New Romance Books to Read

[Pelican Press 0]

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New Romance Books to Read

Romance loves to build triumphant outcomes out of terrible decisions. And Danica Nava’s contemporary THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO EMBER (Berkley, paperback, $16.99) stars a heroine who makes more bad decisions than most.

Ember Lee Cardinal’s route out of her *****-end bowling alley job feels like an impossible climb. After hundreds of job applications and not a single interview, she impulsively checks the box marked “white” instead of “Native *********.”

Suddenly Ember breezes into a job as an accounting assistant, where she meets a superhot I.T. guy named Danuwoa who smells like lavender and wears his dark hair long. But ***** have a way of turning on the teller. Now she’s working overtime for the moody chief executive, scrambling to hide her relationship with Danuwoa from H.R. and being blackmailed by a colleague who saw them together. Ember’s always prided herself on being the steady, independent one in her family, but now she might have to do something unprecedented and ask for the help she needs.

It’s the details that really bring this book to life: the zip-lock bag Ember puts over the can of beans in the fridge, the shock of going from plunging clogged toilets to working in pristine corporate offices, the way Ember and Danuwoa have spectacular **** and then fall asleep with their pinkies entwined. It’s funny and messy in the best way, and I was rooting for Ember even as she dug herself deeper and deeper.

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With THE FRIEND ZONE EXPERIMENT (Tor Trade, paperback, $18.99), Zen Cho brings us a beautifully soapy second-chance romance set in modern-day London. The former concert pianist Ket Siong has a tight-knit family and a teaching job that feels like a comedown; the heiress Renee Goh has a terrible family but a self-made career she adores. The pair were best friends at university until they broke each other’s hearts with a near-miss hookup; now one chance encounter reignites all that long-ago yearning.

There’s a lot going on here — corporate back stabbing, a missing activist — but the romance buzzes like a live wire. Ket Siong’s quiet care gives weight to Renee’s drive, and her quickness lightens the emotional burdens he’s been concealing.

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Both heroines in Karelia and Fay Stetz-Waters’s gorgeously stylish SECOND NIGHT STAND (Forever, paperback, $17.99) start the book laden with regrets. The burlesque troupe leader Blue Lenox (whose real name is Izzy Wells) has a moldy theater mortgaged to the hilt, while the ****** ballet prodigy Lillian Jackson hasn’t told her prestigious dance company their financiers have pulled out. Both are desperate enough to audition for a dance reality show with a huge cash prize — and both need to ***** off a little stress with an anonymous hookup.

Isn’t it awkward when you show up on your first day of filming and your competition is the hottest one-night stand you’ve ever had? Izzy and Lillian are both bright and wary; the combination makes for sparkling banter when they’re deflecting, and incisive observations when they start letting the other in.

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Speaking of deflecting … Andrew Ushida, the hero of Courtney Milan’s THE EARL WHO ISN’T (self-published, paperback, $17.99), is a champion at changing the subject — a useful skill for the Earl of Arsell’s unacknowledged eldest son. Keeping his parentage concealed has been Andrew’s priority since he and his mother fled their violent white aristocratic in-laws for the safe anonymity of Wedgeford, a fictional majority-****** small town in Victorian England.”

So when his childhood best friend and onetime lover Lily returns from years in Hong Kong, thrilled to explain she’s found proof of his lineage, Andrew does the only thing he can: He steals the proof. Even though it’s a betrayal of the woman he still loves and the long-ago night he holds dear as “the best mistake he ever made.”

Lily Bei — too frank, too ******** and too intense — knows instantly Andrew is the thief. But she wants him to trust her enough to tell her why, even as she worries she’s too difficult and unfeminine to earn anyone’s love. She spends her dowry on a printing press so she can publish feminist ******** poetry in translation, even though her first attempts at political activism have led to a rupture with her grandfather.

And as if this weren’t complicated enough, Andrew’s younger half brother, Alan, arrives in Wedgeford to insist that Andrew, not Alan, should be the earl.

As she did in the first two Wedgeford books, Milan sprinkles in comic details by the handful — bouncy but troublesome Alan, the giant long beans Andrew grows in his garden — then brings everything together in a dazzling, dizzying moment of catharsis. “The Earl Who Isn’t” weighs the difference between malice and mistakes, between the villains who let easy roads lead to evil and the heroes who choose the right thing even when it’s hard. Because bad decisions can only get a romance plot started: They can’t get you all the way to the happily ever after.

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