When you choose a wine to match a meal, you’re not declaring all other wines invalid. Pairings are binary but also boundless: More than two possibilities exist, but selecting only two highlights something about each. This truth is hornily illustrated in Casey McQuiston’s very adult, very queer romance, THE PAIRING (St. Martin’s Griffin, 411 pp., paperback, $20).
Theo and Kit are childhood soul mates who fall in love, move in together, and break up just before a three-week European food and wine tour. Now the nonrefundable tour tickets are about to expire, and Theo (they/them) has decided to embark on the trip solo. Unfortunately, Kit has the same idea.
With their hearts still shattered, they immediately launch a hookup competition, flirting (and more) with various guides, sommeliers and attractive locals in a nonstop bisexual smorgasboard.
Theo narrates the book’s first half, so we see all their flaws magnified while admiring Kit’s charisma. Then we switch to Kit, and suddenly it’s Theo who’s bold and fascinating. Soon our duo is back to their old game batting improvised cocktail and dessert recipes back and forth, bonding over imaginary dishes as they eat and drink and et cetera in every city of the journey — until they finally end up where they truly want to be.
In the spirit of that game, the next two books in this column are also better as a pair: two historicals where the leads team up to solve an inheritance problem.
THE FINEST PRINT (Self-published, ebook, $4.99) is Erin Langston’s newest, after last year’s “Forever Your Rogue.” Belle Sinclair is a judge’s daughter and aspiring novelist — except nobody wants to publish books by a spinster whose reputation is in tatters after a broken engagement.
Enter the American Ethan Fletcher, heir to a London print shop with a debt that means he needs something profitable, and fast. A chance meeting feels like fate: Belle’s stories will finally find readers, and Ethan’s press has words to work with.
An initial spark soon flares into the raw yearning that made Langston’s earlier novel such a hit. This is a concretely physical book: the yearning, yes, but also the smell of ink and the heft of the press and the shoulder cramps when Belle scribbles too much too fast. The text is an open door letting us step into how the past might have felt to the people who worked and sweated there, and I devoured this book like it was drenched in velouté.
Erica Ridley’s HOT EARL SUMMER (Forever, 354 pp., paperback, $9.99) is the other kind of historical: a champagne fizz of a romance, where trying to possess history and wear it like a costume is a villain’s gambit.
Stephen Lenox is an inventor of ludicrously improbable machines (the kitten dispenser?!) who’d much prefer to spend all his time tinkering in his London workshop. Unfortunately his cousin, the Earl of Densmore, needs a favor — and, long story short, Stephen is now pretending to be the earl while defending a medieval castle from the Waterloo-reenacting neighbor who claims the real earl lost the castle to him in a card game. And this jerk is determined to seize the place with cannons, if necessary.
Enter the bloodthirsty Elizabeth Wynchester, whose body often rebels due to a chronic joint illness but whose skills with a blade never fail her. One of the “Wild Wynchesters” who help clients seek justice outside of the law, Elizabeth has been hired by the castle’s true heir, Miss Oak, to find the will that proves her claim.
Stephen has been able to keep his villainous neighbor at bay for weeks; it takes Elizabeth all of 10 minutes to breach both the castle’s and Stephen’s defenses. They’re both used to being punished for their differences, so it’s a long, delicious while before they learn to trust one another beyond the battlefield.
Reading these two books in conversation enhances the differences. There’s the achingly fraught semi-undressing in Langston’s love scenes versus the uproarious shock in Ridley’s, where Elizabeth uses a battle-ax to slice Stephen’s shirt and waistcoat open. And there’s the breathless pressure of Langston’s claustrophobic setting, with its small shop and narrow Old Bailey corridors, while Ridley’s characters blast literal holes in any wall someone tries to build around them.
And here’s where the metaphor of the wine pairing really comes through: we don’t have to designate one or the other approach as inherently superior. We get both/and, not either/or — food and beverage, Langston’s complex sensibility in concert with Ridley’s soaring flights of fancy.
Because in romance you’re encouraged to be ravenous, and you never have to stop with only one.
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