The Roommate by Rosie Danan: Humour, Scorching Sexytimes, and All the Feels

The Roommate by Rosie Danan

Published: September 15th, 2020

Publisher: Berkley Romance

Tropes: Forced proximity, opposites attract, roommates

Heat level: 🔥🔥🔥

# of pages: 336

My rating: 5 stars

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House Rules:

Do your own dishes

Knock before entering the bathroom

Never look up your roommate online

 

The Wheatons are infamous among the east coast elite for their lack of impulse control, except for their daughter Clara. She’s the consummate socialite: over-achieving, well-mannered, predictable. But every Wheaton has their weakness. When Clara’s childhood crush invites her to move cross-country, the offer is too much to resist. Unfortunately, it’s also too good to be true.

 

After a bait-and-switch, Clara finds herself sharing a lease with a charming stranger. Josh might be a bit too perceptive—not to mention handsome—for comfort, but there’s a good chance he and Clara could have survived sharing a summer sublet if she hadn’t looked him up on the Internet...

 

Once she learns how Josh has made a name for himself, Clara realizes living with him might make her the Wheaton’s most scandalous story yet. His professional prowess inspires her to take tackling the stigma against female desire into her own hands. They may not agree on much, but Josh and Clara both believe women deserve better sex. What they decide to do about it will change both of their lives, and if they’re lucky, they’ll help everyone else get lucky too.

  

 

The Roommate has been so hyped over the last few months, I was honestly a bit nervous to read it. I also didn’t know what a ‘raunch-com’ was, and I didn’t read the synopsis or any reviews before starting, so I had no idea what was in store for me.

So, what was in store? A whole lot of laughs and swoons. Great characters that were easy to root for. Sexytimes that nearly set my Kindle on fire. Without a doubt, The Roommate completely lived up to the hype and is one of my favourite books of 2020 so far.

 

I loved Clara. She was wonderfully quirky and she made me giggle so much. She was someone I could see myself being friends with, and I wanted her to see how wonderful she was and that she deserved good things, despite feeling like her family was cursed. She’d lived a safe life doing what was expected of her and doing her best to live up to the family name. The first spontaneous, out-of-character thing she ever did was move across the country to live with her best friend - and unrequited crush - only to discover he was actually ditching her right from day one to go on tour with his band.

 

Enter Clara’s new roommate, Josh. Oh, Josh. He was so swoony! Total book boyfriend material. He and Clara were so different, but they had sizzling chemistry and their banter was hilarious. I loved how the way he saw Clara was so at odds with how Clara saw herself, but he slowly pulled her out of her shell and made her see that she deserved better than unrequited love and living only to please her family.

 

I also loved how sex-positive this book was. It shone a light on the porn industry and humanized sex workers when a lot of people are quick to dismiss and demonize the industry and all people involved. I especially appreciated the emphasis on women’s pleasure and how women deserve to enjoy sex as much as anyone else. You know how people often refer to romance in derogatory terms like ‘lady porn’? Well, this book was lady porn in all the best ways and was simultaneously a love letter to romance and also a big ‘eff you’ to everyone who talks crap about the genre and the things that bring women pleasure.

 

So yes, The Roommate completely lived up to the hype. I loved the characters, I loved the romance, I loved the banter, the flirting, the sexual tension, and all the emotions. The Roommate is a fun, flirty, fantastic must-read for all romance fans.

Have you read The Roommate? What did you think? What's the last sex-positive book you read?

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Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall: British RomCom Perfection

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
Published: July 7th, 2020
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Genre: Romantic Comedy/LGBTQ+
Tropes: Enemies to lovers, opposites attract, fake dating
Heat level: 🔥🔥
My rating: 5 stars
Acquired this book: From the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for honest consideration
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Wanted:
One (fake) boyfriend
Practically perfect in every way

Luc O'Donnell is tangentially--and reluctantly--famous. His rock star parents split when he was young, and the father he's never met spent the next twenty years cruising in and out of rehab. Now that his dad's making a comeback, Luc's back in the public eye, and one compromising photo is enough to ruin everything.

To clean up his image, Luc has to find a nice, normal relationship...and Oliver Blackwood is as nice and normal as they come. He's a barrister, an ethical vegetarian, and he's never inspired a moment of scandal in his life. In other words: perfect boyfriend material. Unfortunately apart from being gay, single, and really, really in need of a date for a big event, Luc and Oliver have nothing in common. So they strike a deal to be publicity-friendly (fake) boyfriends until the dust has settled. Then they can go their separate ways and pretend it never happened.

But the thing about fake-dating is that it can feel a lot like real-dating. And that's when you get used to someone. Start falling for them. Don't ever want to let them go.

Boyfriend Material is one of those books I’m finding difficult to review because I basically just want to gush and squee and scream, ‘I loved everything about this book!’ It was hilarious (I had actual tears of mirth running down my face at times), romantic, and full of unexpected feels. It had the perfect balance of hilarity and ridiculousness and also depth and real emotion. Add in a fantastic cast of memorable characters, and Boyfriend Material is easily one of the best books I’ve read in 2020.

Luc was a screwup and he knew it, but he wanted to do better. He’d been trying to fill an emotional void with all the wrong things - casual sex, booze, complete avoidance of his problems. He and Oliver were both so wonderfully, realistically flawed. They didn’t like each other at first, but they needed one another, and they ended up being so good for each other and integral to each other’s growth. Their banter was hilarious and they had such great chemistry (just for the record, all sex scenes are fade-to-black). I rooted for them throughout the book and I swooned hard on several occasions. I also really felt their pain, their insecurities, the self-destructive tendencies that stemmed largely from a lack of self-worth on both their parts. They were so different and yet so similar, and I adored them.

Luc and Oliver weren’t the only fantastic characters in Boyfriend Material. I loved Luc’s zany friend group, his ridiculous co-workers, and his eccentric mother. I’m actually sitting here giggling as I think of all the antics this group of characters got up to. I feel like I’d fit right in with Luc’s quirky group of friends, and I desperately wish they were real so I could be part of it.

Charming, hilarious, heartfelt, and full of British wit, Boyfriend Material is the perfect escape from the hellscape that is 2020. It was an instant new favourite, and one I know I’ll recommend constantly. Also, this would make such a fun, funny movie...who do we have to talk to to make that happen??

Have you read Boyfriend Material? What's the last book you read that you'd love to see turned into a movie?

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Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert: Hot, Hilarious, and Heartfelt

Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert (The Brown Sisters #2)
Published: June 23rd, 2020
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins Canada
Tropes: Friends-to-lovers, fake dating
Heat level: 🔥🔥🔥
My rating: 5 stars
Acquired this book: From the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for honest consideration
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Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Romantic partners, whatever their gender, are a distraction at best and a drain at worst. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits—someone who knows the score and knows their way around the bedroom.

When brooding security guard Zafir Ansari rescues Dani from a workplace fire drill gone wrong, it’s an obvious sign: PhD student Dani and ex-rugby player Zaf are destined to sleep together. But before she can explain that fact, a video of the heroic rescue goes viral. Now half the internet is shipping #DrRugbae—and Zaf is begging Dani to play along. Turns out, his sports charity for kids could really use the publicity. Lying to help children? Who on earth would refuse?

Dani’s plan is simple: fake a relationship in public, seduce Zaf behind the scenes. The trouble is, grumpy Zaf’s secretly a hopeless romantic—and he’s determined to corrupt Dani’s stone-cold realism. Before long, he’s tackling her fears into the dirt. But the former sports star has issues of his own, and the walls around his heart are as thick as his...um, thighs.

Suddenly, the easy lay Dani dreamed of is more complex than her thesis. Has her wish backfired? Is her focus being tested? Or is the universe just waiting for her to take a hint?

Get a Life, Chloe Brown was one of my top favourite books of 2019, making Take a Hant, Dani Brown one of my most anticipated books of 2020. I honestly didn’t even care what it was about, I just knew I was completely enamoured with Talia Hibbert’s writing and I wanted more of the Brown sisters ASAP. I’m obsessed with Hibbert’s bold, sassy, sexy - and honest - writing, and I may just have to devour her backlist while I want for the third Brown Sisters book to come out.

Take a Hint, Dani Brown had me captivated from the first page. It also had me giggling from the first page, which is always a good sign. This book was hilarious, and it had a perfect balance of humour, heart, and hotter-than-hell sexytimes. Talia’s bio says she “writes sexy, diverse romance because she believes that people of marginalized identities need honest and positive representation” and she truly delivers on that. Dani was Black, bisexual, and a witch (I loved that part and wish we saw more witchy women in contemporary books). Our sexy, sweet hero, Zafir, was Pakistani, Muslim, and dealt with mental health issues (namely anxiety, plus he had clinical depression for three years after a tragic event sent him spiraling). As someone who has struggled with mental illness for more years than I can count, I’m always appreciative of sympathetic and compassionate rep in books. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bookish hero with anxiety, and I absolutely loved that aspect of the story and how it played a part in so many of the things Zaf did (as did his grief, which I also appreciated, because it’s something else I’m, unfortunately, well acquainted with). The fact Zaf was also a romantic who read romance novels made me fall head over heels in love with him right alongside Dani.

I loved how intelligent and driven Dani was, and I also loved her confidence and how she owned who she was - her sexuality, her witchiness, her workaholic tendencies. I enjoyed her growth through the course of the novel and watching her open up and allowing herself to be loved and cared for. I loved her depth and how she was so confident and snarky and seemingly self-assured, but because of things that had happened to her in the past, she was lacking self-worth. And I loved watching Zaf slowly, patiently, and gently knocking down her walls and showing her how love could and should be. Plus did I mention the scorching hot sexy times? There were a few times I thought my Kindle was going to catch fire! 🔥

Take a Hint, Dani Brown has cemented Talia Hibbert as a new favourite author. Full of great characters who will alternately make you laugh, tug at your heartstrings, frustrate you, and make you swoon, this book is a must-read for romance fans. I read an eARC thanks to the publisher, and then I preordered it because I knew I had to have it on my Favourites shelf.

Read my review of Get a Life, Chloe Brown

Have you read Take a Hint, Dani Brown? What did you think? Who was the last author that made it to 'favourite author' status for you?

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Always a Bridesmaid by Cindi Madsen: Small-town Southern Charm Mixed With Giggles and Swoons

Always a Bridesmaid by Cindi Madsen
Published: May 26th, 2020
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
# of pages: 400
Tropes: Small-town romance
Heat level: As hot as Ford the firefighter
My rating: 4 stars
Acquired this book: From the publisher in exchange for honest consideration
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Violet Abrams has always been in love with everything love and weddings. Good thing, too, since she’s been a bridesmaid no less than seven times. Sure her turn was next, she’d been planning her own nuptials meticulously in a treasured three-ring binder...until her longtime boyfriend left her for someone else.

Fast-forward to the day of his wedding, an ill-advised match being lit to said binder, and the fire department getting called to her sister’s bakery. Violet’s always been a little impulsive and a lot awkward, but having to explain to the super-cute firefighter, Ford Maguire, why she was setting fire to a bunch of wedding dress photos? Worst day ever.

Except now her bridesmaid expertise has her helping Ford cover his “man of honor” duties in his best friend’s upcoming wedding. Ford may be a “bridesdude,” but forever is the last thing on his mind. And if there’s one thing a perpetual bridesmaid knows, it’s the importance of a happily ever after.

A perpetual bridesmaid, a hot firefighter, and adorable puppies - oh my!

Always a Bridesmaid is a funny, feel-good book set in the small town of Uncertainty, Alabama. Violet comes to town to stay with her half-sister after a nasty break-up with her boyfriend of ten years. She’s lost her way and she’s determined to rediscover her passions, all while connecting with her half-sister and baby niece. Ford has a penchant for saving people - as a paramedic/firefighter/search and rescue team member, he keeps busy enough to outrun the demons of his past - namely his own family. Violet doesn’t need saving (except occasionally from herself), but Ford is the perfect person to help guide her back to the person she wants to be.

I loved Violet and Ford, separately and together. Violet was quirky, funny, and determined, and she had a big heart, despite having been hurt so much in the past. She had ADHD and I really appreciated the way it was portrayed and that we got to see how it affected different areas of her life and her relationships. Ford was this big, tough guy who was secretly a softie, especially when it came to Violet. They had one big thing in common: they were both escaping the ‘sins of their fathers’ so to speak - Violet was the product of an affair, while Ford’s family were known around town as no-good womanizers and alcoholics. Both of them had been pigeonholed by people because of it and it was hard to escape in a tiny town like Uncertainty. It affected so much of their lives and how they felt about love and relationships. Because of that, there was a lot of push and pull, will they/won't they, with plenty of hilarious banter and super hot chemistry. It was a lot of fun watching them fall in love and fight for a happy ending.

There were also a lot of really great side characters in this book. At first I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of characters and the fact many of them were referred to alternately by their first and last names. I had trouble keeping everyone straight, but once I got to ‘know’ the characters, I wanted to be part of their group and I enjoyed all the different dynamics and how they welcomed Violet. I also particularly enjoyed the friendship between Addie and Ford - there aren’t enough platonic male/female friendships, and this one was done so well.

Full of quirky characters and southern charm, Always a Bridesmaid was an entertaining read that’s perfect for summer.

Have you read Always a Bridesmaid? What did you think? Have you ever been in a bridal party? Have any fun stories to share?

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The Tourist Attraction by Sarah Morgenthaler: RomCom Fun in the Land of the Midnight Sun

The Tourist Attraction (Moose Springs, Alaska #1) by Sarah Morgenthaler
Published: May 5th, 2020
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Tropes: Small town, vacation romance/fling to forever
Heat level: Steamy (lots of hot kisses, no on-page sex)
My rating: 4 stars
Acquired this book: From the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for honest consideration
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When Graham Barnett named his diner The Tourist Trap, he meant it as a joke. Now he's stuck slinging reindeer dogs to an endless string of resort visitors who couldn't interest him less. Not even the sweet, enthusiastic tourist in the corner who blushes every time he looks her way…

Two weeks in Alaska isn't just the top item on Zoey Caldwell's bucket list. It's the whole bucket. One look at the mountain town of Moose Springs and she's smitten. But when an act of kindness brings Zoey into Graham's world, she may just find there's more to the man than meets the eye…and more to love in Moose Springs than just the Alaskan wilderness.

Like many other people, I’m all about the light and funny books these days, and The Tourist Attraction definitely delivered. It was sweet, hilarious, had great characters, and a romance that was easy to root for.

Graham hates tourists. As a reluctant diner owner in Moose Springs, Alaska, he’s seen it all, and he hates that his town is overrun with rich, entitled tourists who wreak havoc, flash their money around, and are just generally a nuisance, even if they do help him pay the bills. He does have a soft spot for one tourist in particular, though, and when she arrives with a friend in tow, he’s charmed despite himself. Zoey isn’t like the others; she’s not rich and spoiled, and she didn’t choose Alaska on a whim. She toiled away as a waitress for years, saved all her money, and finally made her dream of visiting Alaska come true.

Graham and Zoey were such great characters. They had an instant connection and their playful banter had me grinning and laughing out loud. Zoey is adorable and relatable, and I wanted to be friends with her right away (hello, fellow shy bookworm, let’s hang out and read together!). I appreciated that she didn’t have everything figured out; she’d settled into her waitressing job back home as a means to an end, with her big goal being Alaska, and now that she could check that off her bucket list, she didn’t really know what was ahead. As for our hero, I know a lot of people are all about the grumpy hero, but they’re not always my favourite; they’re often unforgivably rude and seem to have little to no reason for the giant chip on their shoulder. Graham appears gruff and grumpy, but he’s actually a squishy, soft sweetheart, and the way he is with Zoey melted my heart. He saw her - truly saw her - from that very first moment, and the way he thought about her and treated her made me swoon.

The Tourist Attraction is adorable and witty, and the banter between Graham and Zoey is honestly some of the best I’ve seen. Prepare for lots of giggles and swoons, a side of feels, a stand-out setting, and a couple of animals that totally steal the show. I’m excited this book is the first in a series of standalones, because I’m eager to return to Moose Springs in the autumn with Mistletoe and Mr. Right. 

Have you read The Tourist Attraction? What did you think? Have you been to Alaska?

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The Little Bookshop of Love Stories by Jaimie Admans: A Perfectly Charming, Enchanting, and Romantic Escape

The Little Bookshop of Love Stories by Jaimie Admans
Published: May 8th, 2020
Publisher: HQ Digital
Genre: Romantic Comedy
# of pages: 384
My rating: 5 stars
Acquired this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for honest consideration
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Today is the Mondayest Monday ever. Hallie Winstone has been fired – and it wasn’t even her fault!

Having lost her job and humiliated herself in front of a whole restaurant full of diners, this is absolutely, one hundred percent, the worst day of her life.

That is until she receives an email announcing that she is the lucky winner of the Once Upon a Page Bookshop!

Owning a bookshop has always been Hallie’s dream, and when she starts to find secret love letters on the first pages of every book, she knows she's stumbled across something special.

Things get even better when she meets gorgeous, bookish Dimitri and between them, they post a few of the hidden messages online, reuniting people who thought they were lost forever.

I always say that Jaimie Admans’ stories are like sunshine in book form, and The Little Bookshop of Love Stories is no different. This book is sweet, laugh-out-loud funny, romantic, and just an overall delight. The world feels like it’s going to hell in a handbasket at the moment, and this book was a much-needed escape. I started giggling on the first page, and I had a giant, goofy grin on my face almost the entire time I was reading.

Hallie can’t seem to win; she has terrible luck and she’s clumsy to boot. But her luck changes suddenly when she wins - yes, wins - her favourite local bookshop. The store is in dire need of updating and organizing, and its finances are in pretty rough shape, but Hallie’s book-loving heart is happy, and she’s determined to turn the shop around. I loved Hallie’s perseverance, humour, and creativity. It’s always been a secret dream of mine to own a bookstore, and this book made me feel like I was right there with Hallie, helping her make improvements in the shop and figuring out how to make it succeed.

Then there’s Dimitri...ahh, Dimitri. *heart eyes* Jaimie always writes the best heroes; they’re sweet and swoony and aren’t afraid to show their softer, more vulnerable side, which is such a refreshing change from the oh-so-popular alpha-hole trend. Dimitri was adorable, quirky, and smart, and his sensitivity and kindness made me long to hug him as often as Hallie wanted to. I loved that these two found kindred spirits in each other; they were two misunderstood book lovers who were both clumsy and had bad luck, who found comfort and companionship in each other and lit each other up. Their banter made me giggle and grin, and I swooned so hard as they began falling for each other.

The Little Bookshop of Love Stories is like a love letter to books. I have no doubt Hallie and Dimitri’s deep love of books will both charm and resonate with fellow book lovers. If you’re looking to get swept up in a magical, whimsical romance, look no further. Be prepared to fall head over heels (or arse over tit!) in love with The Little Bookshop of Love Stories.

Have you read The Little Bookshop of Love Stories? What did you think? Do you have any favourite books about books - ones that feature book lovers, bookstores, libraries, book clubs, etc?

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