Tag Archives: Romance

Favourite Books of 2024

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Romance

  • Much Ado About Nada by Uzma Jalaluddin – second-chance romance; Persuasion re-telling set in Toronto’s Muslim community. I’m a huge fan of Uzma Jalaluddin’s work, and books like this are exactly why. It’s evocative and heartfelt, with main characters who make huge mistakes but actually have understandable reasons for doing so.
  • Jane and Edward by Melodie Edwards – contemporary Jane Eyre re-telling set in Toronto. As much as I love Jane Eyre, I was skeptical that it could be adapted to the present-day, but Melodie Edwards achieves this, and in spades! I love how she handled the complex power imbalances between Jane and Edward, and I especially love how she updated the Mrs. Rochester / “mad woman in attic” subplot.
  • Miss Rose and the Vexing Viscount and Miss Isobel and the Prince by Catherine Tilney – fun and flirty Regency romances, two in a trilogy about beautiful blonde triplets who travel to London to learn more about their birth family and experience their first (and only, due to their guardian’s budget constraints) season. Book 1 is about shy triplet Rose, Book 2 is about outspoken triplet Isobel, and I for one can’t wait for Book 3, about practical eldest triplet Anna!
  • The Witch is Back and De-Witched by Sophie H. Morgan – contemporary romances with witchy main characters. Lots of fun, sparky banter, lots and lots of angsty reasons why the leads can’t be together, and some beautifully hard-won happily-ever-afters. Oh and cute dogs! Books 1 and 2 of the Toil and Trouble series (named after the bar the heroines of the first three books co-own) feature a second-chance romance between a shy witch and the charming warlock who left her years ago, and a grumpy-sunshine forbidden romance between a bubbly, animal-loving human and a super-serious warlock with trust issues.

Mystery/Romance

  • The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter – both homage to, and pastiche of, Agatha Christie’s finest, this is a locked-room mystery starring two rival crime writers who are spending the holidays at a famous author’s mansion when the author suddenly goes missing. With a larger-than-life author character clearly modelled after Christie herself, and a pair of leads trading sparky enemies-to-lovers banter, this story is sheer delight from start to finish.

Mystery

  • It’s Elementary by Elise Bryant – Funny and fantastic series characters lead a strong kick-off to this cozy mystery series about a PTA mom who gets sucked into a mystery at her child’s school.
  • Those Opulent Days by Jacquie Pham – Historical mystery set in French-colonial era Vietnam, this story stands out not only because of the strength of its core mystery, but also because of its incisive and fascinating commentary of the complex race- and class-based social hierarchies of the period.

Contemporary Fiction

  • Hate Follow by Erin Quinn-Kong – a timely and heartfelt exploration of the complexities of using one’s children for social media content. I love how the author showed not just the daughter’s right to privacy over her own life, but also the mother’s need for her income as an influencer to continue paying for her children’s basic needs. It’s hard to see a resolution that would meet both their needs, but the author somehow manages to do it, and show both characters’ growth at the same time.

Graphic Novels

  • Age 16 by Rosena Fung – a heartwarming, heartwrenching, heart-EXPANDING story about three generations of women and their experiences at age 16. The specifics and locales may differ, but many elements also remain the same, reflecting how trauma can get passed down, despite each generation’s best efforts. A must-read for daughters of mothers and grandmothers, especially those of us who know the struggles of being big girls in a society that equates beauty with thinness.
  • Pillow Talk by Stephanie Cooke and Mel Valentine Vargas – this fun riff on Whip It features a pillow fighting league (!), lots of awesome body diversity, and powerful messages about the strength we draw from community. I especially love that the main character’s journey to success in her new life as a pillow fighter (again – !!!) doesn’t involve completely shedding elements of her old life; rather, her pre-pillow fighting BFF ends up staying just as integral to her life all the way through the end.

Lady Kidlat Meets Her Match is a plus-size, nerdy romance set in Toronto, about a museum educator/comics creator and a psychologist who fall in love while working together on art therapy workshops. Features yummy Filipino food, Star Trek conversations and sexy role-playing, and cute kitties. If this sounds like your kind of thing, check out my book at:

Author News | I Wrote A Book!

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It’s here! It’s finally here!

As some of you may have noticed, my blog has changed a bit in the last few months, and the reason is quite simple: I’m finally ready to publish my first novel, and rather than go through the muck of setting up a separate author website, and maintaining two sites for different areas of my writing, I decided to simply expand Literary Treats to include my novel writing as well.

And as you can see in the above photo, I’m thrilled to announce that the novel is finally available for purchase!

What’s this book about?

Lady Kidlat Meets Her Match is a contemporary romance about two plus-size Filipinos in Toronto who fall in love over a shared love of cats, Filipino food, and all things nerdy.

Kat is a museum educator and comics creator who refuses to fall in love. Jake is a psychologist and avid Trekkie who longs for happily ever after. A one night stand to explore their deepest fantasies leads to working together on art therapy workshops for the museum where Kat works, and, well, you’ll just have to read the book to find out what happens next. 😉

More information here. Buy the book on Amazon.

What does this mean for the blog?

I still plan to keep reviewing books on my blog. The main difference is, instead of seeing my latest posts on my home page, you’ll just need to click on the “Blog” link in the header to see my latest reviews.

Another big difference is that I’ll be starting a newsletter for updates on my romance novels. For those who fall in love with Lady Kidlat and want to keep reading any romances I write in future, I’ll also be posting author updates on the blog. As you’ll see with this post, I’ll tag it “Author News” and “Lady Kidlat” so you can choose which of my posts to read.

What about the newsletter?

For those who’ve signed up for email updates for my blog posts, you can customize your experience to receive only the updates you want.

On the bottom of one of the eblasts, simply click on “Manage your email settings.”

Then you can select which of the newsletter categories you want to receive.

Thank you all for reading what I write, whether it be my bookish blog posts or, now, news about MY VERY OWN BOOK! For those of you who are inclined to give Lady Kidlat a try, I hope you love her as much as I do, and I look forward to posting a lot more romantic adventures within her world.

Review | The Rose Arbor, by Rhys Bowen

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The Rose Arbor is a captivating and highly engrossing historical fiction/mystery. Rhys Bowen does a great job in immersing you in a different time and place with her prose. I was fully invested in the characters and their journeys, and I actually enjoyed my commutes to and from work because I got to delve into this story again and again.

In 1943, the residents of a small English village named Tydeham were asked to evacuate, so that the military could use their village for wartime exercises. The evacuation was rather frantic; in most cases, people didn’t want to leave their homes. There’s a beautifully heart-breaking moment where a woman insists on having a final cup of tea in her own kitchen before she has to get on the van to leave, and her husband tells her they unfortunately don’t have the time. In all the hubbub, three young girls end up missing, and years later, only one of their bodies has been found.

Flash forward to 1968. Liz Houghton hates her job as an obituary writer for a London newspaper, so when her roommate, Marisa, a police officer, mentions travelling to Dorset to pursue a lead about a young girl’s disappearance, Liz jumps at the chance for a more interesting story. While in Dorset, Liz finds herself drawn to the nearby village of Tydeham. Even though her father insists they’ve never lived there, and Liz would only have been two when the village was evacuated for the war, something about the village seems familiar, and a hunch leads to the discovery of a body behind an old manor house. It isn’t one of the missing girls, but rather the skeleton of a young woman.

Whose body is it? How did Liz know it was there? How, if ever, is it connected to the missing young girls, both from the 1940s and from the present day? Bowen packs her narrative with lots of mysteries, and somehow manages to make all the disparate threads come together by the end.

However, the book’s strength isn’t so much in the mysteries that its characters need to solve, but rather in the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. More than the mystery of how Liz is connected to the village of Tydeham, it was her relationships that intrigued me. I was drawn in by the romance developing between her and James, the young man whose family owned the manor where the body was found, and I thought James’ father was charming. Liz’s mother had advanced dementia, and in the few scenes she appeared, Liz’s love for her and sorrow for her current condition really shone through. And Liz’s brigadier father was just shady from the get-go; the way he was portrayed on the page, I imagined far worse secrets than what was eventually revealed.

Adding an extra layer is the stories, mostly lost, of the people of Tydeham. The book starts with the residents of this town reacting to the news that they would have to evacuate, and as much as I got pulled in by the story of Liz in 1968, I also couldn’t help wishing that we’d gotten to spend more time in Tydeham in the 1940s. By the end of the novel, much of the village’s role was reduced to providing plot points for the central mystery, and while I can see the benefit in terms of keeping the storytelling tight, I also couldn’t help but feel the sense of loss that Liz tried to capture in her obituary for the town. Those people mattered, and while it’s certainly realistic that within the context of Liz’s story, so many of these minor characters’ stories would have been lost to time, Bowen has managed to make us care enough to wish this weren’t so.

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Thank you to Firefly Books Limited for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.