August Lane
by Regina Black
AUGUST LANE (Grand Central, 325 pp., $29) is a second-chance romance and a powerhouse of the genre — a sullen, smoldering ember that’s one breath away from blazing into an inferno. To be honest, I’m a little mad you’re reading my column and not this book right now.
August was abandoned by her superstar mother, Jojo, raised by her grandmother and betrayed by the boy she loved. That boy, Luke Randall, stole a song they’d co-written and became a country music star himself. And now Jojo’s being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and has asked Luke to sing his signature hit as a duet onstage in Arcadia, their hometown.
Everything that was taken from August is on that concert stage, and it will all go up in smoke if she tells anyone that Luke had a co-writer. Contracts, royalties, sponsorships — poof. Revenge is right there for the taking.
Except August doesn’t know the real reason Luke’s kept singing their song. She doesn’t know he’s been sober for five years, and that he’s tired of watching his career wither while he hides his real voice behind radio-friendly production polish. She doesn’t know he sees his return to Arcadia as a chance to finally make things right.
If she doesn’t burn down his career, he’ll do it for her.
The angst is glorious. Everyone in this book is ruined in some way that will never be fixed. People do monstrous things to the ones they love. This is not the aw-shucks kind of country: It’s the murder ballads, the rolling thunder, the long black road — and the best romance I’ve read all year.
The Entanglement of Rival Wizards
by Sara Raasch
Next up is an enemies-to-lovers, THE ENTANGLEMENT OF RIVAL WIZARDS (Bramble, 326 pp., paperback, $19.99), in which a magical graduate student has to work with his nemesis from another department in order to keep his funding and complete his degree.
Sebastian Walsh, a human wizard studying evocation, keeps his trauma close at hand like a switchblade. Elethior Tourael — he says to call him Thio; Sebastian would rather die — is a snobby half-elf from the rival conjuration department whose relatives have made piles of money off magical weapons. Thio and Sebastian separately pitched projects on how to prevent magical spells from draining a wizard’s power — so to save money, the university pairs them up and tells them they’re sharing the grant.
It’s a disaster until the two realize that irritation is one step away from attraction. But just as they’re starting to work as a team, both in and out of the lab, family secrets start coming home to roost.
This is the complex world building SFF readers live for, paired with the epic swooning of modern romantasy. Raasch gives us a detailed magical military-industrial complex that has its claws in every aspect of Sebastian and Thio’s lives. The philosophy of spells, orc religions, parental betrayals — it’s a lot, but Raasch always pulls back before it becomes too much.
By Marsh and by Moor
by Annick Trent
Finally, indie author Trent has treated us to a new working-class queer Regency, BY MARSH AND BY MOOR (Self-published, ebook, $3.99). Jedediah Trevithick loved his life as a carrier, just him and his cart and his horse. But then he was kidnapped by the press gang, a roving band that snatched up laborers for a Royal Navy desperately in need of sailors. Jed has spent the past five years at sea, dodging cannonballs, hating the officers and planning his escape. Now he’s washed ashore at the feet of a London ostler traveling to a place not far from Jed’s hometown.
Solomon has his own reasons for keeping to the back roads and byways — but he doesn’t know them nearly as well as Jed does, even after five years’ absence. Solomon and Jed come to depend on each other — and then, slowly, to want more than simple trust and friendship. But Solomon’s secrets are the kind you can’t run away from — and Jed will have to decide just how much of his life he’s willing to risk for love.
Regencies with war veteran heroes often paint the Napoleonic period as an orgy of prize money and roguish scars; Trent presents the bleak reality most soldiers and sailors faced instead — being stolen from loved ones and sent to die by cannon or cutlass. But we also see people stand up to the press gangs, protect friends and strangers, and find ways to keep one another safe from kidnappers and abuses of the law. In a subgenre where money is so often the fantasy, it’s worth cheering characters who escape via their wits and not their wealth.
The post If You Have Time for Just One Romance Novel, Make It This One appeared first on New York Times.
