Book 20: Copper Script by KJ Charles

A book that beautifully straddles the line between a murder mystery and a romance! This author writes about damaged men finding each other in post-Great War Britain so well, and this one has just a touch of the paranormal to keep it interesting. Joel can essentially see who a person is at their core from their handwriting, and this skill makes him useful for both a socialite checking up on their fiancée and a cop trying to solve a murder. The cop in question is Aaron, a detective who's living a small, closeted life and has to open himself to work with Joel to save themselves and apprehend the crook. And you know what, it just works! It's a nice book with a lovely romance at the center of it, and if the mystery isn't the most complicated one I've ever read, I still really enjoyed my time reading this. It hit the spot.

Grade: A

Book 17: Provoked by Joanna Chambers

Sometimes you just need a classic gay regency romance to get through the day, and boy did this do the trick. We've got an upstanding lawyer who desperately wants to resist his desires, and a lord who is desperate to convince him not to. Add in some early 1820s political radicalism and social tensions and you've got a great first book in a trilogy. It's closer in length to a novella than to a novel, and for me that was perfect for the amount of plot and tension and longing. Also, the sex is extremely good regency gay sex. Looking forward to reading the next two!

Grade: A

Book 16: A Gentleman's Gentleman by TJ Alexander

This was recommended by someone I follow on bluesky, and at first glance it looked like a standard (and delightful!) m/m regency romance novel. And while it certainly is that, it's got a bit more going on as well. 

Christopher is a reclusive lord who doesn't want to be an active part of Society because he's got a secret: he's trans. But in order to secure his family seat and inheritance, he must marry before he turns 25. Which means he has to go to London, and no gentleman would travel without his valet, the titular gentleman's gentleman. And that is how he meets James Harding, who is far better at being a valet than Christopher is at being a lord. 

About 85% of the way through the novel I got a bit worried about how the various conflicts and romances would be resolved, but I shouldn't have been concerned. The book manages to pave the way to a future that felt both of the time and like it would actually make all parties involved happy. The romance at the center didn't have quite enough longing and suspense to be an all-timer for me, but I had a lovely time reading this. 

Grade: B

Book 12: Under the Mistletoe with You by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Look, sometimes you need to end March with a gay Christmas romance novel, okay?

This one has a lot to recommend for it - it's got a baker named Christopher who lives in a quaint Welsh village. He gets snowed in with the famous actor Nash Nadeau there under a fake name who was supposed to stay at Christopher's apartment while he went home for Christmas. They clash! There's only one bed! They have to figure out how to work together to help the village! Christopher hides that he knows who Nash is! 

This book is extremely cozy, and it's lovely to have a lead character who's trans and not have that be the big message of the book. But for me, the balance of small village pre-Christmas stuff to romance wasn't quite what I was looking for - the two leads didn't have the kind of chemistry I was hoping for, and while they each had personal obstacles they had to get past, it didn't feel like they found the answers in each other. Plus, and this is just a particular pet peeve for me, Nash never sounded like an American (or a Canadian who moved to LA when he was a teenager) to me. I'm sure that the reverse happens for British readers all the time, but I wish his dialogue and internal monologue had been more carefully written to be that of a non-British person. 

Grade: C   

Book 8: Saint by Sierra Simone

So I put a hold on this book in the library when I read the following quote from it:

"There's no instruction manual for falling in love with your best friend's little brother. And there's no manual for falling back in love with him when he's a monk." 

Up until the final three words it's just pretty standard gay romance novel fare, and then it suddenly takes a turn!! And that turn is why I picked up the book and it's why this book has the charms it does. 

The monk is Aiden, who had been a millionaire playboy with underlying trauma that he decides to deal with by breaking up with his hot boyfriend Elijah and becoming a monk (but like a cool monk, in a cool monastery that's fine with his queerness etc.). But then Elijah comes by because he's writing a big magazine piece on monastery breweries, and also he's engaged now to another man, and Aiden loses his mind and the chastity cage he's been wearing under his robes no longer controls his desires. 

The whole vibe of this story is giving these two men in contemporary life a reason why they can't be together that's also extremely hot, and the enforced celibacy of Catholic priests/monks/nuns is a perfect fit for it. It also begins to sag a bit at a certain point, because there's only one way out of this (Aiden leaves his monastery) and also we find out what his Big Secret was for leaving Elijah and entering a monastery the next day, and frankly it doesn't hit as well as it should. But the sexual tension and denial is extremely good, and the way they roleplay with the actual restrictions they're breaking is incredible. I was sad to discover that most of this author's books are either straight Catholic versions of this, which I'm less interested in, or fake modern politics based on Camelot, which unfortunately I simply cannot deal with right now. But this was a great winter read. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Dark Heir by CS Pacat

I finally made it to the sequel of Dark Rise! And it was both exactly what I'd hoped for/expect while somehow being a bit less than the sum of its parts, unfortunately. 

The whole book is built around the tension that Will knows who he is deep down but none of his friends do, and if they did know, they'd immediately turn against him. And that's a pretty good central tension to a story, but either I've simply read too many of these kinds of stories at this point or the book didn't quite hold the tension as well as I'd like it to, because the moment of his reveal didn't quite hit for me. This is partly because James is on his own journey that's separate from Will's path, but it's one that's less about discovering who Will is and more Will continuing to somehow always be a step ahead of him in terms of accepting their intermingled destiny. I don't know! I get why Will is like oh noes he only loves me because he thinks I'm NOT the big bad and/or because he doesn't realize that the collar is linking him to me because I'm that guy, but I thought by the end of this book we might actually get to the next stage of it. I wanted more actual juice in the central relationship of the story. 

This may also be because so many of the other characters felt sidelined to me. This is a classic second book/movie in the trilogy issue, where the main crew gets sent off on their own journeys before finally coming back together at the end, but as a result I felt cut off from Violet and the whole Lions plotline and Elizabeth dealing with Visander. 

Having said all that, I think it was a much more coherent book than the first one, and I am still looking forward to the final book of the trilogy because I do think it'll probably land the plane pretty well. I think I just wanted a bit more tropey nonsense from these books and less lore. 

Grade: B

Book 20: You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

The second book in her series about mid-century gays living in New York City, this one unfortunately suffers a bit from comparison with the first one, which I enjoyed so so much. But this is still delightful, just slightly less my speed.

The love story here is between a journalist who is still privately grieving the death of his boyfriend a year and a half prior, which of course is something very few people know he's going through, and a slumping baseball player who's been traded to a team that sounds suspiciously like the Mets but of course isn't. Mark gets assigned to write a series of articles about Eddie's slump, and in the process they strike up a friendship that very very slowly becomes more. It's an interesting narrative in part because both of them are out to themselves, so it's less about coming out and more about creating a community. But I found the resolutions of some of the conflicts to be more expedient than I wanted. I don't need or want historical accuracy in the form of tragedy or the threat of outing from my gay historical romance novels, but this one went a little too far in the other direction, for me. Mark also felt like a character who made more sense as a 40 year old than a 28 year old, and while that may have been intentional from the standpoint of him aging as a result of losing his partner, I kept bumping up against it. So not quite the home run of her prior book, but still a solid double. 

Grade: B

Book 19: The New Guy by Sarina Bowen

Okay, look. If you're in the market for a hockey m/m romance novel to read on a porch while you're on vacation, this is perfectly serviceable. The titular new guy is both of the main characters: one is a young hockey player who keeps getting traded to new teams, the other is a newly hired athletic trainer for the team. They meet before the season at a bar before they know who they are and almost hook up! The hockey player has an overbearing dad! The athletic trainer is a young widower with a kid and an overbearing mother-in-law! 

I was sort of hoping for more from this, but the characters don't make a ton of sense and while the daughter's not the worst kind of kid character you find in a book like this, it was still more than I really wanted. Plus I kept arguing with the sports, which is never a good sign. But again, it did its job on my vacation, so I can't complain too much.

Grade: C 

Book 14: We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

Man, Cat Sebastian has really found her wheelhouse in writing gay romances set in mid-20th century America. This one takes place in New York and is between a Brooklyn-born Italian-American who scrapes through and becomes a newspaper reporter, and the son of the publisher who joins the reporting desk in order to learn the business before he takes over. The New York of it all is super well crafted and made me want to go wander around different neighborhoods in my city, which is about the biggest compliment I can give it. The love story is really beautiful and the depiction of how gay people lived in a pre-Stonewall era just felt really nice to read: a reminder that we've always been here. 

Grade: A

Book 13: Time to Shine by Rachel Reid

A charming hockey romance about a goalie in the minors who gets called up to the NHL and finds both his confidence and true love! This is a lovely and extremely readable story featuring one taciturn loner and the bubbly yet anxious star player whose love he can't quite trust. However, it's a romance novel, so you know he will eventually! I also enjoyed this one more than others because while we've got a lot of archetypes here, they map less cleanly onto real life players than some hockey romances do, which makes it easier for me to lose myself in the story and not argue with it.

Grade: B

Book 5: Catered All the Way by Annabeth Albert

I liked this one better than the other romance I read by this author this month! I can't say that I completely recommend it, but this is a pretty charming romance between a twenty-something gamer and his older brother's high school best friend who he's always had a crush on. The crush comes back home and helps out the siblings with their family business over the holidays (a subplot I truly could have done without), and sparks fly, etc. It was fine!

Grade: B

Book 4: The Christmas Veto by Keira Andrews

Sigh, another Christmas romance that's...fine, I guess? This is somehow the third fake dating storyline within the same series, where one of the guys in the fake romance is the son/stepson of the fake romance guys of the first novel. At a certain point, you'd think that people would catch on! It's inoffensive but doesn't offer a lot more than that, unfortunately. 

Grade: C

Book 3: Bring Me Home by Annabeth Albert

I keep trying gay romances by this author, because they wrote a couple of romances I read a while ago that I remember liking a lot, and then I end up disappointed. This one is about a retired naval investigator in his early 40s who meets a really hot 23 year old at a gay bar, only to discover that he's the son of one of his high school friends, oh no! And also the 23 year old is going to be living with him in his old victorian house that he inherited from his aunt, and also there's a...mystery to be solved? And it's a whole forbidden romance thing that both wants to be a massive problem and something that's easily overcome, and I don't know! It didn't really work for me, even though I like a lot of age gap romances and I'm not opposed to a fantasy narrative about restoring a house together and finding love. So far I haven't found a book this year that really hits. 

Grade: C

Book 40: An Heiress for Christmas by Samantha SoRelle

Well, one of the best things I can say for this novella is that it was short, except that its main flaw was also its slightness. Two best friends from Oxford become master and valet when one man's father loses everything and ruins his son's prospects in the process, but then the master needs to get married by Christmas or get cut off by his father, and honestly none of it matters. Perfectly readable but with no real story, and not enough Christmas to make up for it. 

Grade: C

Book 39: A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles

The sequel to The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, this book is just as delightful and captivating as the first one. The focus of this book is on Joss's nephew Luke, who becomes the secretary for Rufus d'Aumesty, a new Earl. They develop a relationship, but Luke has secrets and Rufus has his own problems attempting to fend off his uncle's attempts to strip him of his title and property. Will it all work out???? Indeed. 

Grade: A 

Book 38: The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by KJ Charles

Man, I loved this book. Two men who have been sleeping together but don't know each other's real names at a pub in London part on bad terms, only to encounter each other again when one of them moves to Kent after the death of his estranged titled father. Sir Gareth is completely unfamiliar with the smuggling families that control the Kentish Moors, but is introduced to all aspects of it when he discovers that his former bed partner is Joss Doomsday of the Doomsday clan. Hijinks and misunderstandings ensue, and it's just a delightful story from start to finish, with real conflicts that are resolved in satisfying ways. My favorite book by this author in quite some time. 

Grade: A 

Book 35: Once Upon a Christmas House by A.D. Ellis

We have once again hit the time of year when I stop pretending there's any chance of me getting to Book Zero and finishing my To Be Read pile in order to read a whole bunch of Christmas-themed gay romance novels and mysteries. First up, we have a classic pretend relationship for the sake of appearing on a home improvement reality TV series, with a side of magical Christmas house nonsense. I will be honest, this is a book that is a much better idea than execution, but I also failed out of five other gay romance novels before I hit this one, so at least it was that level of good! The backstory for the emotional damage one of the protagonists has was extremely silly, and this is definitely a novel that would have been much stronger if it had just been novella-length, but I had a nice time on a December evening reading this, so I can't complain much. 

Grade: C  

Book 23: A Thief in the Night by KJ Charles

A lovely novella to read on a summer afternoon! There's not a lot of conflict in this gay regency romance, but sometimes that's just what you want. Toby is a thief who robs a man after a mutually satisfying encounter in an alleyway, only to meet him again when he goes to a manor house attempting to pose as a butler. But the man in question has his own difficulties, chief among them the fact that his father deliberately ruined his estate while he was in the navy, which he now has to resolve after his father's death. Will they learn to trust each other and find the hidden jewels that will provide for their future together??? What a question. This is the final piece of the world started with Kit and Marian's novels, and I had a very nice time reading it. 

Grade: B

Book 16: Masters in This Hall by KJ Charles

Well, it took me until February 7, but I finally read a great Christmas romance novel this season! 

Honestly, I expected this to be great; it's a novella set in a universe I had enjoyed, and the setting is also delightful. John Garland has been dismissed from his job as a hotel detective after a robbery occurred while he was, uh, distracted by Barnaby Littimer. He retreats to his rich uncle's home on Christmas Eve for the Christmas season, and discovers that Littimer is there as a master of festivities during the the week leading up to his cousin's wedding. He is of course immediately suspicious that Littimer is there to rob his uncle, but is there more to the story? Who can say! 

The pairing is very fun, and so are the holiday traditions Littimer is in charge of leading, including a mummers play. It's a classic mystery set at a great house over the holidays, and I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A 

Book 14: The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian

Man, every once in a while I hit a book by this author, who I usually enjoy a lot, and just completely bounce off of it. In this case, the setup is that the son of a Duke, Percy, needs to hire Kit, a highway robber who has lately retired and become a coffeeshop owner, in order to rob his father the Duke. There are reasons for this, and attraction is suggested between the two, of course, but it takes a hundred pages before Kit will even agree to the scheme, and then he has to teach Percy how to rob his father himself, because part of the reason Kit retired from his thieving ways is that he has a limp now from a robbery gone wrong, and there are other shenanigans at foot, but it just never really clicks for me. Part of why I continued reading is because it's the first in a series, and I knew that the second novel was about Marian, Percy's childhood friend who was married to his father after his mother died, and I'm still curious about that one. But this felt like a story that could have been a novella of setup for that second story. I will report back on whether the next book works better for me!

Grade: C