The day after handing in my final graduate school assignment at the end of May last year, I read The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston, which I had placed on hold at the Brooklyn Public Library months earlier for reasons I could no longer remember by the time it became available to me. It had been decades since I last read a romance novel, probably for an assignment for a Women’s Studies class in college, but since listening to an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible on clinch covers—those classic covers showing a swoony embracing couple—I was curious to read another. Well, after that first one, I read another, and then another. . . .
After three years of graduate school started during a global pandemic, it is no surprise that I am hooked on reading page-turning stories that promise a Happily Ever After (HEA) for each of their ambitious, resourceful heroines. According to Alison Doherty at Book Riot, I am far from alone in this desire. Romance has long been the best-selling book genre; for example, 25% of books sold in the U.S. in 2018 were romance novels. And sales of the genre have been growing since 2020, due in part to the pandemic and in part to the new appeal of the genre to younger readers inspired by BookTok.
Fortunately, the leisure reading section at BMCC’s Library includes many great romance titles. Here are some of the best among those I’ve enjoyed.
The Bride Test
by Helen Hoang
When friends ask me for romance novel recommendations, this exceptional book is at the very top of the list. It features Esme Tran, who supports her four-generation family—including her grandmother, mother, and five-year-old daughter—by working as a maid in Ho Chi Minh City, and Khai Diep, who believes he is incapable of love. Khai’s mother, a successful restaurateur, invites Esme to California as a potential bride for her son. The story that follows is both steamy and deeply moving, with Esme and Khai learning to navigate their cultural differences and understanding of Khai’s autism as they become more intimate. Esme is a fierce heroine, determined to stay in America and get an education with or without Khai, and Khai is an endearing hero, who discovers that he has had a soft, enormous heart all along.
Get the book! Check out The Bride Test by Helen Hoang at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, or the Queens Public Library.
After Hours on Milagro Street
by Angelina M. Lopez
This homecoming romance serves up history with plenty of salsita, as Lopez puts it in the acknowledgments. After their grandmother has injured herself in a fall, Alex Torres and her sisters offer to buy Loretta’s, her bar, and take over its management. The bar is the last remaining business on Milagro Street, once the bustling heart of the Mexican-American side of town in Freedom, Kansas, and it now has too many debts and needs too many repairs. Once named “The Best Bitch in Bartending” by Esquire, Alex is determined to remake the bar to suit wealthier customers. Meanwhile, Jeremiah Post, a history professor renting a room above the bar, is working with the Freedom Historical Society to establish a museum celebrating the town, particularly its Mexican-American community, established at the beginning of the 1900s when men came with their families from Mexico to Kansas to work building the railroads. In his view, Loretta’s is the perfect site for that museum. From the moment they meet, Alex and Jeremiah are both at odds with and completely hot for each other, and I like how their pairing challenges the usual grumpy/sunshine setup. In M/F romance, it’s usually the woman who brings the sunshine, but in this book, Alex is the grump.
Get the book! Check out After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library (in print or as an e-book or audiobook), or the Queens Public Library.
Get a Life, Chloe Brown
by Talia Hibbert
After a near-death experience, Chloe Brown decides that it’s time for her to get a life. She makes a list of adventures she’d like to go on—ride a motorcycle, go camping, and so on—and moves out of her family home to her own apartment, where she occasionally watches the superintendent, Redford Morgan (“Red”), while he paints in his room at night. Feeling guilty about the spying, she crosses “Do something bad” off her list. Smitten from the moment he meets Chloe, Red helps with the other items on her list—taking her for a ride on his motorcycle, bringing her on a camping trip, and more. Hibbert’s prose is smart and fun, and she tackles her characters’ serious problems—chronic pain from fibromyalgia and the emotional consequences of partner abuse—with great heart. I rooted so hard for this charming couple.
Get the book! Check out Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, or the Queens Public Library.
Love & Other Disasters
by Anita Kelly
I don’t care about cooking very much or reality TV at all, so I was surprised how very much I enjoyed this book that features two contestants on a cooking show, Chef’s Special—and by “enjoyed” what I mean is that I cried, possibly more than once, as the main characters, Dahlia Woodson and London Parker, arrived at deeper understandings of themselves and each other. Dahlia wants to have a big life that feels “like the way your favorite song feels, when you’re sixteen,” but her ideas about how to make this life a reality are so far disappointingly vague; in the meantime, she’s divorced her high school sweetheart and then left her uninspiring copyediting job to take a chance as a contestant on Chef’s Special. London auditioned for the show in response to a dare from their twin sister, and they’ve decided to use the show—and possible winnings—to raise support and funds for a nonprofit for LGBTQ+ youth. As in many of the best contemporary romances being written today, Love & Other Disasters also features a diverse cast of secondary characters—family and friends—who provide love, support, and insight to Dahlia and London.
Get the book! Check out Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library (in print or as an e-book or audiobook), or the Queens Public Library.
The Worst Best Man
by Mia Sosa
Three years after Lina Santos was jilted by her would-be husband on their wedding day, she finds herself collaborating with Max Hartley—her former fiancé’s younger brother, whom she believes is responsible for the breakup—on a presentation that could win her the job that could take career as a wedding planner to the next level. For Lina, a first-generation Brazilian American raised by a single mom, failure is not an option. As she puts it, “I owe it to my mother and tias to rise above my shortcomings and succeed in my chosen profession.” And so her mantra is, Never let them see you weak. It doesn’t take long for Max to see past Lina’s no-nonsense persona to the fun, vulnerable person she is underneath. For them to get together, though, Max has to get out of his older brother’s shadow, especially in his own mind, and Lina needs to learn how she can tap into her emotions as a source of strength in a world where shows of emotion by women, especially women of color, are too often condemned as signs of weakness or irrationality.
Get the book! Check out The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, or the Queens Public Library.
A Princess in Theory
by Alyssa Cole
Not once would Naledi Smith consider that there might be any credibility to the emails she is receiving, telling her that “I, Likotsi Adelele, assistant to His Royal Highness, have sought you out high and low over the last few months, at the behest of the most exalted—and most curious—Prince Thabiso. He has tasked me with finding his betrothed, and I believe I have succeeded: it is you.” But these emails are part of no scam. Thabiso, the prince of the small African mountain nation of Thesolo, does indeed believe that Naledi is the woman promised to him in marriage years ago, and he has come with his assistant Likotsi to New York City to find her. Orphaned when she was very young, raised in a variety of foster homes, and now a driven, exhausted graduate student in epidemiology, Naledi carefully guards her heart, even in friendship, but soon after they meet, she finds herself opening up to Thabiso, who she is at first led to believe is some kind of “trust fund baby” named Jamal. Their romance takes a non-paranormal spin on the fated mates trope, and it’s funny, sad, and sweet.
Get the book! Check out A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library (in print, large print, e-book, or audiobook), or the Queens Public Library.
A Caribbean Heiress in Paris
by Adriana Herrera
This novel was among the first historical romances I read last year, while on vacation in August, and by the end of that vacation, my preference for historical romance had become clear. Herrera herself grew up reading historical romances, and she also loves the works of Edith Wharton—who, despite her decidedly unhappily-ever-after endings, seems to be an inspiration for many romance authors. This novel, Herrera’s ninth, is her first historical romance, which she began after she learned that the Dominican Republic had an exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, when the Eiffel Tower debuted. It tells the story of Luz Alana Heith-Benzan, who has inherited her family’s rum business, Caña Brava, which she plans to launch into European markets by meeting buyers at the Exposition. At the Exposition, she also meets James Evanston Sinclair, Earl of Darnick, an “irritatingly handsome” Scotsman with whom she eventually enters a marriage of convenience that threatens to become something more. Just delicious.
Get the book! Check out A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library (in print or as an e-book or audiobook),or the Queens Public Library.
Rebel
by Beverly Jenkins
Beverly Jenkins is a legend in historical romance. Before it was published in 1994, her first novel, Night Song, was rejected many times because publishers said they didn’t know what to do with a story featuring nineteenth-century African Americans that wasn’t about slavery. Since then, she has published dozens of novels, including contemporary, contemporary suspense, and YA novels, as well as many historical romances. As she once explained to Jezebel, she looks at American history as a quilt: “The pieces pertaining to African Americans or Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans or Native Americans have been some of it ripped out, some of it cut out. And so I look at it as—I don’t know if you want to use the word ministry—to stitch those pieces back into the quilt.” The first book in her most recent series, Women Who Dare, Rebel tells the story of Valinda Lacy, who in spring 1867 travels from her home in New York City to New Orleans to fulfill her dream of teaching. She is betrothed to another but finds herself tempted by the charms of Captain Drake LeVeq, whom she meets when he and his sister-in-law Sable rescue Valinda from an attempted assault. Both the perils and the appeal of Reconstruction era New Orleans are vividly portrayed in this novel, and Valinda proves to be a formidable heroine—as bold as Drake, whose boldness comes (he says) from his pirate ancestors.
Get the book! Check out Rebel by Beverly Jenkins at BMCC’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, or the Queens Public Library.
About the author Rachael Nevins is an adjunct librarian at BMCC and also a writer, voracious reader, and long-distance runner.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
