06.12: Best Romance Novels of 2023
The Best Romance Novels of 2023!
It’s the best and worst task for us, because we read so many fabulous books over the course of the year, and choosing ten is hard, ok? But here they are — ten books we adored—books that delivered all the things we love in romance: sharp edges, sparkling dialogue, strong heroines and smoking hot chemistry.
Buy the Fated Mates Best of Book Pack in one fell swoop from our friends at Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, PA, and get seven of the traditionally published books on the list (many of them with signed book plates) and a Fated Mates sticker! We love the idea of you gifting yourself this box, but maybe you’d like to slide into someone’s text messages with the link as a very excellent gift for you! Or…you can do what Sarah does, and buy the box and spread the love around—sending each of the books to someone on your list.
FYI, Freya Marske’s A Power Unbound is on this list, but it’s the final book in the series, and you really should read this series from the start, so you can elect to add her "A Marvelous Light” to the box, along with a collection of other 2023 books by our favorite people (or a signed Sarah MacLean book!) if you’d like! Let us know what you end up doing with these fabulous books, and don’t forget to tag us on Instagram or Twitter when you unbox!
Check out our “Best Romance Novels” lists from previous years: 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019. (We were 5 minutes old in 2018 and didn’t do a list that year!)
Thank you, as always, for listening. If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your favorite podcasting app, we would be very grateful.
The Best Romance Novels of 2023
Fantastic 2023 Romance By Our Friends
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Piper Rayne, authors of Single and Ready to Jingle
Read it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books or Kobo
or wherever you get your audiobooks.
and
Kathryn Nolan, author of Keep You Both
Get it at Amazon, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
and
The Book Larder, a community bookstore in Seattle, WA
specializing in cookbooks and food writing. Get personalized shopping help and use the code FATEDMATES for 10% off your order at booklarder.com.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:00 / #: Best of the year.
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:04 / #: Hard to believe that it is the end of 2023.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:08 / #: Yeah. I know that everybody, it's like the most cliche thing in the world to say that in November of any year like, "How did we even get here?" But why don't I remember the beginning of this year at all? It's just out of my head.
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:25 / #: I don't know. It's truly terrible.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:28 / #: Anyway, do you see I'm wearing these crazy glasses. I'm so sorry that I always look ridiculous now, but I cannot see anymore.
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:38 / #: Yeah, the humiliation of that is super real, right?
Sarah MacLean 00:00:41 / #: It's pretty terrible-
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:41 / #: Where you're just-
Sarah MacLean 00:00:43 / #: It's terrible. I'm not that old. By the way, everybody, in a textual message-
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:51 / #: With me earlier today, I mis-numbered Sarah.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:53 / #: Jenny aged me by two in entire years.
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:56 / #: Your birthday is in three weeks.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:59 / #: It is Sagittarius season coming up. In fact, actually-
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:02 / #: Well, it's still Scorpio season. So guess what? I'm just going to-
Sarah MacLean 00:01:04 / #: It's Scorpio season.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:06 / #: I'll take what I give you.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:07 / #: Exactly. As we are recording. It is Scorpio season, but when this episode comes out, it will be Sagittarius season. And so I have already begun shouting out my office door. If anybody would like to purchase me a gift anytime in the next month, a very bright light for my desk, which will help me see better would be-
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:30 / #: That would be great.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:32 / #: Welcomed. And I know last week, we talked about Eric's obsession with Wirecutter, and so I'm certain that I'll have a very bright light for my desk that is not at all form and very much function.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:49 / #: Absolutely. I upgraded the bedside lamp.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:54 / #: Because you can't see. Is it because you can't see, Jen?
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:57 / #: The lamp was broken. I think it's probably fixable, but not by me. And then I somehow got, I think, light bulbs that are way brighter and now it's almost too much in there for me. But you know what? It's okay. It's nice.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:08 / #: Welcome everyone, to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah McLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:15 / #: I'm Jennifer Prokop, romance reader and editor, and I just hope that Eric cut all that out and you have no idea what we're talking about. Maybe you're like, "No, they're probably talking about how Jen-"
Sarah MacLean 00:02:25 / #: Taylor swept.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:25 / #: "Went to see two concerts this week."
Sarah MacLean 00:02:27 / #: Oh, yeah, you did. But don't tell them who.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:30 / #: Sure. Well, Trevor Noah I guess wasn't a concert. Comedian. I feel like he's well within the rage of coolness.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:34 / #: Trevor Noah is cool. Sure, sure. He's allowed. He's allowed in.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:40 / #: Good point. Okay, so we're not going to do that. We're just going to talk about romance novels that we loved in 2023.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:46 / #: Which because we are young and relaxed and groovy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:50 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:53 / #: No, but here's the thing. This is our episode. Every year, this is the episode we look forward to the most. We get so excited. We do a lot of scrappy discussion of who should be on the list, who gets to decide which book, who gets to talk about which book. Because often, there are books where we overlap and we love them both very much. And then there's usually a book or two where one of us has read it and the other one hasn't, which is also fun. And this week, this year, I think we have all of those things. As always, let's get the important stuff out of the way.
00:03:27 / #: There are ways for you to support all of these authors, all while supporting a queer, woman-owned, anti-racist, super feminist bookstore in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. An indie bookstore that loves romance so much, they put them all right at the front of the store, right inside the door. This is pocketbooks in Lancaster. You can head over to fatedmates.net/pocketbooks and order this group of books, the box along with some extra titles, which we'll talk about at the end of the episode. So what we've done this year, Pocket has put together the official box and then in classic Fated of Mates fashion, we just can't stop ourselves. So there are a bunch of other books that you'll be able to add on as supplemental stuff, including all of my books, signed. So we're super excited. Many of the books in the box will come with signed book plates and they will also come with Fated Mates stickers, Fated Mates pins and Pocket Books maybe is throwing some things in too. So we're excited. It's going to be interesting drops.
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:39 / #: Yeah. It's maybe interesting drops. But it's going to be okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:40 / #: Oh, it's not pins?
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:42 / #: I don't know. We're just trying our best.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:43 / #: We don't know what we're doing. It's fine.
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:44 / #: We don't. You'll get something from us. You'll get a letter from us, which usually happens too. So that's fun. And in general, you'll just be able to be relaxed, read romance novels throughout the rest of the year, just like all gas, no breaks through the end of the year.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:01 / #: Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:02 / #: Until 2024.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:02 / #: Reading great books or giving them away. Some people buy the box, they give it to a friend, sometimes they buy the box and they unpack the box and then wrap all the books up for their friends.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:14 / #: I love it.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:15 / #: Listen, I support all of it because in the end, every penny that you spend goes to either a great independent bookseller or...
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:23 / #: A great author. Exactly, okay. So I would like to say before we start, that I am not allowed to put my favorite book of the year on this list because Sarah wrote it. So, sorry everybody.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:35 / #: Oh, listen to that. That was an unplanned.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:38 / #: It was unplanned because she was like-
Sarah MacLean 00:05:39 / #: Unplanned interjection.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:40 / #: Because she was like, "They're not going to let me do it." But listen, I love Knockout Tommy, go Boom. It was amazing. It was dedicated to me and it was my best book of the year. And all week long or weeks we've been planning this, I've been like, "What is wrong with my list?" And then I was like, "Oh, right. Knockout's not on it." So anyway, just throwing that out there.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:57 / #: Well, thank you Jennifer.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:59 / #: Don't have a podcast with an author you love because then you can't put her book on the best of year list.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:03 / #: Exactly. Then she says, "Let's not talk about my books."
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:05 / #: Sure. And I just did that.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:06 / #: And let's not talk about my books. But if you haven't read Knockout, you can buy a signed copy of it as an add-on to your box from Pocket Books.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:13 / #: Okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:13 / #: And that is that.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:14 / #: That's it. Okay. All right. So how do we want to tackle this list, Sarah?
Sarah MacLean 00:06:20 / #: I don't know. Do you want to play our normal game, which is segues?
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:23 / #: Oh yeah, that's true.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:24 / #: One of us starts and then we try to segue in?
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:26 / #: Sure. I think you should start. I think you should start. I also think if I've counted correctly, we're going with a rogue number 11 this year.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:35 / #: Yeah. That's only because I refused.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:39 / #: We put some indies and we couldn't really decide.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:40 / #: I was like, they're indies. I get to call too.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:41 / #: Yeah. We'll just add them. Whatever we want.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:43 / #: Listen, guess what? Everybody we're in charge. We get to do it. We can be chaos.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:47 / #: Exactly.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:48 / #: Tommy goes boom. Okay, I'm going to start with Ashley Herring Blake. I think it actually might be the most recently published book on the list.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:58 / #: Okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:58 / #: So Ashley Herring Blake, you've heard me talk about these books before. She's writing a Bright Falls series, which is a contemporary romance series set in a small town called Bright Falls. It's all sapphic, though different combinations of sexuality. So we have now seen two books prior to this. It was a group of some number of women. The important number is three here. And the first two books, the two friends got matched up, they got together, they partnered up, and they are very happy. Living happily ever after. And Iris Kelly, who is the third in the trio, Iris is really very happy for her friends, super-duper happy for her friends, but kind of sad. And the reason why she's sad is not because she also wants to be paired up, but because she really misses her friends.
00:08:11 / #: And I think this is a really nice way of entering this new world of contemporary romance. We talk so much over the year. We have talked a lot about what's happening in contemporaries and what contemporary is trying to do, and how it's really about community now, finding community. And I think there's something very refreshing about a character who's like, "I'm super happy for my friends, but I don't get to see them as much anymore." It's not the same because now we have these other people who I also really love, but it's just not the same. So Iris has a fairly new career as a romance novelist, but she had a rough breakup with an ex. She's bi and her ex wanted to have children and she did not want to have children. And she broke up with this man and her parents were unsettled by this. They didn't love it. They wanted a particular kind of life for her that she does not want herself.
00:09:16 / #: And so she's in this funny place as a character and as a person in the world. And she meets her heroine, Stevie, who is an actress who is involved in a community theater production who's also going through her own shit. If you have been around large groups of lesbians, you know that often... I went to Smith. Caveat, I went to Smith. You know that relationship is really when you break up with somebody as a lesbian, often everybody's so connected that your ex doesn't leave the universe, they just stay. You stay in a friend group and it is a challenge in many ways. So Stevie's ex is now dating another friend in their group. It's all complicated and weird and everybody else in the group is like Stevie, "Is it complicated and weird?" And she's like, "It's not at all. I have a new girlfriend." Except she doesn't. What she has is Iris who's on a whim, trying out for this play or going to be a part of this play, which is a queering of Much Ado About Nothing for those of you who are Shakespeare lovers.
00:10:35 / #: Anyway, so she says to Iris, "Would you be willing to fake date me?" And Iris is like, "This actually could be good for me, inspire me. The fake dating will inspire me in my romance writing." And Stevie's like, "This will be good for me because my friends will all believe that I'm over the fact that my ex has fallen in love with somebody else in our group." And so it's just this really big, expansive book about all the different ways that we love and all the complexities of the ways that we love, and how we set boundaries with our families and with our friends and how we learn to be ourselves in these big communities where we start to feel a little bit like fish out of water. On top of it all, Ashley's hilariously funny as a writer. It's just a really fun book. And if you haven't read this series, I am on record for loving it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:27 / #: You love the whole series.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:28 / #: And you should just start from the beginning and enjoy yourselves. So that is Iris Kelly Doesn't Date by Ashley Herring Blake.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:36 / #: Perfect. Okay. I am going to jump to the whole group has a say in you and your ex being around, right?
Sarah MacLean 00:11:43 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:43 / #: And that book is Jana Goes Wild by Farah Heron. I've talked about this book briefly before. One of my big fears, I don't know if you have the same one when we do this every year, is that recency bias will essentially take over, right?
Sarah MacLean 00:12:02 / #: Yes, absolutely.
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:02 / #: Just whatever I most recently read is on my mind. But I read this book, it came out I think in, I want to say April or May of this year. And I think about this book a lot. So one of the things for me about what makes the book the best of, because of course it's also personal, is that staying power feeling. And this to me, is probably one of the best, if not the best second chance romance I've ever read. And so what it is-
Sarah MacLean 00:12:35 / #: A bold statement.
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:36 / #: I know, it is but this book, it really has stuck with me. I think it's so powerful. So anyway, Jana is a single mother, essentially. Her daughter, Imani... Is co-parenting, let me say. And her daughter, Imani, I want to say Imani's like five or six something, four or five, pretty young. And the father, Anil lives also in Toronto, but she is just furiously angry at him still. And we know from the beginning, and I realize that this might be a deal breaker for a lot of people, but it's essentially the prologue, which is they have this really brief intense fling where they meet and connect, and it is just instant love, the way that they felt about each other and the connection they had. And then she finds out that he is married. And so then it's the end of the prologue and now it's like five years later,
Sarah MacLean 00:13:37 / #: Yikes.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:37 / #: She has a baby and he actually has moved to Toronto to co-parent with her. But she has kept the firmest boundaries of anyone. So he picks her up or she drops her off.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:53 / #: Wait, wait, wait. She has an intense one night stand. He's married and she has a baby?
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:56 / #: No, it's not a one night stand, it's a fling. They have a fling for a couple of weeks.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:01 / #: She gets pregnant?
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:02 / #: She gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby and he moves to Toronto. And so-
Sarah MacLean 00:14:08 / #: Scandal.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:09 / #: You really understand pretty quickly, his wife was-
Sarah MacLean 00:14:12 / #: Something's up with the wife.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:13 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:13 / #: Okay.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:13 / #: He's now divorced and it takes... But the book really, here's I think the thing I really admire about it and you know this too, it's so easy to just be like, "Okay, this man is garbage." And that's what Jana has done. She has compartmentalized it really to the point where she's like, "I just don't interact with him. He is the father of my child and so there's things I have to handle with him." But it's all through email, she doesn't try to talk to him, she doesn't see him. And then what happens is there's a big family wedding and it's a destination wedding to where her family is from in Tanzania. So it's really cool because the whole community, this whole Muslim community in Toronto is going to pick up and go to this destination wedding. And there, she cannot keep Anil in his box.
00:15:07 / #: All of a sudden, she has to see him with their daughter, which she didn't really experience. She gets to see the way that her daughter loves him and their relationship is so sweet. All of a sudden, all of the aunties and everybody are like, "Look at what a good dad he is." But that also fuels a lot of her rage, the way that she gets blamed for being this single mother. And he gets all of the strokes for being this great dad and she really has to let go of so much of the past, so much of her fear about making these choices that make her an outsider to her family and her culture, and just really being herself. And I just think she's a powerhouse character.
00:16:01 / #: I think it sounds a lot like when I'm talking about it almost like that it's women's fiction, but it's such a romance, but it's also a romance that is deeply rooted in the idea of family. They're going to make a family together, their extended family is there. She's really determined to move on finally and he is like... It's just very emotional. I don't know. Like I said, this book has really stuck with me months and months after reading about it. I think about it often and I think it's just a really good example of how second chance is really about you have to show all the baggage and you have to show that these people are really different. And this book shows this. We get the whole journey. And so then at the end when they're back together, you really believe in them. I just think it is a spectacular, spectacular romance. I love it so much.
00:17:06 / #: This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by the Seattle bookstore, The book Larder.
Sarah MacLean 00:17:13 / #: Jen, I'm so excited. I just learned about this today obviously, and I can't, I'm so excited. I got to go to Seattle. The book Larder focuses entirely on cookbooks and food writing and features everything from new cookbooks to imported cookbooks and signed cookbooks. They offer in-person and virtual author talks on their YouTube page. So you can see cooks, and chefs, and cookbook authors in person showing the whole thing, showing how to cook, how to make cool stuff. They are women owned. Jen, they are magnificent firebirds.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:53 / #: I love this so much.
Sarah MacLean 00:17:55 / #: I'm so excited. It's like all my dream magnificent firebirds have come together. Listen, this is perfect because cookbooks make amazing holiday gifts. I would never buy you one, Jen, but I do buy cookbooks for lots and lots of people at the holidays. They're big, and they're beautiful, and they're full color. And often there are cookbooks that have great storytelling and great writing in them. If you call The Book Larder, you can get a personal interaction with one of the booksellers, and they will help you pick a perfect cookbook, maybe signed, maybe vintage for somebody in your life who loves to cook. If you're in Seattle, you can visit them in Fremont seven days a week. But they have an extensive online shop. You can also call them. They ship everywhere in the world and Fated Mates listeners will get 10% off at The Book Larder right now using the Code Fated mates at checkout online, or I'm sure you could give it to them over the phone.
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:56 / #: Amazing.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:57 / #: You can visit Book Larder at booklarder.com.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:00 / #: You can also find them on Instagram @Booklarder, or like we said, check out their YouTube channel, which has lots of great content. Thank you to the Book Larder for sponsoring this week's episode. And everybody, get out there and get some great gifts for the upcoming holiday season.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:17 / #: You said that Jana this electric heroine. She's this powerful powerhouse heroine and I'm going to move from there. Then I'm going to go historical to Joanna Shupe's The Duke Gets Even.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:32 / #: We both love this one.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:34 / #: Well, listen. Most years we say we're not going to talk about books by friends and Joanna is my friend, full disclosure. But sometimes one of your friends writes a book and you're just like, "I got to put it on." And I got to put it on because it was probably my favorite historical of the year. And as everybody knows, I could not let this go without historicals. Okay. So this one, I think you can absolutely read this book on its own. Joanna has done some really deft work here to make sure that it stands by itself. But if you really want a full picture of where we are here, go back to the beginning of the Fifth Avenue Rebels series and start from the beginning. First of all, I'm just giving you a gift there. You should just do that anyway.
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:23 / #: Yeah, just do it.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:23 / #: But The Duke Gets Even is about the Duke of Lockwood. So the whole conceit of the series itself is the Fifth Avenue rebels. We've been watching the Duke of Lockwood over the course of this series, a British Duke, he's come to Newport in the dead center of the Gilded Age to fetch himself an American heiress. He's got a title and he needs the American money, which is literally how history happened. This is real. What we have seen over the course of the whole book is he has successfully chosen or unsuccessfully chosen, like basically every other heroine-
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:01 / #: Oh, yeah. Every other heroine in the book.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:02 / #: In the series, which I think is-
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:03 / #: Not that one.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:03 / #: So delightful. And so he gets engaged or he goes looking and then something falls through and that heroine meets their hero in a prior book. And now here we are, the Duke is here. Listen, he's so sexy. He's so sexy. This book begins, I'm just going to talk about the meet-cute for a second because I think it's so great. Begins with him swimming in the Atlantic off the coast of Newport and it is hot and he's swimming nude. I don't know if he's nude.
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:38 / #: Yes, as one does.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:39 / #: But I'm pretty sure he's nude.
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:39 / #: I'm pretty sure he is. We ret-conned it to be that way.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:41 / #: He's just nighttime and he's just swimming in the fricking Atlantic like a God. And he runs up on this woman who is also swimming in the nude. And he's like, "She's clearly a mermaid."
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:56 / #: So fun. It's so crazy.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:58 / #: So there's no other answer.
Jennifer Prokop 00:22:00 / #: Obviously, that's it.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:01 / #: They basically wet hump because you can't dry hump if you're swimming.
Jennifer Prokop 00:22:10 / #: Oh my God, I'm fine, everybody. Okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:12 / #: So they basically wet humped in the Atlantic and then he's like, "Who are you?" And she's like, "It doesn't really matter who I am. Let's not bring names into this, that seems silly."
Jennifer Prokop 00:22:25 / #: Let's not get involved. No.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:26 / #: And he's like, "All right, well why don't you come to my hotel tomorrow and we'll do this for real." And she's like, "Cool." And then the next morning... And so it moves forward and it turns out, so they start to have this secret affair, except it turns out he is engaged to her best friend, at which point, Nelly, who is so cool. All of Joanna's characters are cool because Joanna is so cool. But she's this child. So Nelly's whole story is that she's the child of this incredibly rich railroad magnate, and she's the only child and she just doesn't give a shit. She's like, "I'm going to inherit all this money. I don't need to subscribe to society's expectations for me. I'm just going to live my life. I believe in sexual freedom for women. I think we should have all the same rights as men. I think we should have access to birth control. I'm funding clinics, I'm funding research. I'm funding all this stuff. I'm basically spending all my dad's money on suffrage and shit, no one can tell me what to do." She's the best, right?
00:23:45 / #: No, but she's not the best. She's not a perfect duchess. This is the opposite of what Lockwood needs. He needs somebody who's going to get in line and go meet the Queen, and that is not Nelly's-
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:55 / #: Nelly's not interested.
Sarah MacLean 00:23:56 / #: Nelly's got no plans for that.
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:59 / #: Not interested, no thanks.
Sarah MacLean 00:24:00 / #: So listen, this book is a lot about... What's interesting about it is-
00:24:03 / #: So listen, this book is a lot about ... What's interesting about it is it goes back and forth. We see a lot of the past, so we see them obviously falling for each other in the past of the series because when he's engaged to her best friend, that's the first book in the series, right? It really layers really interestingly. The book is a lot about the past, the truth, what we expect from ourselves and others when we interact with them. Do we expect them to tell us the truth from the beginning? How do we reveal layers of ourselves to each other? How do we think about each other? How do we overcome the past and the way that the past and our realities and our truth make ourselves, make us who we are? And then on top of it, it is so wildly sexy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:24:57 / #: Oh yeah, Joanna knows the job.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:01 / #: It's like finger singing.
Jennifer Prokop 00:25:03 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:03 / #: It's so great. Anyway, go read the Duke Gets Even by Joanna Shupe. Yeah, it's so, so good. Okay, so I have a historical on my list as well, and I think it also plays around with that whole, do we belong together, right? Which of course maybe is the concept of every romance. But Marry Me By Midnight by Felicia Grossman is a gender swapped Regency Jewish Cinderella retelling, and I could not get enough of this book. And this also is a book that I think came out maybe a couple months ago, maybe in August. And again, one of those ones that's really stuck with me because for a different reason.
00:25:48 / #: In this one, one of my favorite things in romance, and I feel like it is unusual, is when you are reading it and you are literally like, there's no way these two are going to work this out. Right? You just really feel that the conflict is so rich between these two, that there is no possible way that it's going to work out, and that to me is one of my favorite feelings. I often joke that is the high I am chasing in every romance. And so in this case, we have Isabella Lira, it's 1832, so I said Regency, but I guess that's Victorian, whatever. Her father has just died and he was ... The Jewish community has a really powerful group of, I don't know, elders, I guess, who help steward the community. And he also co-owned a business with these brothers, the Berab brothers.
00:26:47 / #: Her father died. Of course, she's in mourning and she's full of grief, but these brothers are really doing something super sketch, which is they are trying to cut her family out of the business. And almost like, it's very interesting the way she feels about it. It's almost like they're erasing him, right? The way that they're trying to just almost eliminate his ... The way that he influenced her as part of the community. It hurts her, right? She loved her father. And I think that's really important because she really essentially has to marry in order to secure the business, but it's not because of money. It's because essentially of her father's legacy that she wants to protect.
00:27:42 / #: And of course, what happens is one of these brothers is going to try and marry her, right? That's going to be their way of doing it, so she has to find somebody else. And what happens is she has enlists the help of Aaron Ellenberg, who is a really interesting member of the community. He is essentially like a custodian. He works at the temple. They've provided him with work because he's almost like an orphan. He doesn't have family of his own, and so they want to support him and give him a way to be a part of the community, but it means he has a really interesting perspective.
00:28:24 / #: She is the consummate insider, right? She's the prince, right? She has everything and seems to be so wealthy and has everything she needs. And he is the one who is essentially ... And it's not quite Cinderella because he doesn't have wicked stepsisters, but he does not have that in that way of being in the community that she does. So he agrees essentially to help her by spying on what's going on in the synagogue as things are happening and funneling her information. And she in return is going to give him money that's going to allow him to be his own person rather than being at the mercy of the largess of the community. Right? So it is just a fascinating book.
00:29:14 / #: The tension between them is the sexual tension and the romantic tension between them is so good, but she just cannot see him as a potential partner because she really thinks she has to be ... What would it mean for my father's legacy if I were to marry this custodian, right? So there's all these subplots, there's good guys and bad guys, and this really delicious romance between these two people that on the face of it should have nothing in common. Right? So that whole Cinderella feeling and even the cover of this book is so beautiful and she really is channeling big Cinderella energy. She's got her hair up, and I just think the whole thing is really spectacular. I loved reading this book. I just fell into it, right? I fell into it, and that is the best feeling.
Jennifer Prokop 00:30:09 / #: I love that. It's wonderful. That's Marry Me by Midnight, by Felicia Grossman.
Sarah MacLean 00:30:15 / #: Then I'm going to do my final historical. Well, I guess it's not my final historical, it's my final straight up historical.
Jennifer Prokop 00:30:23 / #: Okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:30:23 / #: That's what I'm going to do. I want to talk about Ana Maria and the Fox. Again, I have talked about this before briefly, I talked about it on the 23 for 23 episode, but this is by Liana De La Rosa. You have definitely seen this book around. The cover is gorgeous. It's beautiful and illustrated and stunning. And Ana Maria is the eldest of three sisters. They're from Mexico, but this book is set against the backdrop of the Mexican War of Independence from France. I think it's the 1860s. France basically attempted to just take Mexico like, Hey, cool, what if you were just French like us?
00:31:13 / #: And so her family is fighting, they're very, very wealthy Mexicans and some of them are staying, but they have sent these three girls to London to live with their uncle in London for two reasons. One, it gets them away from the war itself, and two, they're gone there in order to drum up support from Britain for the war in Mexico against France. Right? So there's this big political thing happening about that in the background.
00:31:45 / #: But these are incredibly wealthy, young sisters and they turn up and also ... I mean, listen, it's historical, so there are definitely moments where ... This is a real historical heroine. At the very beginning of the book, she's just as likely to charm you into giving all of your money to the Mexican cause as she is to yanking her hat pin out of her hair and shiving you on the docks. Either of those things could happen, and I love both of them, no notes.
00:32:19 / #: And then when she gets there, she meets Gideon Fox, who is a member of Parliament and who, because of his own family history, is a staunch abolitionist. Not that you need to have that be your family history for you to be an abolitionist, but it helps in this case. So he is working very, very hard. It's the 1860s. So while slavery is illegal on the island of Britain, the Atlantic slave trade still is legal and he is working very hard to sway members of parliament to vote to make it illegal. And so he has this very strong, very stern way of being because he's like, I'm doing something incredibly important. There is nothing in the world that is more important than the work that I'm doing, capital W, in parliament.
Jennifer Prokop 00:33:13 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:33:14 / #: And she comes in and she's like, I do not disagree. Your work is very important, as is mine. You see what's happening to my people, to Mexico. And then on top of it, there's this layer of she's incredibly wealthy. She has access to all of this high, high level of society in England because of her connections and her wealth, but there are all these little microaggressions that she's having to deal with kind of all the time, which is great.
00:33:45 / #: So of course, two people who are both passionate about their progressive politics and their work, capital W, and the importance of what they're doing and their place in the world, I mean, these two are destined to bang because of course they are. They're going to change the world and they're going to pull on their threads and then they're going to pull on the thread together. It's so-
Jennifer Prokop 00:34:08 / #: I love it.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:09 / #: This is one of those books, you guys, every year, I think to myself, I just want that one romance that makes me feel like this is the work of the genre. This is what we're meant to be writing. And this one is about class, and it's about race, and it's about politics, and it's historical because of course, historical, this is where historical shines, and it's great, it's beautiful. And it could be historical fiction, what you were saying about Jana Goes Wild. It could be shelved in a different place, but it's shelved here and aren't we lucky for it?
Jennifer Prokop 00:34:43 / #: Yeah, I loved it too.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:45 / #: Liana De La Rosa's Anna Maria in the Fox. This week's episode of Faded Mates is sponsored by Catherine Nolan, author of Keep You Both.
Jennifer Prokop 00:34:56 / #: Catherine Nolan probably sounds familiar to many of you out there that really loved Rival Radio earlier this year. So in this one we have Paige who is a wedding planner. She is going to take her best friend's Beau and Flora up to their wedding venue where they're going to say yes, and she's just going to be checking off things off of her year-end list. However, an unexpected blizzard traps the three of them together in this cozy cabin, and all of a sudden the chemistry that has been at a low simmer between the three of them is going to burn it up. So Paige, of course, is worried, is this going to break up their friendship? She's got a secret that she's worried is going to cause all a big kerfuffle, but I have every belief that this super steamy MFF novella set on New Year's Eve weekend is going to be the best thing for your holiday season.
Sarah MacLean 00:35:52 / #: This is perfect for anybody who is looking for a cozy holiday novella, a forced proximity story, a snowstorm, a book where everyone's bisexual. We are very excited. You can find it in print, in ebook, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited, and thanks to Catherine Nolan for sponsoring this week's episode.
Jennifer Prokop 00:36:20 / #: You mentioned ... I don't know how, but I am going to talk about a fantasy romance next. This is independently published, so this one will not be in the box, although I do think that the bookstore is going to see if they can order some print copies as an add-on. So this book is called The Midsummer Bride by Kati Wilde, and I think that Kati Wilde writes a perfect 230-page romance, right?
Sarah MacLean 00:36:50 / #: Listen, that is a treat.
Jennifer Prokop 00:36:52 / #: Especially in fantasy, right? I like a light touch with the world building is what I'm going to say, and so this is part of a series. You can totally read this alone because I've only read some of these books. It's called The Dead Lands, which is I think just the name of ... There's a map at the beginning. Okay?
00:37:16 / #: Anyway, there's a queen, her name's Elena, and she has been cursed and she essentially is dying except for the fact that she is wearing these magic rings, and these magic rings were literally a raven flew into her tent one day and dropped them in her lap, and so she put them on, and it's the only thing that is literally keeping her alive from this curse. And the person that cursed her is her uncle because she's the queen, and so he curses her, and it's complicated. Some of this gets unwound later, all the details, but the only hope she has is that a fortune-teller at one point told her that there would be a man who would essentially fall in love with her the minute he saw her and that this man is what's going to be the barbarian warlord.
00:38:12 / #: Hello? You know I was in, I checked right in, Jennifer checked in, who would essentially help her go back and get revenge on her uncle who poisoned her, who wants her crown. So she, through some deductive reasoning, decides that this guy is this man named Warwick, and Warwick has been languishing in a jail cell. So she puts on her queenly finery, and she's supposed to be ... It's like there's something about gold, so she's covered in gold paint and whatever, and this headdress, and she's so weak from this curse that she can barely hold herself up, but she's like, I got to go and convince this prisoner to marry me.
00:38:59 / #: And sure enough, when he sees her, his eyes light up and she's like, wow, it worked. Right? So he agrees essentially to go with her and there's a lot of fantasy stuff happening, whatever. And eventually what we realized is it's not that Warwick thought he was in love with her. It was that he saw these rings and these rings have been stolen from his people. And if he can recover them, he can stop this curse that's been plaguing his land and he thinks she stole them. So he's like, I'm going to marry this woman, get these rings back, take them to my people and forget this woman. So they are immediately at odds.
00:39:40 / #: Now he pretty quickly figures out, oh, he was wrong about her. And oh, actually he is desperately in love with her. Once he sees her real face, he literally just boom. And so they go off on this road trip adventure and all this business and they finally get married and here's the part that's great. Okay, I'm sorry. I know I'm talking.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:04 / #: No, I love it. Go.
Jennifer Prokop 00:40:06 / #: Okay, I don't want to spoil it, but I will tell you this part. On the day that they're finally getting married, this woman who's marrying them, this witch or whatever, it's a binding ceremony where there's a red ribbon and they tie it to each other and then they pledge their love, but you can also unmarry people in this world by untying this ribbon. There's a way in which once it gets tied a certain way, if you untie it, you can unmarry the person. And so they get married, and this woman who's marrying them is like, you really should not get married with those rings on because they're full of magic and they might have an unintended consequence on the ceremony.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:47 / #: You might not be able to get unmarried.
Jennifer Prokop 00:40:48 / #: And Warwick is like, she can't take them off. She's going to die. At this point, he knows, right? So she has to keep them on, so they go ahead and get married with her wearing the rings. And I am going to tell you, I don't want to spoil it. I'll spoil it for you later. I'm not going to spoil it for everybody here. The third act breakup of this book is the best one I've ever read.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:09 / #: All right, I'm buying it right now.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:10 / #: You should, because-.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:12 / #: I don't even have to know. I don't even have to know what happens. I'm going to read it tonight.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:15 / #: It is so fucking good, everybody. I'm sorry. I just swore it so fucking good.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:23 / #: You're sorry. Well, no one here has ever had anything strange put in their ears by us.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:28 / #: No. So anyway, I just really think that this is a case where the fantasy of it, the world of it is really the super highway to the tension in their relationship and their romance, and it is brilliant, brilliant.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:48 / #: Awesome.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:48 / #: It's so good. Okay, I'm not going to spoil it. I want to though.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:52 / #: So that is, name it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:54 / #: The Midsummer Bride by Kati Wilde.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:58 / #: Okay. So I'm going to do fantasy then because you were just doing fantasy, and this one's a little bit ... There's a caveat with this book for the box.
Jennifer Prokop 00:42:09 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:09 / #: Go ahead. Do you have something to say?
Jennifer Prokop 00:42:11 / #: No, I think you should explain that-
Sarah MacLean 00:42:12 / #: Okay. So I'm choosing as one of my best books of the year, Freya Marske's, A Power Unbound, which is the third book in her last binding series. But here's the thing, this is historical romantasy, but the fantasy, it's 55% fantasy, 45% romance, and so you really do need to read all three of these books to know what's going on. You particularly have to read the second book in the series because the romance in this book begins in the second book.
00:42:48 / #: So the last binding series, I'm not going to get too deep in the weeds on what the premise of the series is, but basically it's historical, it's Edwardian England. Magic exists in the first book, which is called A Marvelous Light. There's a human who is accidentally hired to be into a secret position at the foreign office or the home office where his job is essentially to liaise with the magical community. And he's like, oh, shit, magic happens? Tell me all about it. And it's great. In the first book, which is A Marvelous Light, will lead you into this story, which the overarching story is there are bad people in the magic world who are trying to harness all powerful magic themselves and do bad stuff. It's exactly what you imagine it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:43:45 / #: Listen, it's a classic fantasy trope for a reason.
Sarah MacLean 00:43:47 / #: A classic structure, right? So this merry band of what ends up being ... It's actually seven people. These couples pair up, and there's another person, and they're all working toward this ultimate goal of stopping these bad guys. So in the first book, it's like the setup for the whole thing. The second book is Sapphic, the first book is Male Male. The second book is Sapphic, and set on a ship, and it's basically a murder mystery through the whole thing and it's super fun. And then halfway through that book, we meet these two characters who then become the couple in the final book, which is called A Power Unbound. And this book, Jack Lord Hawthorne, who was this just asshole in the last book, just stern. I mean, immediately, the second he's on page, you're like, well, it's obviously going to be his book. He's perfect in every way, for me, he was just the worst.
00:44:48 / #: And in this book, we learned in the very beginning that he was born with a twin, and he and his twin sister had this intense bond, but also had this incredibly powerful magic, so powerful that the moment she started practicing magic, bad men found her and were like, we have to take your magic from you. And when they were children, they were put through a ceremony where their magic was essentially taken from them and she couldn't bear it, and she died. And so he has lost this sibling, but he's also lost ... It's not only his twin, but she was also the other half of his magic, and so it's just brutal and sad. And now we know why he's been such a jerk for a whole book, but it's all going to be okay because he meets Alan.
00:45:40 / #: Now he has Alan and Alan, who is a journalist and a thief and a writer of sexy stories, he does a lot of things, Alan is getting to the bottom of everything that's been going on in the magic world, of course, of which Hawthorne's past is deeply tied up in it. So Freya's threading this really interesting needle where she's telling this big plot about magic, this big fantasy plot, and then matching up these lovely characters along the way. The prior two books were medium sexy, maybe light sexy, then medium sexy. This one is all the way sexy, very, very sexy, and it's really fun. It's really delicious because it's ... If you love the Magpie Lord series, the KJ Charles series, this one is for you. Now, here's the way this is going to work. A Power Unbound is not in the box because it's the third book in the series-
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:43 / #: And it's hard cover, which makes it hard to include for price reasons.
Sarah MacLean 00:46:46 / #: It's in hard cover, so we wanted to be thoughtful about pricing, but you can select A Marvelous Light as an add-on to the box via pocket this year, and you can start this series. Yeah, I think actually they probably are putting ... I'm not sure, I haven't looked at the page, but I think they are probably putting all three of the books there. So if you want to just jump in, if you're like historical fantasy, sign me up, you are not going to be disappointed. So buy all three or maybe put the other two on your holiday list.
Jennifer Prokop 00:47:16 / #: On your to-do list.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:17 / #: Yeah, tell someone you love that they should buy them for you. Can I tell you something? I actually just forgot, Sarah, but I've been in contact with the bookstore. One really cool thing that they're doing this year is they are requesting signed book plates from the authors. So I think the first 100 boxes will have signed books for a lot of these, signed book plates. So I just think that's also really cool. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:47:43 / #: Fred is Australian, and she, I know, is sending sign book plates for A Marvelous Light. So it's a little bit different this year, but if you want to add that in, I can guarantee that it's a very fun time.
00:47:59 / #: This week's episode of Faded Mates is sponsored by Piper Rain, authors ...
Sarah MacLean 00:48:03 / #: Fated Mates is sponsored by Piper Rain, authors of, Single and Ready to Jingle. Okay, so our friend, Kenzie really loves Christmas, Jen-
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:12 / #: Of course.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:12 / #: ... like a whole lot.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:14 / #: It should be a national holiday.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:15 / #: She thinks, yes exactly, December should be a national holiday. And she has this small business where she party plans around Christmas, she decorates, she throws parties, she comes dressed as an elf. Listen, she accidentally turns up to a blind date dressed as an elf. That's a story for another time. It doesn't go so well that blind date and it doesn't go that well for three reasons. One, it turns out that blind date is with Andrew, who is her brother's best friend, who is also the biggest grump she's ever met, and Andrew hates Christmas. So there is just no way this is going to work out.
00:48:55 / #: Here's the problem, Jen. Andrew has to plan his firm's holiday party and he needs somebody who really is crazy for Christmas to come do that for him, which gives Kenzie an opportunity to not only build her small business, but also prove that she can turn this Grinch into a Christmas loving beefcake sounds like.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:16 / #: Perfect.
Sarah MacLean 00:49:17 / #: So she's going to make his heart grow three times its size.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:21 / #: And something else.
Sarah MacLean 00:49:22 / #: She's going to make something else grow three times its size. And it isn't long until Andrew discovers that there is such a thing as a Christmas miracle.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:30 / #: So everybody you can check out, Single and Ready to Jingle, it is available on ebook, in print and also in audio with dual narration, which I know people really love.
Sarah MacLean 00:49:39 / #: And speaking of audiobooks, you can listen to the first three chapters of, Single and Ready to Jingle at the end of this week's episode. Thanks to Piper Rain for sponsoring.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:53 / #: I don't know how I'm transitioning to my next book, but I'm just going to go ahead and tell you. It is a rom- com. Mickey Chamber Shakes It Up by Charis Reid. And I, gosh, I love this book everybody. Okay, so this, I don't know, you know how you just love a book with great characters? When I'm really thinking about, what is it that drew me to this book, and if you have not read a book by Cherish, she is just a really great writer. She just knows how to, I don't know, there's some people that you just fall into their books and they just know how to take you on this journey.
00:50:30 / #: So Mickey Chambers is young, I think she's 30 or 32 maybe, and she has pieced together, and she is like pure sunshine also. She's pieced together kind of a living as an adjunct at several local universities teaching composition classes. And there's some problems with this. She has a tough time. She doesn't really have great medical insurance. She is kind of constantly trying to make the money work to buy the medicine she needs and pay the rent and all that stuff. And so it's Summer and I think what happens is one of these classes falls through. So she's walking in town and sees this local bar has a help wanted sign.
00:51:20 / #: So she goes into this bar and because she's like, "Look, I'm just going to... How hard can it be to wait tables or be a bartender as a way of just adding some extra money?" And it's really interesting, she has a lot of pride. She has an older, I think he's actually a younger brother who kind of makes enough money and is kind of like, "Let me help you." And she's like, "No, you are not going to help me. I'm going to do it." The bar owner is named Diego Acosta and he is a widower, which I love I'm sorry. I'm not sorry, I love it. And he essentially-
Sarah MacLean 00:51:54 / #: I'm not sorry. I love it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:55 / #: I'm not sorry, I love it. Diego is 42, so he's older than her and he is running this bar that had been his wife's. Now she's been, I think, gone for about five years so the grief is sort of really muted. He misses her, but running the bar and the restaurant was her joy and he was just the guy who kind of kept it running and did the bookkeeping and that kind of stuff. But now he's had to really sort of take over in the front and it's been a real struggle for him.
00:52:25 / #: So he's really stressed, but he also promised his wife that he would go back to school. And so it turns out that he is enrolled for his first online class and who do you think is his adjunct? Mickey Chambers.
Sarah MacLean 00:52:40 / #: Perfect.
Jennifer Prokop 00:52:41 / #: Perfect. And you know what, it's really funny-
Sarah MacLean 00:52:44 / #: You know he's my favorite.
Jennifer Prokop 00:52:45 / #: Because you know... Yeah, you know what's always really great though is I think because it's online, it didn't really strike as much and also he's her boss. So he's her boss at the bar and she's his teacher at the college and so it all kind of felt like a little even to me. But I also think there's this really beautiful part where she has assigned just a journaling exercise and he wrote about his wife. And I had this moment where I was like, if being a writing teacher, being an English teacher, you do really sometimes read such incredibly personal things.
00:53:25 / #: And I felt like this was sort of like, but it's just really beautifully done, and the way that Mickey can hear what he has to say and is really encouraging of him as a writer. So anyway, there's all this back and forth and it turns out that she's going to be a bartender with him because they've hired another waitress and it's Summer and there's all these crowds and you guys, this book was just a perfect contemporary romance.
Sarah MacLean 00:53:53 / #: Oh, I love it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:54 / #: And I just feel like those are kind of hard to find, but he's grumpy, she's sunshine, but this conflict between them is so rich because of the way that they have some power over each other, but it's just perfect. And even though, I don't know, I had... Adriana recommended this book to me and I was like, "Okay, sure, I'll give it a shot." And I just zoomed right through it. It was that perfect feeling of just being like, "All right, this is how reading a romance should feel."
Sarah MacLean 00:54:30 / #: I love that feeling.
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:33 / #: It's so good.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:33 / #: I love it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:33 / #: So it's Mickey Chambers Shakes It Up, by Charis Reid.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:36 / #: I'm going to go from emotion, like real emotion-
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:41 / #: Feelings.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:42 / #: ... big feelings. So I want to talk about Adriana Anders', We'll Never Have Paris, which I was thinking about holding for the holiday episode, but then I was like, "No, I really love this book. I'm going to put it on the list." So I will probably talk about it again in a few weeks when we do our holiday episode. But it is-
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:01 / #: It's awesome. I love this one too.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:03 / #: It's short and incendiary and it's so great, but in classic Adriana Anders fashion. First of all, anybody who's read Adriana's books knows she brings heat in all forms, which is great. And I mean, it's perfection and I read everything she's written because of that, because they're just great, fast, sexy reads. But she does not stop there. Every one of her books has just a big feeling. She minds her character's backstories for intense emotion.
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:39 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:41 / #: I mean, not one of her characters is left uncrafted, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:46 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:46 / #: I mean, they're all so, they're so beautifully raw. But this is really fun, this is the heroine, Jewels, is an American who is living in Paris and it is Christmas Eve and she's flying back to America tomorrow, Christmas day. Her neighbor in this apartment where she lives, is Colin, who is a grumpy Welshman who hates her, hates her, really is like, "She is loud, she's brash, she's so American, why does she look so hot all the time? I just can't with her.
00:56:25 / #: She's too much altogether," which is all well and good until they're in one of those old Parisian elevators in their apartment building and the power goes on the fritz, yes, and the lights go out and they are stuck in this elevator together. And she's-
Jennifer Prokop 00:56:46 / #: And it's Christmas Eve. Did you say that already?
Sarah MacLean 00:56:48 / #: ... Christmas Eve.
Jennifer Prokop 00:56:48 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:56:49 / #: And she's wearing her nightgown and it is... And then suddenly there is just this intense moment of, "I hate you, but also I want you. Oh boy, we're stuck in an elevator in Paris and-
Jennifer Prokop 00:57:06 / #: Whatever shall we do?
Sarah MacLean 00:57:07 / #: The book is so dirty and I love it. But also it's really about loneliness and it's really about feelings and the feelings that the holidays can evoke, and about... There's a lot of loss in this book. He's lost his sibling, she's lost a parent, and it just feels emotional and deep and important for the way that we live in the world as humans, and also incredibly sexy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:57:43 / #: Yeah, and then your antithesis-
Sarah MacLean 00:57:44 / #: And you're not going to feel bad about it. Yeah. And to me this book, also the Kati Wilde, this to me, it's like this is what Kindle Unlimited is for, right? These great, I mean I know that there's a lot of really long books in KU right now, but these 200 page bangers are what I'm in it for.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:05 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:07 / #: And I also think there's something to be said for, I mean, it's literally like we talk about a phone booth.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:15 / #: I guess.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:15 / #: Maybe we should just call them elevator romances-
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:17 / #: I mean, an elevator.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:17 / #: ... right, a literal elevator romance. It's fantastic, really delicious. You are not going to be sad. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:25 / #: I should just tell everybody, I did work on a draft of this book, but-
Sarah MacLean 00:58:28 / #: Oh, it's fine. You didn't pick it. I didn't even know that-
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:30 / #: I know. Yeah, that's right.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:30 / #: ... until this exact moment.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:31 / #: So there's this moment.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:32 / #: So listen-
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:33 / #: But if you're reading the acknowledgements and you're like, "Wait, what's Jen doing?" Sarah picked it and it's fine.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:38 / #: I picked it and I didn't know that. Yeah, so listen, December is in two days. You want a cozy holiday read? This is it. Okay, and my final book, which is not my final book, but it's just the last one that we're talking about, is Zoraida Cordova's, Kiss The Girl, which I have also talked about on the podcast before, which is why I have extras guys, because I've talked about-
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:02 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:03 / #: ... some of these books before.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:05 / #: And we had Zoraida up to talk about, Fairytale Retellings.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:06 / #: We did and so we talked about it then. But I often find that when we have guests on, we don't do enough talking about their book, we talk about other things, which is the point of the podcast. So this is where I get to talk about Zoraida's book for real and say, this is a retelling... First of all, out of the gate, I want to say this is a closed door romance and it's a retelling of the Little Mermaid. And if you have a tween or a teen in your life who loves Taylor Swift but maybe isn't ready for sexual content in her books or their books-
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:47 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:48 / #: ... this is perfect. This is it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:50 / #: Yeah. Yeah. This is a great starter romance you would say.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:53 / #: This main character is not Taylor Swift, but if you have... I mean right now it feels like everybody has one of these-
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:59 / #: Oh, but with the love of music. And I was-
Sarah MacLean 01:00:00 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:01 / #: ... that's the woman in a band and a strong, that artistic temperament.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:06 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:06 / #: All those things, right?
Sarah MacLean 01:00:07 / #: Yes. Yes. So I mean I just think this is the perfect gift for that kid in your life. It's not YA though, it's also the perfect gift for you, so you'll enjoy it immensely. Okay, so the premise is Ariel, the same names apply.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:26 / #: I hope so.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:26 / #: Ariel is one of a girl band, like a sort of rock band, superstars, like absolute mega stars, think like One Direction, but sisters. And there are eight of them, seven of them.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:39 / #: Love it.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:40 / #: There's seven of them obviously. Obviously there are seven of them, seven sirens, the siren seven. And they are having their... The book opens on their farewell concert. They are done now. They are deciding to go their separate ways and try new things with their lives because they have spent their entire, basically young adulthood being celebrities, being pop superstars. And they have never been out from under the thumb of their fairly, fairly, extremely domineering father, right, the King Triton of it all.
01:01:15 / #: So Amitcute, daddy, unfortunately he's not quite as daddy as King Triton could be if King Triton would be, but.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:27 / #: A very different book. I understand.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:28 / #: It's different unfortunately. So Amitcute happens, and so they sneak out. They go to a club in Brooklyn. They've never done anything like this because they have been superstars forever and they meet Eric, who is the lead singer and guitarist for this up and coming band that's about to embark the following day on a tour around the country. But not like a cool tour, we are all in a van doing just sort of getting it done across the country. And for romance reasons, through a confluence of romance reasons. Ariel gets a job as the merch girl for this band and she goes undercover-
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:19 / #: Love it. I'd love it.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:20 / #: ... on this tour bus with this band for their first go around and it's great. It's a road trip romance because of course they make a deal. There's a deal that's made with Eric and his band mates that he won't sleep with the merch girl. But of course they're obsessed with each other almost instantly. They love each other, they think they're... they can't get enough of each other except... So there's that sort of constant tension of like, "But we can't, but we can't." Also, because we're on a bus with all these people.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:53 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:55 / #: Not that kind of book, Jen. And it's just really great because I mean, everyone knows I love a rockstar, everyone knows I love a celebrity, and part of the reason why is because I love somebody who has to step out of the limelight to understand who they are. And that's what this book is. I think Zoraida is one of the best writers writing today in multiple genres. This book is just, it's going to hit you in all the feelings. It's the perfect read for you, for young people in your life, for like I said, if you want to introduce romance to somebody.
01:03:28 / #: It's funny and it's sexy and it's smart and it's thoughtful and it does all the things that rom-coms should be doing right now and also does it with massive amounts of feeling and a big found family, which is great.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:42 / #: Your, the perfect thing.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:44 / #: The perfect thing. And that is Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Cordova and my final book.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:52 / #: That's it, 10.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:52 / #: There it is.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:53 / #: Is that 10?
Sarah MacLean 01:03:54 / #: I think they did the job. I think it's 11.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:55 / #: I think we did the job too.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:55 / #: Oh, maybe it's not. It's 10, counting.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:59 / #: Who knows?
Sarah MacLean 01:04:00 / #: Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:01 / #: The thing that's hard always, everybody like, oh, let's say it. We'll go ahead and say the standard disclaimers here at the end, right? These are just books we love that spoke to us for whatever reason, right? There were lots of great romances this year. There are lots of great romances we didn't talk about for various reasons. We cannot wait to hear about the books you loved and yeah, of course-
Sarah MacLean 01:04:21 / #: Please recommend them to us.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:22 / #: Yeah, right.
Sarah MacLean 01:04:22 / #: We're always looking-
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:23 / #: The thing is that's-
Sarah MacLean 01:04:23 / #: ... always.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:24 / #: ... sort of tricky is because we're always constantly reading back lists, some of the best books I read this year I haven't talked about because they were not published in 2023. So keep in mind that the best of is always a moving target in this genre. Mostly what we love is romance. We had a great time reading these books. We think you will have a great time reading these books. And we want to support romance in our libraries, in our local bookstores, in our little free libraries, under our Christmas trees, with our Hanukkah presents, wherever, wherever great romances can be found.
01:04:58 / #: So we hope that you read these and share them. We hope that to hear what your favorite romances are, and just remember lots of great books don't get on the list. And it's not that we don't love them, it's just that we only could choose 10.
Sarah MacLean 01:05:13 / #: That's right. I also just want to give a shout-out to some of our favorite books by our friends this year. Adriana Herrera had, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal, which is a sapphic historical set in 1890s in Paris and is a banger. Kate Clayborn had, Georgie All Along, which is just-
Jennifer Prokop 01:05:34 / #: So great.
Sarah MacLean 01:05:35 / #: ... gorgeous, a gorgeous book by Kate Clayborn. I mean when is she not written a gorgeous book, but there we are, Georgie's for every single girl out there who has ever thought to themselves, "I have to go home and who am I now that I'm back?" And Christina Lauren had, The True Love Experiments, which is a love letter to romance novels-
Jennifer Prokop 01:05:59 / #: It sure was.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:00 / #: ... as Jen will attest. Diana Quincy had, hang on.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:07 / #: The Mark Quest Makes His Move, was that this... This one?
Sarah MacLean 01:06:09 / #: No. No. Diana Quincy had, The Duke Gets Desperate, which is a Regency Castle book. I inherited this castle. No wait, I inherited this castle book. So let's just bang it out even though we hate each other.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:26 / #: Tracey Livingston's-
Sarah MacLean 01:06:27 / #: I don't have complaints.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:28 / #: Yeah, Tracey Livingston's second book in the, American Royalty series came out this summer called, The Duchess Effect. I think she also released a novella, kind of like-
Sarah MacLean 01:06:39 / #: I'm going to talk about it on the Christmas episode.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:40 / #: Oh.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:41 / #: So we're not going to say anything yet. We're going to talk about it on the Christmas... Come back for the Christmas, for the holiday episode. I'm going to talk about it then. And then Sophie Jordan has had her first book in her new series, "The Scandalous Ladies of London, called, The Countess, which is kind of a big, Real Housewives of London, kind of the beginning of a, Real Housewives of London kind of structure. And, The Duke Starts a Scandal, which is her most recent book, and has probably the sexiest cover I have seen all year. Have you seen that one where she's pushing him up against the wall? I'll take it, man.
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:19 / #: Yeah, we have read lots of great romances this year. When you look at the pocketbooks list, they have books we recom... They'll have our books. I think it's, Seven Trade Paperbacks and, One Marry Me by Midnight is a mass market paperback. Is that right? No, two mass market paperbacks. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:35 / #: Because it goes fan of-
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:36 / #: Joanna Chu.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:36 / #: The jiu jitsi fan.
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:38 / #: Then there'll be sort of these other ones that we've recommended or that are by our friends. And then underneath that you will see books that the bookstore loved. So you can just fill up your box with lots of great romances this year.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:52 / #: And also, I was there a month or so back and I signed all my books for them. So if you're looking for a sign book by me, you can hopefully find it there.
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:01 / #: Perfect. Well everybody, that's it. That's our best of 2023. Until next year.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:06 / #: We've done it again. We hope we filled your, to be read piles very, very high. Again, you can visit FatedMates.net/pocketbooks to order the box and any of the supplemental books with it. Let us know what you do with these boxes. We want to see pictures.
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:24 / #: Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:25 / #: Post them on the Discord. If you are not a member of our Discord, you can join it now at patreon. com/FatedMates where you'll get more episodes from us, video interviews with authors who we like and know, and also just this raw looking Discord-
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:43 / #: It is a rough gang.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:43 / #: ... full of people who love romance novels. So if you're looking for a place to find your people, that is the place to find your people. I'm Sarah MacLean. I am here with my friend Jen Prokop. We are Fated Mates. You can find us every Wednesday in your ear holes on the podcasting app of your choice, or at FatedMates.net, on Twitter @FatedMates, on Instagram at FatedMates pod. And don't forget that you can stay tuned to listen to the first three chapters of, Single and Ready to Jingle by Piper Rain in audiobook right now.
