Romantic Parvenu

Sleeping Beauty Riff In Need of Caffeine | A Cowboy to Remember by Rebekah Weatherspoon

July 8, 2020

This cowboy-meets-Sleeping-Beauty romance is slow to start—like really slow to start—but once it finally gets going, it's wonderful. It's just too bad the point where the plot comes into its own is already two-thirds into the text.

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Bitter Truths About Friendship | When You Were Everything by Ashley Woodfolk

July 3, 2020

When You Were Everything unearths—in gutting, unflinching honesty—the reality of a breakdown in a friendship. Cleo and Layla have been friends since middle school. Not just friends: best friends. While not unhealthily so, they were each other's ...

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The Dark Murder-for-hire Romance of My Dreams | All Things Burn by Jodie Slaughter

June 29, 2020

On a high-level overview, All Things Burn does everything right: a desperate woman who's been failed by the police who are supposed to protect her turns to a hitman in order to keep herself safe—then follows a tricky descent into moral ambiguity ...

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Magical Realism with Surprising Misogyny | Don’t Call Me Cupcake by Tara Sheets

June 26, 2020

Taking place on a small island off the coast of Washington, this book is full of the usual small town charm that many readers of contemporary romance love. Quaint shops, nosy neighbors, and a friendly, down-to-earth vibe suffuse the first few ...

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Book Review: The Newcomer by Robyn Carr

June 24, 2020

To describe The Newcomer as a disappointment is possibly the biggest understatement of the year (thus far). The first book in Carr’s Thunder Point series, The Wanderer, was easily my favorite contemporary romance in quite some time. I was pumped ...

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Book Review: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

June 22, 2020

Elisabeth Thomas's debut novel is a Gothic in the style of Donna Tartt. (Honestly, though: any book about hedonistic, amoral college students is getting compared to Tartt and there's no way to avoid it.) For what it was, Catherine House is good. ...

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