A critic’s best-of list is on some level a confession: You can deduce a lot about my year from the stories I found solace in. So in addition to the expected delights of this year’s romances — lush historical eras, dazzling space battles, scenes of love triumphant — there’s a resonant thread of grief running through the fractured timelines, vengeful heroines, and small-scale victories of the books below.
You Should Be So Lucky
By Cat Sebastian
Terrible things happen in romance: Death, betrayal and tragedy are shockingly frequent before we reach the final pages. The central difference between romance and tragedy is that tragedy ends after the worst thing happens — but romance perseveres.
My favorite romance of the year, “You Should Be So Lucky,” is this theory made manifest: A widowed reporter and a failing baseball player find solace together after staggering losses. This story is the gentlest kind of gallows humor — the pages overflow with that cathartic, bittersweet feeling you get when you’re telling someone about the worst day of your life, and you’re both laughing because the list of catastrophes just keeps going.
Not Here to Make Friends
By Jodi McAlister
In the long and painful stretches of this year, when too many things were happening, I was drawn to romances that defy despair, like this masterly novel set behind the scenes of a reality dating show. Lily, a widow, is a ball of fury and vengeance, bouncing gloriously off the producer Murphy’s cutthroat manipulation of the other contestants. They’re not good people, but they’re great fun to watch as they bend every rule they can.
Rules for Ghosting
By Shelly Jay Shore
For top-notch drama, this year’s medal goes to “Rules for Ghosting.” Ezra is trying to move forward with a new apartment and a new crush, but his family’s needs and the ghost of his crush’s dead husband keep tangling him up in the past. Funeral homes have become increasingly visible as romance settings since the pandemic; here actual ghosts haunt the quiet and tender moments, and it’s the scenes at family holidays that leave you rattled and gasping.
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
By Tia Williams
We edge further into light supernatural with this not-quite time-slip romance that stretches from the Harlem Renaissance to the modern day. Charming and vibrant, this is one of those novels where the author’s powers make you doubt, just a little, that the magic trick is going to work this time. That delicious bite of uncertainty makes Ricki and Ezra’s final chapters so much sweeter.
The Ministry of Time
By Kaliane Bradley
Time and Tide
By J.M. Frey
Time travel and time-slips are coming back into vogue and two novels really stood out for me, to the point where I couldn’t choose between them. “The Ministry of Time” pulls historical figures into the near future, where inevitable romantic entanglements complicate a mysterious governmental project.
“Time and Tide” sends a modern disaster bi back in time to meet an authoress bound by the homophobic social taboos of Austen’s England. Bradley’s book is sci-fi dystopia, while Frey’s curtsies to the bonkers, bodice-ripping yarns of Johanna Lindsey and Bertrice Small. But both stories fascinate by committing to the idea that chronological dislocation is a kind of violence, and not being afraid to get a little messy about it.
The Earl Who Isn’t
By Courtney Milan
Milan wraps up her Wedgeford Trials series with characteristic wit in this novel, in which an earl’s secret son and a firebrand with a printing press grapple with long-simmering passion in a majority-Asian town in Victorian England. (I feel about Wedgeford the same way I feel about Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork: I know it’s not a real place, but it ought to be.) We deserve more gorgeously written books that care this much about joy, justice, community and the world.
A Shore Thing
By Joanna Lowell
Lowell’s novel, full of uncommon delights, brings us a trans painter turned bicycle mechanic, a stubborn widowed botanist in need of the painter’s artistic skills and an excuse for a bicycle race down the Cornish coast. We also have conversations about the arts and sciences, and about fearing you’ll never rediscover inspiration once you’ve let it slip through your fingers.
Swordcrossed
By Freya Marske
Marske’s newest fantasy takes place in a city teeming with guild politics and competition where a wool merchant’s son, Matti, hires a swordsman for his upcoming wedding, then finds himself falling for the swordsman instead of the bride. But Luca is more than a simple swordsman, and his secrets cause a surprising amount of trouble. This one’s spicy and heisty and cozy in just the right balance.
Lady Eve’s Last Con
By Rebecca Fraimow
This is a heist romance that really sticks the landing. With heist romances, you’re always waiting for the moment when the mark becomes more important to the lead than the money, and Fraimow finesses this transformation with a confident hand. Eve is diamond-sharp and dazzling, an unforgettable showstopper of a heroine.
Long Live Evil
By Sarah Rees Brennan
Finally, we have Brennan’s brash and bloody “Long Live Evil.” Rae, 19, leaves behind a body dying of cancer and is reborn as the villainess in her favorite fantasy series, where she proceeds to try to rewrite the narrative with shamelessly self-interested brio. Technically this isn’t a finished romance — it ends on an unpulled punch of a cliffhanger, and I am happy to show off the bruise until we get Book No. 2. The gorgeous, smoldering rage at the heart of this story will keep me warm all winter.
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