Book 7: The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid

Another vacation book! This one is a perfect post-retirement hockey romance by the author of the Game Changers series, but it's a standalone in a separate universe. Adam and Riley were a d-man pairing and best friends and roommates who were also more than all that, until Adam freaked out and married a woman and broke Riley's heart. So Riley requested a trade and then retired early from hockey, and they didn't see each other for over a decade until Riley's dad died and Adam showed up at the funeral in Riley's tiny Nova Scotian seaside village, where Riley spent five summers when they were young players together. 

I really enjoyed both the second chance romance and the fantasy of owning a small house right on the water with a garden and having a wonderful queer friends group. The conflict of when they were players together made perfect sense, and if some of the resolution felt a bit too easy, especially coming so fast after Riley losing his beloved father, the characterization and chemistry is strong enough for me to buy it. A lovely read on a rainy weekend away. 

Grade: A

Book 6: Fall Into You by Dylan Morrison

Time for some vacation reads at a house in the woods! The first one is this extremely classic gay romance about a guy named Will who fled his parents' farm when he was 18 and never looked back, until his father died and left him a farm. When he returns, he meets Casey, who had been taking care of the apple farm for the final 6 years of Will's dad's life, and sparks fly! Is selling the farm to the real estate developer the right move? Was Will ever really happy living in the big city? I bet you know the answers to those questions, and as always, the fun is in the telling of it. I would have liked a bit more development of the romance between Will and Casey, but overall I really liked this story of someone finding the right version of home for them. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Sheep Calm and Merry On by Ashlyn Kane

This is a perfectly adequate Christmas romance novella in which two retired hockey players end up in a bit of a Canadian shack situation and realize that maybe they're meant to be together! It's cute but doesn't do anything more than what's on the tin, and even at a novella length still had to invent a reason for a second location/is he going to call me bit of drama. It's fine!

Grade: B

Book 4: The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray

Set in the dying days of World War I, two former public school boy friends find each other again while convalescing from the front. One has lost a leg, the other an arm, and they begin to rekindle the romance that never quite bloomed while they were at school together. 

I really loved so much of this - it's an era that I keep going back to, in part because the brutality of that war destroyed so much and never quite got dealt with. That's a bit of an issue with this novel, for me. I appreciated the lack of a quick fix for either of them, but I also wanted an ending and a resolution that presented at least a clearer way forward, if not a complete emotional and mental recovery for both of them. I don't entirely know how to do that beyond a magical cure for PTSD before anyone really knew what that was, but I felt more off-balance by the ending than I had hoped.

Grade: B

Book 3: Deck the Halls with Secret Agents by Astor Glenn Gray

What a charming bite sized Christmas novella! This is actually much more in line with what I expected Honeypot to be like - it's two secret agents who have been secretly fucking whenever they encountered each other on opposite sides of the Cold War who find themselves without a clear purpose in the early 1990s. They've both been sent to an English country house to steal incriminating letters at a Christmas party, and wouldn't you know there's just the right kind of bed for them to fall into together. This had almost no real conflict and I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A  

Book 2: Honeytrap by Aster Glenn Gray

This is a gay romance novel that spans multiple decades and follows the romance of a soviet spy and an American spy who are partnered to solve a mystery of sorts and embark on a roadtrip across late 1950s America. It's both a charming romance in which both of them are hiding a secret (Gennady is supposed to be honey trapping Daniel, and Daniel has been demoted for having a gay affair with another FBI agent), and a look at how the closet hurts people's lives over many decades. I expected something different from this novel--less of a historical examination and more of a classic romance novel in which two characters decide their love requires them to risk it all--and it took me a bit to come around to the slower, more agonized love depicted. But maybe we need a slightly more honest version of this story right now. 

Grade: B

Book 41: The Gentleman and his Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide

I confess that this was almost a DNF for me, but I decided that I wanted to know how it would resolve badly enough to stick with it. Do I regret that? A bit, but only because I am trying to become more ruthless in not spending my time with media I don't truly care about, because it turns out there is plenty out there that I genuinely love and why give my life over to things that don't work that well for me. It's a regency m/m romantasy and neither the romance nor the magic nor the setting really worked for me. Oh well!

Grade: C  

Book 22: Enlightened by Joanna Chambers

The final book in the Enlightenment trilogy following Beguiled, it's a very satisfying conclusion to both the relationship and the world we get to live in during the first two books. One of the great narrative demands of historical gay romance novels is creating a resolution that feels both happy enough for our gay protagonists and also doesn't feel like it breaks our understanding of how hard it was for most queer people, and I think this story does a neat job of it while also not relying solely on 'well they're rich enough that it doesn't matter for them.' Their life together feels well earned and they're both finally able to acknowledge what the other means to them. A delight! 

Grade: A

Book 21: Beguiled by Joanna Chambers

The sequel to Provoked, which I enjoyed very much, and hey I liked this one just as much! The two leads have come back together after years of separation, and David gets to be very brave and then suffer and Murdo gets to be the good person he actually is, and it just continues to be a wonderful regency era m/m series that's also interested in unpacking how queer lives could function in that society. A nice time! 

Grade: A 

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 6: The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels

This is almost a really sweet and satisfying Christmas romance novel before it kind of falls apart in the end, sadly. Margot and her girlfriend break up right before the holidays, so when one of her clients asks her to be his fake girlfriend at his rich parents' home for Christmas, she says yes. All goes well until she meets Ben's hot gay sister Ellie, oh no! Ellie thinks she's a gold digger but is also drawn to her, of course. 

I thought this novel was going to avoid most of the worst pitfalls of this genre when Ben and Margot confess that they're faking it at about the midway point, long before Margot and Ellie actually kiss, but then the final conflict and resolution is so both overdone and underbaked that the whole thing falls flat. Not mad I read it, but it could have been much better with a bit more work, for me. 

Grade: C 

Book 4: It's a Fabulous Life by Kelly Farmer

As is probably obvious from the title of this Christmas romance novel, it's a take on It's a Wonderful Life. But instead of an actual angel, we have a group of drag queens who need to get the wings of their costume, and the small town has a sad lesbian who never got to leave the town to go out and experience the world because her dad died her senior year of high school, and the love interest is the girl who got away from high school who's just moved back. 

There's a lot in this that's cute, but the central conceit really falls apart in this version of it. We're supposed to think that by the end Bailey George (yes, really) will of course be happier if she stays in Lanford Falls and never leaves or moves to a different town (let alone city or country like her dream was), and that literally the entire town will fall apart and stop thriving if she leaves. And you can kind of buy it in the movie version, that a small town banker really could be the thing to keep an entire town and family together. But the book doesn't actually want to get as dark and sad as the movie does, and as a result both the low point and the catharsis fall flat. I have read this kind of movie romance novel adaptation many times, and this one unfortunately both misses the emotional impact of the movie and also doesn't give us new characters who make me feel anything different. Bah. 

Grade: C

Book 3: Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake

Exes who reunite is one of my favorite romance novel tropes, and it pairs especially well with a Christmas romance, since it's so easy to dwell on the past during the season and people end up seeing old friends and family in a way that makes an unexpected reunion more likely. But the big pitfall is always whether the reason they broke up in the past still exists, and whether forgiveness etc. can actually be had. 

Unfortunately, for me this book really failed on that front. Charlotte and Brighton were childhood best friends who became high school sweethearts and got engaged their senior year of college, and then Brighton left Charlotte at the altar, and I never came close to thinking that Charlotte should forgive Brighton for it. The explanation that Charlotte was also sort of at fault for not seeing that Brighton was miserable living in New York doesn't make up for that, and they can't fix any of that with good sex. 

It's also the sort of romance novel where they exist basically in a vacuum - there's a queer social group of sorts, but apparently neither of them had any other friends aside from each other in high school or college, and it honestly all just made me kind of angry by the end. I had high hopes but the central conflict and resolution just fundamentally did not work for me, which makes it a hard sell in the end. 

Grade: C

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