Category: Review

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 5 ⭐️ Review: Karla Sorensen’s One and Only ✍🏻

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Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: fake relationship; single dad; sports romance; slow burn

“I wanted her everywhere. All her sounds, every flicker of her eyes, and every smile, I wanted them inked on my skin and threaded through my veins.”

There is something very special about Karla Sorensen’s One and Only. Let me be clear: Sorensen is a must-read author for me because her style, her storytelling, her genius at crafting characters speaks to me as a reader. I can hear her characters and their story distinctly in my head, and the way she puts words together flows easily through my mind. I’ve loved her romances and especially adored Logan Ward, the ultimate book boyfriend, for his capacity to love his sisters and his eventual soulmate, Paige. I note all of this because her newest book has taken the top spot for my favorite Sorensen romance. Here’s why…

  1. The romance is nuanced in a way that shreds your heart. Everything feels understated and small, but the specter of it fills your soul. One and Only is a slow burn. Like…a really slow burn. Think, they finally give in to their chemistry at the 90-ish percentage mark. And it’s pure perfection. It’s exactly as it should be because Sorensen knows that her characters, Greer and Beckett, require the space of the story to find themselves while falling in love with each other.
  2. I’ve tried to understand why Sorensen’s romances captivate me, and One and Only helped me realize that her superpower is crafting small, quiet moments between her characters that shout out their attraction and chemistry in powerful, heartrending ways. Even with a big character such as Greer who takes up space with her spontaneity, the small moments between her and Beckett cause you to hold your breath and fall deeply in love with them. There’s a moment when Beckett shares his experience growing up with older parents and feeling minimized. He tells Greer how he’s insistent on wanting all the time with his daughter, Olive, because he wants to give her more than he had. In that moment, he recognizes how Greer takes his truth and holds it dear: “Greer’s attention never wavered, and I could see the way she tucked every word of my answer somewhere important. I wanted to know where she kept it. Where she locked it away. What question it answered in her mind. This answer, the biggest piece of who I was, mattered to her. And that, in turn, mattered to me.” This is a purely internal moment, and it causes you to hold your breath a little at Beckett’s gravity of interest in Greer. It’s here where love is created, and it jars you a little in all the best ways. Beckett is incredibly internal, and Sorensen uses it to draw her readers to his character.
  3. Beckett speaks few words, but his eventual choices breed a big love. That’s where I fell in love with him. It’s where he surpassed my love for Logan Ward. His integrity and his willingness to sacrifice Greer in order for them to have a future are what made me fall deeply for him. It’s hard to describe why it feels special to this story, but I think, in a world where it feels harder and harder to trust people, Sorensen plays with the idea of integrity through the fake relationship trope and rectifies it in a way that feels both devastating and promising in equal measure. That’s where she blew my mind and made me appreciate her even more as a writer.
  4. The tertiary relationships of One and Only are its foundation. They give Beckett and Olive a family, challenge Greer, add humor, and make me cry. The Wilder family is magical, and I won’t be okay when Tim dies. I know it’s a matter of time, but I’m not ready for it yet. Even more, there is the promise of more stories, and I can’t wait to reside in Ian, Parker, Cameron, or Poppy’s stories because Sorensen has constructed a family that we’d all love to belong to.

I’m still not over One and Only. Beckett’s silent strength and Greer’s fierce love have burrowed spaces into my heart. As I think about the sweet bonus epilogue and the beauty of their journey, I don’t want to move on from them. Hopefully, we will see them again in future Wilder family books, but it’s a testament to Karla Sorensen’s gift that we hate to leave her stories. That we’d love to live in the day-to-day of Beckett and Greer always.

In love and romance,

Professor A

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Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Lauren Connolly’s Letter Late Than Never, a Smartypants Romance and book 3 of Green Valley Heroes ✍🏻

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Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

Tropes: high school crush; love from afar; second chance romance; small town romance

Lauren Connolly’s Letter Late Than Never is a wonderful addition to Smartypants Romance’s Green Valley Heroes series. I found myself lost in her story as Gwen and Sebastian recognize their feelings for each other. Unlike other Smartypants Romance stories, Connolly’s Letter Late Than Never is more nuanced in its messaging. Gwen struggles with believing she can have what she wants, namely Sebastian in this story. The choices other’s made for her in the past influence her present, and she struggles to accept more from Sebastian. That she’s worthy of it. And through Sebastian’s characterization, Connolly highlights the impact of working in a trauma-filled world and the post-traumatic consequences of it: anxiety and panic attacks. Placing that struggle as Sebastian’s journey highlights discussions about masculinity, trauma, and therapy in an underserved population. 

Connolly has crafted a compelling romance in Letter Late Than Never that is sweet and spicy in equal measure. Sebastian’s realization about Gwen and Gwen’s reticence to accept his interest in her make for a story that engages the reader through to its sweet happy ending. 

In love and romance,

Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Lexi Blake writing as Sophie Oak’s Unexpected Bliss ✍🏻

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Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

Tropes: part of an expanded universe; MFM; FMC with past trauma; small-town romance; found family

There is a long list of reasons I enjoy Lexi Blake’s writing as Sophie Oak’s Unexpected Bliss, book 13, in her Nights in Bliss series. I’ll give you the reasons in a moment, but it’s important to underscore the heart of this story: Blake’s own experience infused into her FMC, Elisa’s journey. One of the main reasons I love teaching writing is the promise of learning about the writer through their story-telling. Our filters (past experiences, values, upbringing, etc) find purchase in our writing. When it’s soulful and filled with pain, we, the reader, feel it too, and in many instances, we find the author’s experience reflecting our own. This creates a tether to the story that adds profundity to it. It’s why we cry or laugh or feel butterflies in our stomachs because we find a little bit of ourselves in it. Blake’s bravery in offering bits of her story through Elisa’s journey makes Unexpected Bliss compelling and thoughtful and passionate, and I loved every moment of it. It’s brave. It’s insightful. And it tugs at your heart. That’s just the start. Here are the other reasons I loved this story:

  1. Elisa perfectly balances the literal and sometimes brooding Hale and the charming, stubborn Van. Where Hale and Van struggle, Elisa excels. The three have been crafted to complete each other.
  2. Elisa’s connection to Mel. Mel’s character has challenged the veracity of aliens if you’ve “lived” in Bliss through the pages of Blake’s romances. In this book, Mel and Elisa find something in the other that they didn’t know what missing.
  3. I love a found family trope, and it’s beautifully constructed in this story.
  4. The expanded universe of Bliss is always a treasure. Blake gifts her readers with a trove of past characters, which means you spend a lot of time getting caught up with the various couples. Even more, the next generation infuses the pages of this book. 
  5. While Blake follows her usual story pattern (two of the throuple recognize their love for each other while the third believes they don’t have a future together), it doesn’t matter because we know they’re headed for a happy ending, and we’re treated to some delicious spice while they figure it out.

If you love MFM romances and you’ve never been to Bliss, Colorado, today’s the day to start. If you’ve been to Bliss, but you’ve yet to grab Unexpected Bliss, it’s like pulling on your favorite sweater on a chilly day: it leaves you feeling warm and satisfied until the very end

In love and romance,

Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4 ⭐️ Review: Lauren Rowe’s Hacker in Love ✍🏻

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Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: contemporary romance; blind date; rom-com

I don’t think I’ve read a romance where the MMC and FMC are adorable from their meet-cute. Lauren Rowe’s expanded billionaire and rock-star universe inspires good romances. Her newest offering, Hacker in Love, was created for her fans, and she gifted Henn and Hannah to them. From the moment they meet, it’s clear they’re soulmates, and much of Hacker in Love is them falling heavily in lust and love with each other. Here’s the thing. I love Henn and Hannah’s journey, BUTTTT..and I hate to say this because I adore Lauren Rowe, Hacker in Love feels like filler. Yikes! I hate saying it. This book is steamy, and Henn and Hannah are clearly soulmates, but Hacker in Love feels like what Solo was to the Star Wars universe. It fills gaps and summarizes plotlines from the other stories in the universe. As such, at times, it feels disjointed. The tension of the story is Henn’s secretive life. As it gets doled out over the space of the story, Hannah’s story feels uneven. They’re soulmates, yet he doesn’t fully trust her until almost the very end of the story. It feels inconsistent with their journeys. I love Lauren Rowe, so I wanted to love this story, but I didn’t. I appreciated it for what it was: a love letter to the fans as they waited for Rowe to find her writing voice again. Was hanging out again with many of Rowe’s favorite characters wonderful? Yes. Did Hannah and Henn give me a cavity from their sugar and spice relationship? For sure. Would I want to read their story again? Probably not. Lauren Rowe filled the gaps with Henn’s story, but I’m not sure that they needed filling.

In love and romance,


Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4 ⭐️ Review: Allie Winters’s Can’t Fight It, a Smartypants Romance ✍🏻

professorromance

Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: friends to lovers; opposites attract; slow burn; close/forced proximity; college romance; new adult romance; contemporary romance; STEM FMC

Allie Winters’s Can’t Fight It is a bit of a revelation. There are some tropes that don’t entice me as much as others, namely friends to lovers and sometimes slow-burn (specifically when the pacing is off). However, with Winters’s newest Smartypants Romance book, I found Winters’s pacing appropriate and chemistry-inducing. I was compelled forward through Winters’s romance as her main characters, Tessa and Austin, navigate moving past first impressions (Tessa is initially frightened by Austin’s large stature), learn the complexities of each other, move through life (she’s a student researcher/future grad student and he’s a boxer turned eventual business person), and fall in love. What grounds their story is their mutual respect for each other which begins as neighbors turned friends but eventually becomes attraction due to Austin’s protection and kindness for Tessa. Winters crafts Austin to be physically overwhelming, but he has the biggest heart and shows unending kindness towards Tessa. And Tessa becomes Austin’s motivation to consider more for his life. She impresses on him to stand up for himself with his father and challenge himself to attend school. Before there is love and attraction between Tessa and Austin, they are the other’s biggest ally. And this is why I fell in love with their story. 

Readers should know that this is a serious slow-burn romance. In fact, Can’t Fight It is a romance between introverts, but it felt real to me. There are several lessons to be learned from this story: overcoming fear (literal and perceived); accepting that failure is a part of the learning process; and recognizing that loving and protecting someone doesn’t make them a burden; it’s a byproduct of one’s love for the other. Smartypants Romance continues to tell compelling stories.

In love and romance,


Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 5 ⭐️ Review: Melanie Harlow’s Runaway Love ✍🏻

professorromance

Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: runaway bride; single dad; dad of twins; forced proximity; grump/sunshine; opposites attract

“It’s me choosing you —- just you. As you are.”

Thus far, in the month of May, Melanie Harlow’s Runaway Love is my favorite romance book. This is part Runaway Bride, Sound of Music, and Notting Hill. Two tropes that instantly grab my attention are found in this book: single dad and grump/sunshine. And Austin, Harlow’s MMC, is drawn as deliciously hot, but a grumpyumpleton to his core. Harlow balances his curmudgeon nature with two precocious twins and a family who humbles him daily. Her FMC, Veronica aka Roni, challenges him, through her sunny disposition, to recognize his self-sacrifice and consider choosing his dreams. Conversely, Austin helps Roni recognize the importance of expecting people to love her on her terms. As they work through their separate issues, Harlow infuses spice and humor, sweetness and challenge to engage her readers’ feelings, and the combination of these things causes the reader to gobble the book. At least, I did. Austin and Roni excited me, and I didn’t realize that I’d been missing the draw of reading until I fell into Austin ad Roni’s story. I felt indignant for Roni’s betrayal, cheered Austin’s sister when she decided to invite Roni to be a nanny for Austin’s children, grew annoyed with Austin’s instant judgment of Roni, became elated when Roni showed her beautiful soul, was titillated by Austin and Roni’s chemistry, and grew emotional as both Austin and Roni recognized that he needed to choose himself and his dreams and she needed to be chosen period. 

Grab Melanie Harlow’s Runaway Love if you need something to read that feeds your soul. This book will make you laugh, become misty-eyed, and fog your glasses all in one pass. This book is a total homerun.

In love and romance,

Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Catherine Cowles’s Echoes of You ⭐️

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Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

Tropes: friends to lovers; romantic suspense; small-town romance; found family; band of brothers

Catherine Cowles is a supreme wizard when it comes to romantic suspense, although I want to make sure she’s “okay” half the time when her poor heroines encounter so much trauma in her romances. Echoes of You is dramatic and heart-rending and joyful and steamy and sweet and page-turning. From its beginning, Cowles captures her reader’s attention with her heroine’s painful background. While its beginning isn’t as dramatic as the first book of Cowles’s Lost & Found series, it’s serious and emotional as we encounter the painful reality of Maddie’s life. Over and over again, Cowles pummels her reader with the trauma from Maddie’s childhood and her broken relationship with her ex-fiance. Maddie’s journey is redeemed when Nash finally allows himself to love her as he has always wanted. 

One minute, Cowles takes us from pain and despair to the summit of love as Maddie and Nash accept their long percolating feelings. But Cowles wouldn’t be her usual genius self unless she puts her MMC and FMC through trials. And poor Nash and Maddie must endure an onslaught of villainy to find their happy ending. Through it all, as a beloved reader, you know that the promise of a happy ending is on the horizon, and Cowles treats us to an especially sweet one with these two. To be fair, they deserve all the happiness in the world given the drama of their journeys. 

What should you expect ultimately from Echoes of You? Lots of action that put Maddie and Nash in peril along with sentimental moments filled with Nash’s family protecting and loving Maddie beyond measure. Add to that a tension-filled journey of two friends who fight their feelings before they finally realize that their love is fated and incomparable. You cannot put down Catherine Cowles’s Echoes of You. And you will hope that the next book in the series comes soon.

In love and romance,

Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Talia Hunter’s Tough Cookie ✍🏻

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Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

Tropes: fake relationship; small-town romance; Penny Reid-inspired; STEM FMC; chronic illness; hurt/comfort trope; cinnamon roll hero

One of my favorite aspects of Penny Reid’s Smartypants romance, besides all of the fantastic stories born from Penny’s stories, is the introduction of new-to-me authors. Talia Hunter is one such author. Her offering to the SPR world, Tough Cookie, was captivating. Her story chronicles the fake relationship evolution of Noah and Carla. Carla rents and lives in Noah’s childhood home. When a leak in the ceiling leads to its disrepair, Noah who is in town healing from an on-set accident from his stunt actor work is tasked with repairing the roof and ceiling. He falls almost instantly for Carla. As their time treks toward Valentine’s Day and his eventual return to stunt work, Carla and Noah begin to fall hard for each other. Some of that transpires from their instant attraction. Some of it comes from Noah’s protection of Carla who suffers from ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) or chronic fatigue syndrome. Not one to shy away from loving hard, Noah must win Carla’s heart which is protected behind fortified emotional walls. Thankfully, his tenacity wins out, and these two find a happy ending, even though it’s hard-won.

In each of the SPR stories, authors focus on important topics that add gravity and dimension to small-town romances. In this story, Hunter deftly characterizes the difficulties of this disease as Carla fights against Noah’s love. She feels she has very little to offer, yet Noah loves hard and perseveres in loving Carla on her terms. Even more, Hunter lovingly proffers a heroine whose intellect and love for science feel necessary in stories wrought with romance. Carla’s braininess becomes a major attraction to Noah as well. Their coupling is dreamy with Noah’s fight for her, winning over your heart. 

There is so much to love about Talia Hunter’s Tough Cookie. Jethro and Sienna make a small appearance, underscoring one of this beautifully drawn book’s messages: perfection doesn’t exist; it’s simply created in the eye of the beholder. I’m thinking Hunter’s book will be one of the favs of this newest season of Smartypants Romance.

In love and romance,

Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4 ⭐️ Review: Stacy Travis’s Dough You Love Me?, a Smartypants Romance ✍🏻

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Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: second chance romance; small-town romance; Penny Reid-inspired romance; going home

Stacy Travis’s Dough You Love Me? has found an apt home in Penny Reid’s crafted Smartypants Romance world. Set in the Donner Bakery series, the story follows Julia, who has returned to Green Valley after her grandmother’s death. Julia ran from Green Valley when she was younger because she was spurned by her crush, Shane. Never realizing that Shane felt like he wasn’t good for her, she left town and stayed away. She realizes she has stayed away too long in the shadow of her grandmother’s death. When she encounters Shane at the Friday jam session, long-buried feelings rise to the surface, and she runs again. Thankfully, she only runs as far as her grandmother’s home. As a friend of Cletus Winston, he connects her with his love, Jennifer Sylvester nee Winston who needs her help making bread. It becomes immediately clear that Julia will be working with Shane. As these two spend time together, those buried feelings find flight, and Shane and Julia fall in love in the specter of their past. Eventually, Julia decides to stay in Green Valley, finding her future with Shane.

Dough You Love Me? provides enough of that tension between falling in love and fighting the hurt feelings of one’s past. Julia and Shane engage in a tug-a-war of feelings until they simply can’t deny their attraction and love for each other. Through their story, Travis deftly points to how young people often struggle with differences. Shane’s story is wrapped up in his finding self-confidence in himself due to his disability. He rejects Julie out of a lack of confidence. When he finds music, specifically the French horn, he finds himself. When Julia returns to town years later, he is now able to love her despite his disability. Travis handles this storyline well. 

I think Travis muted this message with the coincidence of Julia and Shane’s bread-making. On the one hand, she’s able to spend some time focusing on the importance of companies using local growers to source their ingredients. It’s an important message to consider, but I found it to undermine the larger message of Shane’s journey of self-acceptance. There were times when the story felt uneven as Travis had to balance what I felt were two storylines. 

All in all, though, I loved Stacy Travis’s Dough You Love Me? as it returns us to the world of Cletus and Jennifer (even if they are sitting in the background), and it keeps us wrapped in the world of the Donner Baker’s delectable pastries and bread. I’m hoping we see more stories from Travis in this new world for her. I think Clay deserves a story in the Smartypants Romance world.

In love and romance, 

Professor A

Review

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4 ⭐️ Review: Tijan’s A Cruel Arrangement ✍🏻

professorromance

Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: anti-hero; alpha hero; mafia romance; forced proximity; grumpy/sunshine; opposites attract; heroine in danger; tragic past

Tijan’s next Kings of New York story, A Cruel Arrangement is a fitting follow-up to Tijan’s A Dirty Business. Both books envelop the reader in a harrowing tale of mafia tribulations couched in sultry romance. Where Trace and Jess’s love story is fraught with the forbidden element of their relationship, Ashton and Molly’s romance is high adrenaline from the very start to its end. 

As Tijan does well, A Cruel Arrangement is full of minute-by-minute tension. Ashton and Molly are opposites: he’s the new head of a mafia family, and Molly is the owner of a local bowling alley. Her father is a street “rat,” owned by Ashton’s family due to his extravagant gambling debt, and Ashton has taken on the family business in the wake of the deaths of his uncles. They shouldn’t work; however, something in Molly matches Ashton’s darkness, and the two are drawn together like magnets. 

This book has much to be solved because danger is afoot at every corner. Tijan places her characters in sundry difficult situations, and Ashton and Molly must work their way out of them. A Cruel Arrangement is page after page of trials, yet Ashton and Molly forge ahead, their attraction palpable on the page. Even in its darkest moments, Tijan has grafted a sweetness in Ashton and Molly’s pairing. 

Given the suspense in this book, I didn’t figure out the villain’s accomplices until Tijan revealed it. This, thankfully, kept me turning the pages of her story. The ending, however, was abrupt and not fully fleshed out. Yet, I’d like to believe there might be another book. 

If you’re an avid reader of suspenseful, dark mafia, A Cruel Arrangement will give you some good feels, but I’m not sure the most dedicated reader of mafia romance will find it dark enough. In the end, I’m here for Tijan and her stories, and this newest book didn’t disappoint. 

In love and romance,

Professor A