All in She Read
Margaret Atwood, in her Masterclass intro, smiles gleefully into the camera, “…Little Red Riding Hood. Let’s start the story a different way: ‘It was dark inside the wolf.’”
You Deserve Each Other employs this delightfully disorienting sensibility with a clever twist on the enemies to lovers trope. Here, lovers have become enemies as the romcom begins in the darkness of a relationship spiraling toward self-destruction.
Peckham’s books consistently give me all the atmospheric, tropetastic goodness I've loved since pulling my first historical romance off my grandmother's bookshelf, but with a willingness to interrogate systemic power imbalances and portray strong, sex-positive, transgressive women in a way that makes her books feel relevant and powerful.
The Duke I Tempted is an erotic historical romance, marriage of convenience story between a sexually submissive duke and an iron-willed alpha heroine.
Mason Deaver’s I Wish You All the Best was my favorite YA read of 2019 and the coming of age story I wish I’d had to give to my non-binary teen when they were in high school. The protagonist, Ben De Backer, is a queer, non-binary teen who’s finding their way after a gutting rejection by their parents in the book’s early pages. While I was in tears within the first few pages, ultimately, Ben’s story is one of resilience and hope.
This was a slumpbuster of a book that left me wondering why Romantic Suspense doesn’t feature more prominently in my reading. The first in a series, Whiteout is a high stakes survivor story that has our hero and heroine fleeing across hundreds of miles of frozen tundra following an attack on the research station in Antarctica where they‘ve each been nursing the wounds of past traumas.
