up living in his house for a while to help take care of him and i was really excited at the prospect of this all of this happens within the first 30 of the book and i was convinced that was gonna be the story like we were going to get her taking care of him which is a romance stroke that i love but unfortunately that's not really what the story was about it was so bogged down with additional things that i didn't care about we have this sort of like mystery plot with elena who is trying to kind of track down this journalistic story that her dad was pursuing before he passed away we also have the story within a story that is present in all of these books but seem to take much more of a center stage place in this story and i think i could have possibly overlooked this if the relationship between a vlad and elena was maybe a little bit more straightforward or had been more communicative but vlad was so insistent on the fact that elena could not possibly love him that he let that get in the way of his expression of his love for her which was so silly because he is characterized as this like really fun loving loving man and he just didn't get to actually show that to elena very much so despite how much i enjoyed this book in the beginning it's ultimately not one that's going to stick with me three stars while we were dating we sure did talk about it to a lot of people at length at the detriment of our own personal interactions this is the sixth book in jasmine guillory's wedding party series and it follows the brother of one of the heroes of our previous books ben and his relationship with up-and-coming actress really big movie star anna i can't say that i had a terrible time reading this book it was incredibly digestible and pretty low angst but it didn't do much to make me swoon and that seems to be an issue that is recurring every time i pick up this author's works i really like my romances i found to have a really heavy emphasis on dialogue and interaction because that is how i feel chemistry between characters i don't want to see them have one interaction and then go off and be introspective i want to see a lot of interaction between the two of them and that's just not how jasmine guillory's writing tends to function i saw that especially on display in this book i get it i get that you're trying to work through your emotions and that makes sense and it's not like i don't want my characters to think about what's happening to them i just wish that it would happen at a slightly quicker clip and that we could have more page time spent between our two characters together and while i did really appreciate certain aspects of the story particularly the emphasis on men going to therapy and mental health in general i just don't think this book is going to have a lasting impression on me three stars and then moving on to august sadly the last book that we are going to be talking about is probably my most disappointing book that i've read this entire year and i am really really sad about it the heart principle by helen huang was one of my most anticipated romances of this year i have given every single book that she has written which i guess admittedly isn't that many but i gave her previous two novels five stars and i found myself crying when reading both of them which if you know me is pretty unheard of so i fully expected and anticipated to adore this book but sadly that was not the case the heart principle is about our hero quan and our heroine anna anna is a violinist who has found unexpected success after a video of her playing the violin it goes viral but unfortunately this has left anna in sort of a weird place she's feeling a lot of imposter syndrome and a lot of feelings of inadequacy not helped by her family who doesn't seem to accept her or understand her personality very well and to make matters worse anna's long-term boyfriend asks if she will go on a break so anna decides that she's going to live this break to the fullest and find someone on tinder to date in the meantime in her endeavor she ends up meeting quan who is a character that we learned about in previous books i was curious once i started this book how kwon was going to play into the story in previous books he's characterized as this fun loving hilarious character and he is definitely the levity that a lot of these other stories need the other two books in this series definitely are light-hearted but there are serious emotional moments and i feel like quan in those books really helped lighten the mood so i was curious how he was going to work in this story that seemed right off the bat to be a lot darker than our author's previous titles now klon is dealing with a recent cancer diagnosis and treatment and he has left feeling kind of self-conscious and a little bit negative about his body and i felt like this was a really interesting choice for our author to make in making him a different character really this time around he has a much changed personality and i feel like a lot of the quan that we saw in previous books is not really present here but i can appreciate what helen huang was trying to do here she was trying to have two characters that are going through a lot get together and accept each other for who they are anna is dealing with a lot of anxiety and she ends up failing on her first date with quan quan's super accepting of this and decides that like hey we should just try this again it'll be fine and we get to see this happen a couple of different times until they finally you know have a sexual encounter together and end up getting together for good and i did really appreciate how patient kwon was but as the story continued i felt just a little bit cheated at the 50 mark of the story it goes from a story that is a little bit melancholy and has some harder hitting topics to being downright depressing anna has to take care of a dying relative for a good portion of this book and much of this book is filled with the misery of anna's caretaking experience i know this is a reality that a lot of people face and i do think that this is something that needs to be present in more stories but it took too much away from the relationship development in this book and that sucks like i said earlier quan was characterized as such a fun loving guy in previous books and i was interested to see how this life circumstance changed his perspective but i honestly didn't see what he saw in anna it is stated at one point in the book that he loves getting to know people's quirks and he likes accepting people for who they are which i guess is good but it feels a little bit generic in the scope of a relationship to just say oh yeah i like quirks she's quirky i'm gonna get with her it didn't seem like our author went to any great lengths to convince us that these two characters should be together besides kwan just being a good guy which i feel like is pretty unfair since we were really really excited for his book in particular because he's so different than the heroes of the other books this book was such a mixed bag for me because i really did appreciate anna's journey i really loved seeing anna get her autism diagnosis and how she felt comfort in that and i really did like how helen huang tackled certain aspects of family relationships but i personally think quan deserved more page time in his own romance three stars now i could certainly leave the video here and leave us on kind of a sour note but i thought it would be fun instead to tell you what my top five romances of 2021 are i'm gonna go quickly and then i'm gonna leave all of these five titles in the description down below with buy links if you are interested in picking any of these titles up three of these i believe are featured in this video two i think are not first up we have twice shy by sarah hogle i've already talked about this book i just loved the emphasis on mental health in this book i also just loved how sweet it was i love wes and mabel and i think if you want a really good grumpy suntrain story you're going to love this book next up on my list is one that is not included on the 33 hottest romances of 2021. we have it happen one summer by tessa bailey i adore the story i think tessa bailey writes some of the steamiest stories out there and this is a shit's creek inspired rom-com with an alexis rose type heroine falling for a grumpy crab fisherman it's definitely an opposite attract romance a fish out of water romance and it was a five star for me of course with my glowing review of this book i had to put actor age eve brown on this list again fantastic story i love a grumpy sunshine story i love the autism representation in this book i love our plus-size heroine everything about this book was perfect to me it was sweet it was incredibly sexy it made me blush i don't know what more i can say pick it up i know not everybody is but i am a huge sucker for friends to lovers romances and i really feel like people who meet on vacation by emily henry did a fantastic job this is going to be on so many best of lists i'm sure and it's definitely going to be in the goodreads choice awards so if for some reason you want to be caught up on that before it even comes out before the nominees are announced in december pick it up and then in my fifth place slot okay technically there's two books here because i couldn't decide and i feel like they kind of have similar vibes we have the soulmate equation by christina lauren again i talked about this one i think if you haven't had luck with christina lauren though you might want to give the love hypothesis by ali hazelwood a try from my understanding this story started out as fan fiction and you can really tell in the best possible way this is a trope-filled science-filled story and you've got a lot of again grumpy to sunshine feels with a hero who has been pining for the heroine for two whole years so if that interests you if you want to see all of the delicious fanfiction trope goodness i feel like you need to pick this book up that is it i read against my better judgment uh almost almost 33 of the hottest romances of 2021 i had a really good time doing this i love making list videos this is not my first rodeo if you want to see any of my other list videos i will link my playlist down in the description i've done two other ones before also romance related so thanks so much for watching i know this was a long video but thanks so much for watching i love y'all so much and until next sunday yousometimes you spend an entire year reading books about people getting it on and sometimes you bring those findings to the internet hello welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new my name is chandler and i read romance in today's video i'm going to be running through a goodreads list with you i found this list at the beginning of the year i was kind of on the hunt if i'm being 100 honest for a list of new and exciting romance titles to read for this coming year i feel like i'm always kind of behind on like what's hot and what's trendy so i took this list and i said i'm going to endeavor to read all 33 of these books and tell people my thoughts on them and you know what over the past eight months i have been reading all of these romances and now i am here to tell you my findings and tell you what books i think are worth your time what books are hot i'm going to be giving you a description giving you some ratings at the end of the video i'm going to be letting you know what my five favorite romances are of 2021 so i'm gonna be running through these in a month order so let's go ahead and start with january so for the month of january we have two books that came out on this list and sadly both of those books were three star reads for me just kind of middle of the road sort of mediocre honestly i haven't given much thought to either of these books since i finished reading them but i'm going to try to tell you about them right now first up we have shipt which is pitched as the un honeymooners by christina lauren me it's the hating game by sally thorne and sadly i don't think it lives up to either of these comparisons shipt is about henley and graham and they are co-workers at a cruise ship cruise line sort of business they have both been vying for a promotion and they are pitted against each other they already kind of hate each other and now they're vying for this promotion together and they have to come up with proposals on ways to get travelers to go on this galapagos islands cruise so they end up going on this cruise taking the crews together and seeing what could be improved and obviously while on this cruise graham and henley end up falling for each other despite their previous disdain for each other it wasn't a terrible read i feel like the chemistry between the characters was perfectly average perfectly fine i think my main issue with this title was that there was so much time spent on the business component that i don't think there was much time left for the romance i feel like the romance took a bit of a backseat though this was really pedaled as a romance more so than a i'm a bad business trying to get a promotion sort of thing especially near the end of the book i was very just uninvested i did not care about henley and her shitty boss certainly not a great situation to be in the situation she gets herself in but also it's like i just don't care three stars and then we have one of the books this year that i felt had one of the best premises that was unfortunately foiled by an extremely whiny heroine and fairly awkward pacing we have the ex talk by rachel lynn solomon x talk is a book about shay and shea has been working at this public radio station for about a decade she has her own program that she produces and she is kind of living life except for unfortunately her radio show is kind of failing even though she's had a great career at this place they kind of doubt her abilities at this point because the whole radio station is kind of failing it's not all her fault but she is having kind of a bad time and on top of that she's had some pretty rough luck in love of course we have someone who's going to come and disrupt everything we have dominic who is this younger guy up and coming recently graduated from i don't know i want to say grad school he's not like super young and he comes on the scene and he is super hot which is important and then he's also someone who wants to save and revive this failing public radio station he and shea come up with this idea that they are going to have a different sort of show going on right like not just a typical boring npr type public radio station show they're going to make something more akin to a podcast and it's going to be about exes who give relationship advice and who better than to play exes than dominic and shea who already don't like each other very much but of course over the course of this sort of radio show that they put on together that is wildly successful and does revive the radio station they do end up falling in love now i loved the premise of this this is such a cool idea i love that it has this sort of like podcast format built in and i was ready to see the relationship unfold between these two over the course of the run of the show but unfortunately i feel like there wasn't enough time spent in the really cool premise and instead we are taken out of the radio station really quickly so that these two can bond and get to know each other understand why that was done you want to get shay and dominic to know each other enough to where they could be convincing exes but a lot of the chemistry and tension between the two of them was built away from the radio show it was like here go to this remote cabin and learn about each other and then come back and i know that doesn't sound super jarring but when you're in the story it feels very strange to read about and i didn't absolutely love that definitely took away from the story and i wanted more of that podcast and then on top of that shay as a heroine was pretty frustrating to read about i felt like personally she whined she just whined too much and i understood at 30 she was looking for someone to love her but it seemed more like the way a teenager deals with these sort of problems she's consistently whining about how she loves men so much and they don't seem to love her back and i'm not saying again that that's an invalid complaint but the way in which she articulates these feelings to us as readers doesn't really make her a very sympathetic character it was hard to root for her as much as i really really wanted to enjoy this book and as much as i appreciated some of the representation here i sadly had to give this one three stars now the month of february was even more of a mixed bag we have some really high highs and really low lows and a ton of different books were published in february obviously because it's the month of love so i have quite a few romances to share with you up first we have makeup breakup by lily manon and um i will take insufferable heroines for 200 alex this book is the definition of the i fear that i have girl bossed too close to the sun audio from tick tock i could i just okay this story is about our heroine annika and she has made it her life's mission to put out an app onto the market to solve something that she saw as a problem i believe with her parents marriage if i am recalling correctly basically this app is going to function as a google translate for bad relationship communication so you hear your partner say something and you can kind of type it in and it'll translate what the emotions behind that statement are right and this app is called makeup before the start of our story though annika ends up hooking up with her arch nemesis at a tech conference and she doesn't really know that he's her arch nemesis at the time she figures this out later but hudson uh who i got every time i say that name i think of the mycene doll he is someone whose app is completely the antithesis of everything that annika stands for this app is essentially uber for breakups so you can call someone up to go break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend for you and annika sees so much wrong with this right and of course once she hooks up with hudson she never sees him again he ghosts her and now she is left bitter and angry that this playboy piss her off and unfortunately as luck would have it this is not the last time they meet hudson ends up coming back into annika's life in a very big way when he ends up moving into her office building and also competes with her for funding for her app now annika's app is kind of failing to be honest no one really cares about her app and hudson's app is like very much doing well because who doesn't want an app where you can get someone to break up with someone for you i mean that would make for some pretty memeable moments and as you can tell clearly the world is out to get annika or at least that's how she acts the entire book i really couldn't stand annika and knowing that this author also penned the y a title when the bolt met rishi i am not super surprised i am all for bad heroines but menons tend to be on the irrational and abrasive side annika was really unwilling to listen to reason and her holier than that attitude about hudson's app and how he can't be a good guy because he created this app it was it was a lot to read about and she kept harping on it time and time again even when she was starting to develop feelings for him it was like that was the main issue that she had rather than anything honestly meaningful it was like oh he must be a bad guy because he created this app okay but like he's showing you he's not exactly a bad guy so what are you like latching onto i'm not really getting it and really the final straw for me was that most of the relationship was kind of told to us rather than shown to us a lot of the backstory here is at this tech conference that we don't actually get to see and so it was really hard to root for annika because she was a lot to handle and hudson was a great guy and he deserved better so two stars much ado about you by samantha young after reading my friends reviews of this after finishing i was really surprised that no one seemed to be on board with this romance i feel like sometimes you just want to indulge in something a little bit silly and a little bit unrealistic is it just me i feel like i'm usually the heartless one but i seem to really enjoy this so this romance is about evie who's passed out for a promotion at work instead of trying to find solace in her current really high-powered position or trying to find a job elsewhere she decides she's going to drop everything quit her job and go and live in england and she's going to work at a bookshop and she's going to get free room and board for doing this seems a little bit unrealistic right off the bat right and uh it continues on in that vein so if that does not excite you don't think you're going to like this book i however was able to kind of overlook it i suspended my disbelief and i had a good time with this story so once evie gets there a bunch of shenanigans take place and she decides to insert herself into the lives of the villagers here and of course everything she touches turns to gold everybody ends up being super happy whenever evie is involved and while she's there she also meets a super hunky sheep herder who she bones down with in a barn and i gotta say that was definitely the highlight of the book it was very steamy despite the odd setting i don't think that this book is um realistic in any sense of the word i don't think that a lot of people are going to like our heroine because she is constantly sunshine but i did like this book i don't know something about it reading it in the summer on a rainy day it just worked for me i gave this book four stars and frankly i don't think this book deserves the hate that it gets so maybe pick this one up the love proof keep in mind that i scripted this video chronologically and i'm not going to go back and fact check whether this is true or not but upon finishing this book i really felt like i had found the worst book on this list and i i feel like i still stand by that after reading all of the books on this list this is insultingly bad like if i had had a physical copy of this book when reading i absolutely would have thrown it across the room because it's an insult to women i'm just gonna say it okay this story is about wayward physics prodigy sophie she graduated from pretty much every school she ever went to a little bit early and she has made it her life's mission to figure out the secrets of the universe she's a little bit non-traditional she definitely is very focused on what she wants and she ends up going to yale at kind of a young age to explore more in physics and explore all of these questions that she has now while sophie is there she ends up getting sidetracked from her life's mission by a man named jake when she falls for jake her whole life changes which is so refreshing to see right we love to see young people in love however there's a big butt there whenever sophie ends up falling for jake she forgets about her life's mission she forgets about pretty much anything but jake she becomes i don't want to say subservient to jake but she focuses so much on jake so much so that jake decides that he does not like sophie anymore this really focused passionate woman that he ends up falling in love with is no longer there because she no longer likes physics she just cares about him you know i guess that's kind of him sort of but the idea that someone would be so lost that they would give up everything for a single person is kind of insulting i mean i'm not saying it never happens but it was a little bit insulting given how focused sophie was how full of direction she was at the start of the story not only is it bad enough that she ends up getting dumped by jake the story gets worse from there so wind shake makes the discovery that sophie is no longer passionate about physics she's kind of given everything up for him he decides that he is going to take her life into his hands and dump her because her love is not simply enough she needs to be a full and interesting person for him to be with her so he dumps her and sophie ends up getting back on track getting her phd she ends up teaching at yale everything is going perfectly except for she ends up meeting jake's son because of course jake ends up moving on and finding love but sophie could never possibly find love with anyone else so she ends up meeting jake's son she teaches him she gets close with him because she realizes that he is the son of jake and then jake comes back to yale kind of old i think he's balding at this point and she ends up taking him back because he's like you know what you accomplished what i wanted you to accomplish and now you are good enough to be married to me i read that i read that entire book and i i'm not proud of that fact but i am proud enough of that fact that now i can tell you not to read this book the cover in my opinion is absolutely stunning and nothing about the synopsis leads you to believe that it would go down this path and i don't think it was the author's intent necessarily to be so blatantly insulting to women but i i felt pretty insulted if i'm being honest with you don't recommend it and honestly if you haven't heard about this book before this video just please forget that it ever existed one star moving on good food is that you wild brain yes it is uh okay finally good food we have miss beverly jenkins our queen of historical romance bringing us back from the dead after reading the love proof okay this historical is set in wyoming after the civil war and we have our two main characters we have spring who we learned about in another of beverly jenkins works one that i actually read so i was really excited to read this one with spring spring is this badass gun-wielding woman who's had some pretty bad luck with the men in her life besides her brother and she is not looking for any help she wants to live her life in solitude she has her own property she owns her own land and you know she's just living until one day garrett who is a reporter coming to interview her brother ends up on her land i want to say he's injured and she ends up helping him and that's the start of a beautiful romance my friends i loved this romance i love beverly jenkins writing because it is beautiful it's set in a place other than england which is fantastic not that england's a bad place but i love seeing historical set in other settings and on top of that her stories are so low angst that they feel like a warm hug you want to read these stories when you're in a warm bath when you need some comfort like these are the romances for those times and this one particularly worked for me because i loved seeing how garrett accepted every facet of spring she was very hesitant non-traditional for the day and she didn't want kids and garrett became totally okay with that because he wanted spring i love that i think that's awesome if you're someone who doesn't want babies yourself perhaps this is a story for you four stars the only way that i like my catfish is fried so it was hard to overlook the premise for first comes like gia our heroine is an influencer and she is constantly fighting her parents assumptions about what it means to be an influencer i think her siblings are all doctors and very you know successful in their own right and so she's constantly having to prove to her family that she is successful and on top of that she's also trying to build her brand she has really no time for love until one day she ends up getting dm'd on instagram by this up-and-coming bollywood star he's a part of a really successful bollywood family and gia is a big fan she instantly strikes up this relationship until she realizes that maybe the person she's messaging isn't actually the bollywood star now it is his official account so she's not quite that dumb but she does end up getting catfished she meets the real dave or dev dave ends up meeting gia at this party and he acts like he doesn't know who she is because he doesn't know who she is and she's pretty pissed about this at first she's just wondering like why is he acting like he doesn't know who i am like we've been talking all this time and then she quickly figures out that she's been catfished she tells the real dave about it and they end up embarking on this journey to figure out who's been catfishing her who has been taking over his social media accounts and messaging women without his knowledge in this process obviously they fall for each other this was a perfectly serviceable romance but i don't feel like it did anything particularly noteworthy i really really loved that we had a hijabi heroine and that both of our characters were from south asia but beyond the representation i don't have a lot to remark upon about this book a couple of months later and i feel like that says something about how impactful the story was overall for me again not terrible but nothing to write home about three stars honey girl much like honey this book was sweet but not totally my thing this story is about our heroine grace who has recently completed her phd i think she's like 28 at the start of the story and she is kind of struggling because she doesn't know what she wants to do what her next move should be she has a father who is really strict with her i believe he's in the military and he wants her to be the best at whatever she chooses to do and grace has felt that pressure she's internalized it and now she's kind of left with this feeling of imposter syndrome and she needs a break so she ends up going on this wild adventure to las vegas with some of her friends to celebrate her recent degree and there she ends up meeting her new wife yuki they end up getting married on this wild night in vegas and this is something that impacts the rest of grace's life pretty much they kind of don't really remember much of what happened that night but she has this warm feeling every time she talks to yugi and so she decides that she's just gonna go live in new york she's going to figure out her life there and the story is really a coming-of-age story about grace figuring out what she wants and kind of unpacking some of this pressure that she's put on herself and that family members have put on her there was a lot to like about this book i think the first thing that i really noticed about this story was the writing i love romance because it is so straightforward most of the time but this story actually really impressed me with how well the prose was written it was very lyrical and lush without being too purple and i really appreciated that i feel like it really worked for this particular story i also think that if you're someone in your 20s who is looking to figure out your life and you're kind of beyond that like initial college figured out thing i think this is a really good story a lot of us grow up at different paces and figure our out at different paces so to see someone at 28 still trying to figure themselves out still trying to figure out their next move was really refreshing and i think it's something that a lot of people could relate to but i think where i struggled with this book was ultimately the romance itself i think a few of my friends have mentioned this and they're goodreads reviews but the way that grace describes yuki was not something that i totally loved 100 of the time at the very beginning of the story she gives very like manic pixie dreamed girl descriptions of yuki which i felt like was a little bit unfair and i think some of that could be attributed to again that like lyrical writing just describing yuki in this kind of like beautiful ethereal sort of way but she is a real person so it would have been nice to kind of get that feeling up front add a little bit of reality into the story and also i think i would have just you know appreciated a little bit more focus on the romance in the book i feel like i liked the coming of age aspects of this book but i don't know that i would 100 categorize this as a romance it didn't feel it didn't feel as as swoony as i wanted it to be so three stars it's been a pleasure noni blake multiple pleasures all the possible all the conceivable pleasures is what our heroine in this book is seeking full transparency this is one of the books that i started but did not actually finish and i have no regrets about doing this although i do sort of regret reviewing it on goodreads because for some reason i have the top review for this story so if for some reason this story interests you please go and read it and write a review so that your positive review can be the top review for this book cause i feel i feel guilty anyway the story is about you guessed it noni blake who has come out of a long-term relationship and is looking to seek pleasure in every possible way she feels like she's been kind of deprived of this for a while and she's gonna go and sew her wild oats all the more power to her she's plus-sized she's bi but beyond that representation i have to say this book didn't really do much for me like i said i am all for people sewing their wild oats i am all for people going out and experimenting and finding themselves however they see fit right but in terms of a romance it's not super successful when we have a heroine who is sleeping with person after person and not forming any sort of like romantic bond with them now i'm assuming that our heroine does eventually find someone to fall in love with because this is marketed as a romance but it was really hard to read her having these experiences time and again because especially the first few experiences she has they're not what i would consider sexy the people do not treat her right and i don't feel like she was making a lot of self-discovery in that first portion of the book that i was reading and again you know stories continue and stories evolve and stories grow and i'm assuming that that's what happens in this book it was just not something that i felt compelled to stick around for so i dnf'd this book at 35 love it first much like my feelings towards the four-time grammy-nominated band the fray i feel hatred for no discernable reason for this book love at first is a story about our heroine nora who lives in an old run-down apartment building with a bunch of old people and when one of these old people kicks the bucket his young stud grandson moves in and decides that he's going to fix up the unit and sell the entire apartment building obviously nora doesn't want to lose the place that she has to live and so she ends up taking it upon herself to convince this man that he should stay in this building but this building is worth it and of course nora and youngstad fall in love but it was a total snoozefest frankly i just want to know who the target audience for this book is i want to know of people who like drinking glasses of whole milk with dinner picked this up from target and were like my jollies are thoroughly jazzed because that's the only answer honestly that i'd be happy with two stars wicked all night with a title like that and chiseled abs on the cover i was pretty hyped to read this but upon going on goodreads and looking up this book i realized that it is the third book in a series and while these list videos are absolutely a sign of my declining rationality i was not so irrational that i was going to read two other books in this series just so i could read the third book for this video moving on the gentle art of putting me to sleep by kj charles i kid i kid i couldn't go to sleep while reading this book because i was so focused on trying to understand the 17 characters at play that i was wide awake this book is a historical romance mostly about robin and marianne who have gotten themselves into a bit of a financial pickle and they decide that it is time for country to come to town in this case town is london they are going to marry well and rob the hell out of whoever they marry but the story honestly got too bulky for my legging i liked the overall premise of this book when i first started reading i was very much invested in robin and marianne finding spouses but you've got marianne you've got her two suitors you've got robin you've got his mark that he is trying to rob you also have his mark's stepmom and his mark's uncle it's just a lot there's a lot going on there's a lot of characters at play and i think if you're someone who likes stories like the importance of being earnest or those sorts of multiplayer sorts of tales you might like this it was just a lot for me as someone who reads a lot of historical romance and and reads a lot of stories that really focus on two people this was just a lot for me okay it was more than my adult brain could handle on top of that honestly though i could have overlooked all of these characters if the romance had been satisfying but unfortunately that just wasn't the case for me central romance actually in the story is between robin and his mark's uncle he ends up losing in this like gambling situation to the uncle and he ends up owing him a lot of money and to pay off his debts he decides to proposition him and say hey would you like to have sex with me for money i feel like other stories have done this before and it just worked out i just feel like the consent here was a little bit weird there's consent given robin is the one who offers himself but i feel like during the actual story itself there is so much emphasis on the fact that this is an uneven balance of power they're the ones that keep stressing this over and over again that whenever they do eventually come to this sort of like romantic place and the agreement becomes more than an agreement it just doesn't feel very sexy to me three stars then we move into march which is where we start getting some of the sunnier more sunshiny romances and there's there's a lot here first up we have a float plan what do you do when your fiance dies you steal his boat and float on all right that was a lot more morbid than i had really anticipated i bet you didn't think that you would hear a modest mouse reference in this video though okay so this story is about anna and kean anna is dealing with the recent loss of her fiance and anna is really a dealing with the aftermath of this she really wondering why he did this he never really gave any explanation and i think that's hurting her more than she really knows but she decides she's going to take this boat trip that they had planned together and she's going to do it herself she goes on this tropical voyage i guess kind of in memory of her dead fiance and along the way she ends up picking up a guy to help her navigate because she's not a super great navigator because let's be honest she wasn't going to do this alone in the first place and she picks up keane a complete stranger and he helps her navigate through all these tropical islands you know i did worry for her safety a bit i did think it was maybe perhaps a little logical for her to pick up someone she doesn't know but i did really enjoy the romance that resulted and i think maybe my enjoyment of this book is really colored by the fact that i was outside gardening and listening to descriptions of this beautiful tropical setting but honestly i had a really i had a really good time with this book i loved seeing anna kind of recover from the heartbreak that she's going through having keenan kind of help her heal from that and then also seeing her make these new adventures and these new memories in this boat that otherwise would have probably left her with some like really uncomfortable memories so i liked this it was a little cheesy at times and it did have sort of a rush ending but i do think that this is a book that i would definitely pick up again i'm on a beach or i don't know i just want something easy and breezy to read it's not easy and breezy because it is a little sad but three stars accidentally engaged and i accidentally forgot what this book's about i mean hey after reading 30 books it was bound to happen i was bound to forget something but i did look it up on goodreads and it kind of jogged my memory a little bit so let's try it this story is about reena and nadim nadim ends up moving into rina's apartment building due to her kind of meddling matchmaking parents they have been trying to set her up for a really long time i believe nadeem works for rina's father and they end up kind of falling for each other pretty quickly even though she doesn't want to fall for him even though it's sort of against her better judgment she ends up striking up kind of a friendship sort of romance with him and he ends up going on a digital cooking competition with her so that she can maybe win some money to start her own business i think she was maybe a software engineer or something before this but she's trying to kind of pivot her career and do something she really wants to do and getting to see her do that was actually like pretty fun it was a pretty fun experience but ultimately i feel like there was so much going on in this book sort of similar to my complaints about the gentle art of fortune hunting god that's a long title not so many characters in this story but there are a lot of different components and i just don't feel like ultimately all of them were executed very well we find out that rina's parents have some secrets that they're keeping from her and keeping from each other and that kind of comes into the play in the book but it never really gets fully resolved and there's just a few different situations like that and i felt like if any of those had been explored more it would have been a little bit more of a satisfying read and would have had a little bit more grit to it and also i feel like the romance wasn't very memorable i mean if i don't remember the book very well it would follow that the romance isn't very memorable either i feel like i should recuse myself from reading this one but two stars now speaking of recusing myself i shall be doing that right now for this book the devil in black by lj shen i haven't had much luck with lj shen's books in past years and i especially have not had luck with her standalone novels so i decided not to pick this one up mostly for myself but also for you moving on actor age eve brown i'm going to say something really bold right now i want talia hibbert to write my eulogy i'm not asking that she know me or do any research i should have a feeling that she'd managed to make it both heartfelt and incredibly sexy which is exactly how i would like to be remembered actor age brown is the third and final book in the brown sisters trilogy and much like its predecessors it was a true delight i always hope to see an author continue to put out stories that i enjoy after i enjoy one of their books but it's another thing entirely to see an author just progressively make better and better stories it's like surely there should be an upper limit right talia herbert said that i'm going to make each book better than the last and she really really delivered with actor age eve brown eve brown is the flightiest and quirkiest of all of the brown sisters and i thought that this would annoy me but strangely it did not now eve's family are pretty annoyed with her because she has taken all of her money that she's inherited and invested it into businesses that have kind of failed not because they have been a bad endeavors but because she just gets bored and ends up moving on to the next thing but her parents are fed up after her last endeavor has failed and they have given her an ultimatum if you want this money you need to work consistently at the same place for six months eve is looking for a way out of this when she comes across a help wanted sign at a bed and breakfast and she ends up working at the spend breakfast and falling for the owner jacob it sounds like a pretty simple premise and it is in a lot of ways but the execution like just thinking about this book gives me butterflies i love this book it is equal parts sweet and sexy which i feel like is very hard to execute on well but i really did find myself just like giggling smiling blushing reading this entire book there were so many perfect moments and as always talia hibbert really executes while on the incorporation of awesome representation so five stars ladies and gentlemen i have found a tech girl boss that i don't want to yell at the dating plan by sarah desai this story is about daisy who is a software engineer and her fake dating relationship with long time crush and brother's best friend liam so at the start of the story liam is hell-bent on getting his family inheritance and the only way that he can do that is if he marries now he doesn't really know who he can enlist for help until he remembers his best friend has a sister named daisy who he famously abandoned for her senior prom but he is able to somehow convince daisy to get married i think for daisy it's about getting her family off her back and it works out pretty well i'm gonna say it works out well for both of them i loved this romance i thought it was so sweet i really enjoyed the exploration of so many different things and this story i feel like it handled family culture career romance all so expertly without having any one thing take center stage i do feel like it did a really good job at the romance component but it did again combine all of these things so excellently and i really felt like the emotions that our characters were feeling were very justified and i feel like sometimes that gets lost in romance there is so much emotion present typically but sometimes i'm like why do you feel like this like i'm not understanding where you're coming from but i really understood both liam and daisy and i really really liked how the story ended four stars moving on to april showers or not so much showers i feel like we had a lot of successes in april april was another jam-packed romance reading month for me and for this list i mean i think a lot of the titles on this list are in the months of february and april i'm just excited to share these ones with you there are some major fails but there are some of my favorite romances in here you've got some five stars that i think might be unexpected first up we have life's too short at least this one isn't about a girl who makes dog furniture if you know you know so right off the bat i think if you have read me cute by helena hunting which i know a few of you have because that one was really heavily marketed you could probably skip this book because there is a lot of overlap between the two stories this has the same heavy emphasis on a lot of life's challenges while the romance unfortunately takes a back seat this story follows our heroine vanessa whose mother and sister both die of the same illness when they are pretty young vanessa is nearing the age at which her mother and sister passed away and she's really scared that the same thing is going to happen to her now as kind of a reactionary thing to these deaths vanessa has made it her life's mission to live her life to the fullest she has been traveling and i think her job is a travel vlogger but unfortunately she is forced to stay at home and not really go on any of these adventures when her half-sister ends up dumping her baby on vanessa's doorstep and vanessa is forced to become a mom but luckily vanessa has a really nice kind neighbor named adrian who hears the baby crying one day and comes over to help vanessa so that she can you know take a shower or get things done around the house and it's really just the romance between vanessa and adrian as they sort of navigate life together and look i understand that bad things happen in real life and i don't want my romance to be completely devoid of reality i just sometimes want a little bit more escapism than romances that i've picked up lately have provided i feel like there is absolutely a way to add levity to some of these harder hitting stories and it seems like a lot of romance authors are just kind of like missing the mark for that i did feel like adrian was a superhero i did really like him as a character but i did feel like vanessa was a little bit irritating at not confirming whether or not she actually had the disease that her mom and sister died up she's spending so much time in this book focusing on her impending death when she didn't even know if she was dying there were just there were just too many things in this book that made me like become annoyed so for me this is a two-star book to love and to loathe a book title with more passion than the contents of the book love and loathe is a historical romance about our heroine diana who is recently widowed and her enemies to lovers flirtation chip with a man named jeremy jeremy has been a bachelor forever and when they're at this country estate sort of party at jeremy's house jeremy and diana have this sort of bet if he doesn't marry within the year then diana owes him 100 pounds i believe that's how the bed goes the assumption here is that jeremy could not possibly settle down and find a wife but as jeremy embarks on his journey to find himself a lady he finds himself dumped by his mistress stating his lack of corn shocking abilities now jeremy is taking this to heart because he has been tupping quite a few ladies in his day and he has never had complaints but he trusts his good old friend diana to be honest so he goes to her propositions her for sex and they engage in an intimate relationship that obviously turns too much more in the course of the story he ends up having this sexual relationship with diana while she's also trying to find him a spouse it's a little bit nonsensical and i do feel like it kind of added to the overall miscommunication of the story i think that's where my main issue lies with this book it's not terrible but i feel like there was so much time focused on these two having an intimate relationship and yet denying that they could possibly have feelings for each other i feel like diana was spending a lot of time thinking like oh he couldn't possibly want me as a wife like why wouldn't he like you are having sex and he seems to really like you when you have a good relationship like i say enemies to lovers at the beginning of this kind of description but it's not true enemies to lovers they enjoy each other's company it just it felt like needless conflict whenever i pick up a historical romance with an illustrated cover i feel like the authors are trying to do something new and fresh and modern like a new modern spin on historical romance which isn't bad i think it will work for some people and not others sadly in this case i did fall into the camp of others three stars all right bear with me i have a scenario for you have you ever found a recipe online and you thought that looks like it was pulled from my brain i feel like every combination of ingredients is coalescing here to be my perfect recipe like i feel like this is going to really be it and you set time aside you know you get home early from work one day and you're like i'm gonna finally tackle this recipe i'm going to make bliss happen in my kitchen so you make this recipe put in the oven you take it out of the oven it smells phenomenal and you go to take a taste and it's bland there's no flavor there everything that you were expecting disappears so you decide that you're going to scour the comment section of this recipe and see if you were alone in your feelings and sure there are a couple of people who thought that this was maybe not their favorite recipe but it seems like most of the people in this comment section seemed to enjoy this dish to the degree that you wanted to enjoy this dish and you feel a bit gaslighted because you're like did i eat the same thing that everybody else is eating that's how i felt with the intimacy experiment by rosie tannen i read the first book from this author earlier this year and while it wasn't a perfect read for me i really did enjoy this author's writing and i was really excited to pick up another book from her our heroine naomi is a former star-turned sex educator and one day she ends up meeting ethan a young rabbi and he asks her hey will you come and do these talks on sex and dating to entice young people to come to my synagogue because everybody there seems to be older and not a lot of people have been in attendance in general and ethan has made it his mission to make a successful career for himself i absolutely loved the setup for this story and we get so much of naomi in book one that i was so excited to see what her romance would be all about but i read and i read and i read and i could not seem to find any chemistry between ethan and naomi and since this is their romance that was really really disappointing and i will say that i'm a pretty harsh critic when it comes to chemistry between characters i don't want them to just like kind of like each other but i really do feel like this book in my opinion of all of the books on this list really really lacked chemistry between the two characters and i feel strange kind of saying that because so many reviewers actually said that they loved the chemistry between naomi and ethan i just didn't feel it and i feel alone in my feelings but ultimately i dnf this book by 50 i'm gonna say it i think everyone deserves a really grumpy really sexy man to set his dreams aside temporarily so that you can live yours twice diet by sarah hoggle is about our heroine mabel who has recently inherited a house from her great aunt who has recently passed away now this couldn't have come at a better time for mabel because she's dealing with a lot of in her life she recently got a promotion at work but she's not able to kind of put into place all of the things that she wants i think she works at a resort and she is in charge of events but no one seems to be interested in the events that maple has come up with and on top of that she is dealing with the loss of a recent friend her friend didn't pass away her friend just catfished her wow it was really heartbreaking to read about how she really really trusted this girl and how she feels completely heartbroken because not only did she lose a friend but she also lost someone that she thought that she could potentially have feelings for it's super heartbreaking and you feel so excited for me able to embark on this journey but of course it's not gonna be quite that simple when mabel arrives at her aunt's house she finds that she is not the only person who is inherited the groundskeeper of the house in recent years wesley is also inheriting the home and they have to kind of collectively decide what they're going to do with it i feel like i have to say that this book was the sweetest piece of cake for the first 40 of the book i will say that i was kind of unsure of the direction that things were going to take kind of like with sarah hoggle's first book this is told in one singular pov and when wesley kind of completely ignores mabel for the first like 30 to 40 of the book i was wondering how the romance was really going to take shape but when this pivotal pivotal scene happens i melted i swooned and then things just kept making me swoon from there i feel like these characters had such incredible chemistry and i really adored how much they accepted each other and accepted each other's flaws mabel is a really really big dreamer and she needs someone to kind of help bring her down to earth in some ways and i feel like wesley does a great job at that and wes is dealing with some pretty challenging mental health issues which mabel helps him work through in a very supportive supportive way and i personally loved it there was a scene near the end of this book where wes is dealing with his mental health and i just loved how it was handled it was one of my top moments in a book that i've ever read and honestly this book just really took me by surprise i related to it more than i possibly thought that i could five stars i really don't want to consider sally thorne a one-hit wonder but all of her titles after the hating game have been misses for me and sadly this one is no exception second first impressions is about our heroine ruthie who has been working at a retirement village and it shows she dresses a little bit conservatively like an old lady and she nearly never leaves the property until one day teddy rolls in he is a flighty himbo whose father recently purchased the retirement village and he tells teddy that if he wants a place to stay he's going to have to work at the retirement village it's the romans obviously between a teddy and ruthie now i think the intent behind this story was to have this kind of like flighty hero who's going to show the heroine how to kind of let loose and then also have this really kind of i want to say stodgy but reliable heroin who's going to teach him how to be a reliable person you know they're going to learn something from each other but i really didn't see enough growth in either of the characters for that to have been the entire basis of the story and i don't know i just felt like ruthie and teddy were not well suited for each other i understand that opposites can attract but i felt like these two were just too opposite to attract i don't know i also i could not relate to ruthie in any sense she was much much much too meek for me and again i understand that everybody has their own personality types but i wanted to see her stand up for herself just a little bit more than she did and that being said this is absolutely not the worst book on the list but it does remind me of my least favorite 80s movie say anything so three stars if you're looking for something to read every night before bed to leave you with sweet dreams i have the book for you love and color is an anthology of stories both original and retold focusing on love throughout history and mythology i personally really enjoyed this one because i ended up picking it up on audio and anytime that i had any small tasks to do around the house i turned my headphones on listened to one of these stories and just got through it in the time that it took me to do my tasks it was fantastic honestly and it was really refreshing getting to pick up something entirely different from anything else on this list four stars jr word will always occupy a pretty big part of my romance loving heart not only because she's written so many damn books but because she is the author that got me into romance in the first place that being said i'm always kind of confused when i see her titles on lists like these not because she doesn't deserve to be on them i mean she's a fantastic writer but because i feel like it kind of does a disservice to readers who might want to pick up these books i think if you're unfamiliar with her series you'd see oh 19th book in a series i can read this with no context but that's where you'd be wrong because all of these books are interconnected and if you go into the 19th book with no context you're gonna be really really confused so for that reason didn't read moving on now i will say no list cobbled together by goodreads or buzzfeed is ever going to be nearly as diverse as i'd like it to be however i was pleasantly surprised when i saw maggie beats her muse on the list because it has a heroine who is over the age of 40. which is an aspect of diversity that i feel like is not often included when we think of romance maggie finds her muse is about articular character and she is a romance author but she has been met with some bad luck and misfortune recently because she's having a really hard time completing her latest romance novel much anticipated by her readers and she's also been dumped by her boyfriend or maybe she dumped her boyfriend either way she's dealing with heartbreak and she's also trying to write this story maggie decides one day to take up her editor's offer and go and live in paris for a while so she can finish her book i mean what better place to finish a story than in the city of love while there she ends up reconnecting with her ex-husband who she hasn't seen in many many years she ends up hanging out with her daughter and also meeting a sexy frenchman max i will say i really did enjoy the atmosphere of this book and i really liked how confident maggie was as a heroine in this author's bio she talked specifically about wanting to see more mature confident women in stories and i do think she really nailed that aspect of this book i also thought that maggie and max's romance was really really cute but i did end up having some issues with this book namely the love triangle aspect and also maggie's relationship with her daughter firstly the love triangle and the story felt completely unnecessary and it did little to add to the conflict of the story we have maggie deciding if she wants to engage or re-engage i guess in a relationship with her ex-husband or if she wants to go in an entirely new direction and date the frenchman max it was just not a good fit for the story i don't think it would have been more interesting had we had a strong conflict with max instead like a reason why they could potentially not be together which i think would have been easy to come up with right like she's from america he's from france that's a conflict in and of itself we didn't really need an extra player added in and then i also didn't love maggie's relationship with her daughter maggie's daughter is described as being autistic and i definitely love when we have the inclusion of autism weapon stories if it's done well we have an adult woman with autism and unfortunately i felt like this story used that autism as a reason why maggie couldn't be close with her daughter which doesn't really make sense to me there are plenty of reasons for someone to not be close with their daughter and i get that i feel like that's something that is very common in real life just because you're related to someone doesn't mean you necessarily get along very well if anything i feel like sometimes being related means you are even less likely to get along than anyone else but i just really didn't like the way that maggie talked about her daughter she seemed to make the autism the reason why she couldn't relate to her daughter or didn't want to spend more time with her daughter she says things like i just don't understand her and it's really nice when we get to connect but i think it's better that we spend a lot of time apart as well i just didn't like it i didn't like that it was implied that maggie's daughter's autism was the reason that they weren't close i'm not autistic myself so i'm not the authority on representation it's just something in this book that personally rubbed me the wrong way two stars i'll be honest this next book is one that i am still reading and if i'm extra honest this is probably a book that's going to languish on my currently reading shelf on goodreads for a very long time if not indefinitely the devil comes courting by courtney milan now i was really anticipating this book because i adored the one contemporary romance that i've read by this author and i figured she's going to knock it out of the park in a historical setting as well because i think that's her bread and butter mostly this book was set to be published in february but it ended up getting pushed out to april which is usually kind of a red flag and i will say it did make me a little bit more apprehensive to pick up this title and then i noticed how long this book was and i got a little bit more wary and then before you know it it was the one book that i had not ended up picking up for this video i tried to read it over this past week and i have to say it was a challenge it was a true challenge to get through this story is about our hero grayson who is a black man traveling to china on business he is looking to find someone who can help him in his endeavor to complete the first telegraphic network he needs someone who is able to i believe translate chinese into morse code or like however telegraphs are transmitted i'm not entirely sure but he ends up being referred to someone named the silver fox who is apparently really really fantastic at anything like telegraph related and he ends up finding out that the silver fox is a recently widowed chinese woman and he asks for her help he asks hey can i hire you can we dominate together basically let's be the first to have a telegraphic network put into place and i was completely sold on this premise i really liked the idea and i really enjoyed from what i read of grayson he's a really really strong hero and he definitely knows what he wants he doesn't let anyone walk all over other people which was very much needed with our heroine amelia i think amelia is a big part of why i had a hard time getting through this story and why i still haven't i understand that in the day and age of this story women didn't have the same rights and freedoms as men i mean i think that's pretty obvious but when amelia is faced with a pretty easy decision in my opinion of marrying a missionary that she doesn't know or going and work for money for grayson she is left in this state of indecision amelia is such a i don't want to say flaky or flighty person but so indecisive and we have to sit and listen to her hem and haw about whether or not she should marry this man or whether she should go and embark on a journey that she really wants it just seemed so obvious to me and it seems like the author is just trying to draw out this conflict but i'm sure there are going to be even greater conflicts that play later on down the line this book is over 400 pages for a historical romance that is way too long i just feel like this is blocking the book down and on top of that amelia has this quirk where she can't remember anyone's name and it is hammered home time and time again in the 17 that i read of this book and it was just irritating now i'm not trying to totally tear this book apart because i haven't finished it and i do think eventually that this could be a really successful story but i really wanted there to be more in this first 17 to grip me and unfortunately that just was not the case since i'm not very far in i'm not going to rate it but i'm also not going to consider this a dnf i think if you are looking for a historically accurate historical romance and you want a book that's not set in england i think this could be one that could really be up your alley but for me i'm unsure we're moving through the calendar once again into the month of may in the month of may there were three stories published that were on this list two of which were five star reads for me one of which was a dnf so let me tell you what those books were first up we have people we meet on vacation by emily henry unlike miss sally thorne i really think that emily henry has proven that a not so stellar romance debut doesn't mean that you can't deliver hot nasty biscuit buttering a second time around people who meet on vacation is a classic friends to lovers mutual pining story about poppy and alex poppy and alex end up meeting in college they strike up this friendship and the way that they keep this friendship up post-grad is to go on vacations together every summer i think poppy is in the kind of like travel industry as a job so she gets to go on these free vacations where she gets to kind of write up profiles and while she's there she gets to kind of like bring a friend every time alex tags along and they just strengthen their friendship this way until disaster strikes two years ago and they have decided that they are not going to go on these trips any longer we have no idea what happened but we know that neither of them are very happy not going on vacations together until another fateful summer when poppy's life is kind of falling apart and she decides she's gonna hit alex up she's gonna be the one to initiate contact again and asks for one final rodeo and then they turn that vacation into a different kind of rodeo if you catch my drift it was hot it was angsty it was tension filled and it has me looking forward to more titles by this author in the future i'm not gonna wax poetic about this book because i feel like if you watch any other romance related content on this platform you've definitely heard someone talk about this book needless to say it was fantastic gave it five stars and i do recommend it surprises keep coming and they don't stop coming a christina lauren book that i actually enjoyed the soulmate equation the soulmate equation is a story about her heroine jess who is a single mom and statistician trying to make ends meet one day she meets a hottie in a coffee bar and she is invited to try his new startup which is a dating application he and his team have cracked the code and apparently by just a simple dna swab they can figure out who your soulmate is if they're on the app obviously from probability between zero and 100 when jess agrees that she is going to try out the app decides to make some time for herself she deserves this she ends up finding out that the founder of this application is a i want to say like 98 match for her and this is the highest match this app has ever seen so it kind of behooves her and our hero to kind of fake date for publicity for the app and then also for money for jess like she will get paid if she essentially fake dates river and um they kind of fall in love from there i really thought this book was a lot of fun i really don't tend to enjoy stories that have startup culture at the heart of them but i think this one it did a really good job at balancing that kind of like techie side of things with jess's family and found family structure she lives in this apartment building and it seems like everybody there kind of helps take care of her daughter we get to see jess's grandparents and her friends kind of rally around her to kind of raise this kid and i just liked the story a whole lot i feel like there was so much emphasis put on building fully fleshed out characters and i really appreciated that because i think that's kind of where christina lauren has failed in the past for me i will say that river was maybe not the most unique hero ever but i do think he does a really good job at kind of working on his flaws and communicating with jess whenever he has any sort of issues i really like this book and i think this is one of those romances that is best read by a pool with a drink in hand five stars i can't say that this is a problem that i've ever had while reading a book before but i grew to disagree with how this author decided to write her own characters how to find a princess is a story about makeda and beznaria makeda is a bit of a doormat at the start of the story she ends up getting dumped by her long-term girlfriend she ends up getting passed up for a promotion at work not because she is undeserving but because she is unable to stand up for herself and we also find out that she's let an ex take out loans in her name bisnaria on the other hand is on a hunt to find the heir to this throne bezarya's family has always protected the royal family but now there's no one on the throne and she's gonna go and look for a long lost heir who she believes to be a makeda i'm telling you about these characters so that you kind of get an idea and a feel for who they should be you assume makeda is going to be kind of like timid and maybe willing to do kind of whatever beznaria says and you think beznari is going to be this like strong character getting someone on the throne like she is a protector type not really the case makita is characterized as doormat in the beginning but she ends up being a complete to basnaria and has no interest in gaining any sort of like royal title i'm not saying you have to have interest in gaining a royal title i'm sure that that would be sort of a weird thing to grapple with especially if your family's been telling you for years and years that oh you're a long-lost princess like i'm sure you would want to tune them out after a while i get it but i just don't think it made sense to have her be as combative with bisnaria as she actually was and i also feel like bezaria wasn't as much of a take charge kind of character as she needed to be for the story to work out on top of that i also feel like the plot was a little bit disjointed and a little bit weird in terms of pacing there was also so much time spent on a boat and i hate stories set at sea it's just one of my pet peeves i decided unfortunately to dnf this book at 50 moving down the calendar again we're into the month of july where only one title was published it actually wasn't slated for july it ended up just getting pushed out we have isn't it romantic romantic yes romantic no this is the fourth book in a series of standalone novels wherein a group of big hunky dudes ends up reading romance novels forming a book club and using this knowledge they find together to help be better partners to their respective partners i really love the concept but unfortunately i was let down by the execution of this book this story is about vlad and elena vlad is a russian hockey player who comes to america to play and he decides that he is going to marry his childhood best friend so that she can come to america as well and study journalism they've been married for about four years or so i want to say at the start of the story and they have never actually lived together or lived as a married couple before until one day vlad ends up injuring himself in a hockey game i believe he breaks a major bone in his leg so he can't really take care of himself and elena ends up coming to his rescue i think he lives in like nashville or something she ends up living in his house for a while to help take care of him and i was really excited at the prospect of this all of this happens within the first 30 of the book and i was convinced that was gonna be the story like we were going to get her taking care of him which is a romance stroke that i love but unfortunately that's not really what the story was about it was so bogged down with additional things that i didn't care about we have this sort of like mystery plot with elena who is trying to kind of track down this journalistic story that her dad was pursuing before he passed away we also have the story within a story that is present in all of these books but seem to take much more of a center stage place in this story and i think i could have possibly overlooked this if the relationship between a vlad and elena was maybe a little bit more straightforward or had been more communicative but vlad was so insistent on the fact that elena could not possibly love him that he let that get in the way of his expression of his love for her which was so silly because he is characterized as this like really fun loving loving man and he just didn't get to actually show that to elena very much so despite how much i enjoyed this book in the beginning it's ultimately not one that's going to stick with me three stars while we were dating we sure did talk about it to a lot of people at length at the detriment of our own personal interactions this is the sixth book in jasmine guillory's wedding party series and it follows the brother of one of the heroes of our previous books ben and his relationship with up-and-coming actress really big movie star anna i can't say that i had a terrible time reading this book it was incredibly digestible and pretty low angst but it didn't do much to make me swoon and that seems to be an issue that is recurring every time i pick up this author's works i really like my romances i found to have a really heavy emphasis on dialogue and interaction because that is how i feel chemistry between characters i don't want to see them have one interaction and then go off and be introspective i want to see a lot of interaction between the two of them and that's just not how jasmine guillory's writing tends to function i saw that especially on display in this book i get it i get that you're trying to work through your emotions and that makes sense and it's not like i don't want my characters to think about what's happening to them i just wish that it would happen at a slightly quicker clip and that we could have more page time spent between our two characters together and while i did really appreciate certain aspects of the story particularly the emphasis on men going to therapy and mental health in general i just don't think this book is going to have a lasting impression on me three stars and then moving on to august sadly the last book that we are going to be talking about is probably my most disappointing book that i've read this entire year and i am really really sad about it the heart principle by helen huang was one of my most anticipated romances of this year i have given every single book that she has written which i guess admittedly isn't that many but i gave her previous two novels five stars and i found myself crying when reading both of them which if you know me is pretty unheard of so i fully expected and anticipated to adore this book but sadly that was not the case the heart principle is about our hero quan and our heroine anna anna is a violinist who has found unexpected success after a video of her playing the violin it goes viral but unfortunately this has left anna in sort of a weird place she's feeling a lot of imposter syndrome and a lot of feelings of inadequacy not helped by her family who doesn't seem to accept her or understand her personality very well and to make matters worse anna's long-term boyfriend asks if she will go on a break so anna decides that she's going to live this break to the fullest and find someone on tinder to date in the meantime in her endeavor she ends up meeting quan who is a character that we learned about in previous books i was curious once i started this book how kwon was going to play into the story in previous books he's characterized as this fun loving hilarious character and he is definitely the levity that a lot of these other stories need the other two books in this series definitely are light-hearted but there are serious emotional moments and i feel like quan in those books really helped lighten the mood so i was curious how he was going to work in this story that seemed right off the bat to be a lot darker than our author's previous titles now klon is dealing with a recent cancer diagnosis and treatment and he has left feeling kind of self-conscious and a little bit negative about his body and i felt like this was a really interesting choice for our author to make in making him a different character really this time around he has a much changed personality and i feel like a lot of the quan that we saw in previous books is not really present here but i can appreciate what helen huang was trying to do here she was trying to have two characters that are going through a lot get together and accept each other for who they are anna is dealing with a lot of anxiety and she ends up failing on her first date with quan quan's super accepting of this and decides that like hey we should just try this again it'll be fine and we get to see this happen a couple of different times until they finally you know have a sexual encounter together and end up getting together for good and i did really appreciate how patient kwon was but as the story continued i felt just a little bit cheated at the 50 mark of the story it goes from a story that is a little bit melancholy and has some harder hitting topics to being downright depressing anna has to take care of a dying relative for a good portion of this book and much of this book is filled with the misery of anna's caretaking experience i know this is a reality that a lot of people face and i do think that this is something that needs to be present in more stories but it took too much away from the relationship development in this book and that sucks like i said earlier quan was characterized as such a fun loving guy in previous books and i was interested to see how this life circumstance changed his perspective but i honestly didn't see what he saw in anna it is stated at one point in the book that he loves getting to know people's quirks and he likes accepting people for who they are which i guess is good but it feels a little bit generic in the scope of a relationship to just say oh yeah i like quirks she's quirky i'm gonna get with her it didn't seem like our author went to any great lengths to convince us that these two characters should be together besides kwan just being a good guy which i feel like is pretty unfair since we were really really excited for his book in particular because he's so different than the heroes of the other books this book was such a mixed bag for me because i really did appreciate anna's journey i really loved seeing anna get her autism diagnosis and how she felt comfort in that and i really did like how helen huang tackled certain aspects of family relationships but i personally think quan deserved more page time in his own romance three stars now i could certainly leave the video here and leave us on kind of a sour note but i thought it would be fun instead to tell you what my top five romances of 2021 are i'm gonna go quickly and then i'm gonna leave all of these five titles in the description down below with buy links if you are interested in picking any of these titles up three of these i believe are featured in this video two i think are not first up we have twice shy by sarah hogle i've already talked about this book i just loved the emphasis on mental health in this book i also just loved how sweet it was i love wes and mabel and i think if you want a really good grumpy suntrain story you're going to love this book next up on my list is one that is not included on the 33 hottest romances of 2021. we have it happen one summer by tessa bailey i adore the story i think tessa bailey writes some of the steamiest stories out there and this is a shit's creek inspired rom-com with an alexis rose type heroine falling for a grumpy crab fisherman it's definitely an opposite attract romance a fish out of water romance and it was a five star for me of course with my glowing review of this book i had to put actor age eve brown on this list again fantastic story i love a grumpy sunshine story i love the autism representation in this book i love our plus-size heroine everything about this book was perfect to me it was sweet it was incredibly sexy it made me blush i don't know what more i can say pick it up i know not everybody is but i am a huge sucker for friends to lovers romances and i really feel like people who meet on vacation by emily henry did a fantastic job this is going to be on so many best of lists i'm sure and it's definitely going to be in the goodreads choice awards so if for some reason you want to be caught up on that before it even comes out before the nominees are announced in december pick it up and then in my fifth place slot okay technically there's two books here because i couldn't decide and i feel like they kind of have similar vibes we have the soulmate equation by christina lauren again i talked about this one i think if you haven't had luck with christina lauren though you might want to give the love hypothesis by ali hazelwood a try from my understanding this story started out as fan fiction and you can really tell in the best possible way this is a trope-filled science-filled story and you've got a lot of again grumpy to sunshine feels with a hero who has been pining for the heroine for two whole years so if that interests you if you want to see all of the delicious fanfiction trope goodness i feel like you need to pick this book up that is it i read against my better judgment uh almost almost 33 of the hottest romances of 2021 i had a really good time doing this i love making list videos this is not my first rodeo if you want to see any of my other list videos i will link my playlist down in the description i've done two other ones before also romance related so thanks so much for watching i know this was a long video but thanks so much for watching i love y'all so much and until next sunday you\n"