Here’s what we got up to in March!
Our Favorite Reads…
Holly’s Choice: The Black Diamond by Bella Barnes
Holly was apprehensive about reading her first ever Mafia romance, but this book was absolutely delightfully bonkers. So so so fun to read.
Ingrid’s Choice: What Happens in Scotland by Jennifer McQuiston
Ingrid says that this book is a masterclass in building chemistry between characters without them being in the same room. Just phenomenal.
Erin’s Choice: Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
Erin loved the dense mythology in the worldbuilding. In fact, she was wowed by the whole thing. She wrote in her review, “Between the story and the structure and the inclusion of ideas and how the problems were solved, this book was just amazing.”
More From the Blog…
- Podcast episode #2! This time, we talked about the Woke Up Married trope, which kicked off a week of reviews.
- If you’re looking for more Woke Up Married books, we also made a list!
- Erin wrote a post about penetration in M/M romances
- Erin also wrote a post about Facebook fan pages
- Erin got yelly about jealousy, and how people react to its inclusion in romance novels
- Holly got yelly about anthology etiquette
- TBR Challenge! This month’s theme was “baggage.”
We’ve also updated some of our static pages! For your general reference:
- A glossary of romance terms
- A general page for all things podcast related
- An updated page where you can browse books by author
Notes from Romancelandia…
For those of you interested in romance writing, here’s a great blog post on writing sex scenes from Edits and Revisions. (And here’s another, older, post about writing sex scenes by K.J. Charles.)
A profile on Vulture of Emily Henry. (Erin read Henry’s Beach Read and the actions of the characters made her hugely angry—but also noted that she liked Henry’s writing style, so your milage may vary.)
Holly read You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty for the TBR challenge this month; if that book sounds interesting and you’re a huge nerd, here’s a really great analysis reading it through the lens of Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”
Coming Soon…
As always, we’ve got a mix of new and old books we’ll be reviewing. And for our joint reading venture, we’ll all be reading books called Enemies with Benefits—and, of course, talking about the Enemies to Lovers trope.
The Smut Report 
I liked What Happens in Scotland quite a bit, but it’s been a long time since I read that one.
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I feel like we’ve been sleeping on Jennifer McQuiston—this is the first book of hers any of us have read. Might be time to add some of her backlist to the big ole TBR
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