Category romances — those slim titles issued every month from themed imprints — are the high-end sports cars of the book world. Impractical luxuries, they’re designed for a single purpose: to go vroom very fast. They’re not always subtle, but when they succeed, they’re absolutely exhilarating.
Church Girl
By Naima Simone
In CHURCH GIRL (Afterglow, 288 pp., paperback, $12.99), Aaliyah Montgomery, a preacher’s daughter, flees her wedding day in a puff of corseted tulle. She has a partial college scholarship and a cousin with a spare bedroom in Chicago: All she needs is a part-time job and the fortitude to avoid her religious parents’ demands that she return and marry the man they’ve chosen for her.
What she finds is a nanny position for Von Howard, a successful tattoo artist and recently divorced dad. Von is too blunt, too hot and too prone to casual cursing — and still wounded from the betrayals of his terrible ex. Aaliyah’s trying to get her new independent life together; having a fling with her boss would be a disaster.
With such intense archetypes, what keeps the book purring along is a powerful, distinct narrative voice. Von and Aaliyah, in Simone’s hands, have a combustive and irresistible chemistry. Aaliyah’s not inexperienced — a welcome choice — but nothing in her previous life has made her feel desired, treasured, pleasured or defended. The sexual arc is less about losing her innocence and more about accepting her whole self, desires and all. It’s positively filthy, and gloriously filth-positive.
Hers for the Weekend
By Helena Greer
In the final “Carrigan’s Christmasland” novel, HERS FOR THE WEEKEND (Forever, 368 pp., paperback, $17.99), the high-powered lawyer Tara Sloane Chadwick is fighting to save the world at the cost of her own joy and happiness (painfully relatable). She may be out as a lesbian, but she’s under intense pressure for her relationships to otherwise fit the criteria acceptable to her white Southern family’s old-money standards. Her former fiancée left her for the manager of Carrigan’s, a Jewish Christmas tree farm in upstate New York — that’s Book No. 1 of the series — and now Tara has to attend their wedding, along with her dramatic, disgustingly coupled-up best friends.
She desperately needs a date.
Enter Holly Siobhan Delaney, a waitress and baker who job-hops around the country to keep from feeling tied down. Holly’s pretty sure the best way to fake a relationship is to have a lot of incredible sex — but Greer has a way of thwarting her characters’ plans and smashing hearts together, whether she’s turning no-strings affairs into full-strings orchestras of emotions, or upending longstanding patterns in friendships. Holly’s feelings about her hometown, Tara’s relationship with her best friend and soul mate Cole — these are weights that pull on the fabric of the romance plot, shaping our characters and their paths. The books in this series have been absolute orgies of comfort reading, brimming with sparkling banter and the kind of heart-rending angst you can drown in.
Love You a Latke
By Amanda Elliot
In LOVE YOU A LATKE (Berkley, 368 pp., paperback, $19), Abby Cohen has fled the big city and her emotionally devastating parents for the isolation of being the only Jewish person in small-town Vermont, where she runs a cafe. Lonely and prickly, she is reluctantly recruited into planning a Hanukkah festival to help the town stand out amid the many other Christmas-focused tourism events.
Desperate, she reaches out to the only other Jewish person she can find in a 50-mile radius: Seth Abrams, the cheerful, pumpkin spice-loving customer who annoys her every morning. Seth’s eager to help — for a price: Abby has to travel to New York with him and pretend to be his girlfriend for a week with his family. In return, he’ll introduce her to enough vendors and food pop-ups to make the Hanukkah festival a smash hit.
The reader can see Seth falling for her, but Abby, aching inside, can’t even acknowledge the possibility of a relationship for most of the novel. Elliot makes her struggle palpable and urgent. Abby’s healing is rediscovering the sense of community and connection that was stolen from her, and the moments where she finds it are nothing short of transcendent.
This is not a family reunification story; none of this month’s books are. Some broken things can never be repaired. The villainous parents are not even allowed to make elaborate apologies: That would keep them at the center of their children’s emotional lives. The triumph for our thriving heroines this month is that the people who’ve hurt them utterly cease to matter.
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