The Next Best Fling
The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gamez is $2.99! This is book one in the Librarians in Love series and it came out over the summer. The main characters enter into a no-strings-attached relationship to get over their crushes on other people.
Two broken hearts decide that the best way to get over their first loves is with a no-strings-attached relationship in this spicy and charming debut romance.
Librarian Marcela Ortiz has been secretly in love with her best friend for years—and when he gets engaged, she knows it’s long past time to move on. But before she gets the chance, she has a bigger problem to contend with in the form of Theo Young, ex-NFL player and older brother of the man she’s in love with. When she discovers Theo’s plans to confess his feelings for his brother’s fiancée at their engagement party, Marcela is quick to stop him—despite how tempting it is to let him run away with the bride-to-be. She manages to convince Theo to sleep off his drunken almost-mistake at her place and when they arrive at a family brunch the next day together, everyone wrongly assumes they hooked up.
Since Theo needs a cover for his feelings for the bride and Marcela needs a distraction from her unrequited feelings for the groom, they decide to roll with the lie. Until one late night at a bar, they take it a step further and discover a layer of attraction neither realized existed. Soon, they find themselves exploring the simmering chemistry between them, whether in library aisles or Marcela’s bed. There are no boundaries for the rebound relationship they form—just a host of complicated feelings, messy familial dynamics, and uncovered secrets that threaten to tear them apart before they can even admit to themselves that their rebound is working. Maybe a little too well.
Apples Dipped in Gold
Apples Dipped in Gold by Scarlett St. Clair is $1.99! This is book two in the Fairy Tale Retellings series, though I can’t quite place which fairy tale it’s based on or just an amalgamation of a few.
Orphaned at a young age, Samara is left under the care of her three, horrible brothers. Just when she thinks she cannot take another day of their abuse, a handsome prince offers for her hand in marriage.
Samara’s brothers agree in exchange for a large dowery but on her way to her new kingdom, her carriage is ambushed by Lore, the wicked Prince of Nightshade.
Samara believes that the fae has snatched away her chance at freedom to punish her for her crimes against his kind but punishment is only half of Lore’s plan.
The truth is that the Elven Prince has pined after Samara for seven long years. She is all he can think about—a toxin in his blood. Can the Prince of Nightshade, whose power over poisons rivals none in The Enchanted Forest, manage to find a remedy or will he succumb to her love?
Shark Heart
RECOMMENDED: Shark Heart by Emily Habeck is $2.99! I mentioned this one on Get Rec’d, but Carrie also selected it as one of her favorite reads from 2024.
Shark Heart by Emily Habeck is a novel that isn’t a romance novel but that does include an incredibly powerful love story. This book was almost unbearably beautifully written. It doesn’t have an HEA in a traditional sense but it does carry the reader through grief into a new happiness. It’s one of the most original things I’ve ever read and I want to read it over and over again.
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A USA TODAY Bestseller
A Booklist Editor’s Choice
A Goodreads Choice Award Nominee
A Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Honors Selection
Shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
A “beautifully written” (Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See) debut novel of marriage, motherhood, metamorphosis, and letting go, this intergenerational love story begins with newlyweds Wren and her husband, Lewis—a man who, over the course of nine months, transforms into a great white shark.
For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist’s heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams.
At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds. Woven throughout this “heart-wringing” (Adam Roberts, internationally bestselling author of Salt) novel is the story of Wren’s mother, Angela, who becomes pregnant with Wren at fifteen in an abusive relationship amidst her parents’ crumbling marriage. In the present, all of Wren’s grief eventually collides, and she is forced to make an impossible choice.
A sweeping love story that is at once lyrical and funny, airy and visceral, Shark Heart is an unforgettable, gorgeous novel about life’s perennial questions, the fragility of memories, finding joy amidst grief, and creating a meaningful life. This daring debut marks the arrival of a wildly talented new writer abounding with originality, humor, and heart.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January
RECOMMENDED: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow is $2.99! I read this one and gave it a B+:
If you’re in the mood for a lovely, tender fantasy novel about belonging and one that feels more like a long, relaxing bath than a hot, intense shower will all of the fancy pressure and pulsating settings you can imagine, you’ll love this one. It’s a soothing pick for when you hope to take comfort in a book
In the early 1900s, a young woman searches for her place in the world after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut.
In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.
Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.
