The Invisible Roommate
by Timothy Janovsky
In Janovsky’s THE INVISIBLE ROOMMATE (St. Martin’s Griffin, 320 pp., paperback, $19), Gerard Wells is a pop star on the run. Desperate for a break from the too-bright lights and hypervigilant fandom of the band he started with his two brothers, he packs a bag, ditches his phone and takes a ferry to a small island he’s only heard about in a vintage folk song. A sharp-eyed older woman rents him a room, warning him that the previous tenant vanished without a trace.
Unfortunately, Gerard quickly finds that, while the previous tenant did indeed vanish, he hasn’t actually left. Emory Griffin is a prickly, troubled genius who succeeded in creating an invisibility serum and then recklessly tested it on himself. (He is not, as he admits, “beating the mad scientist allegations.”) The men are forced to share the room — and its single bed — while Emory works out how to manufacture the cure.
Gerald is rather surprised to find himself increasingly attracted to a man he can touch, but never see. He’s had relationships but stayed staunchly in the closet, and now he’s beginning to wonder if he’s willing to sacrifice his happiness for the sake of a music career that’s only making him miserable. Emory, for his part, has been alone so long that he finds it nearly impossible to imagine someone choosing to stick around for good. A former foster kid subject to a series of profound betrayals, he uses gruffness to hide an intense capacity for devotion that blossoms into something quite poignant by the novel’s end.
The island is a comfortable place to hide for a time — but ultimately both Gerard and Emory find themselves wondering if what they really need long-term is someone who sees them properly.
The Roommate Subtext
by Elia Winters
Our second roommate romance is THE ROOMMATE SUBTEXT (Severn House, 272 pp., $29.99), a spin on Baroness Orczy’s classic “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” Winters’s character doesn’t rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine, though. He’s a popular online dom in the kink scene who masquerades as a mild-mannered botanist by day.
Blake Peabody’s work with a local community garden nonprofit has started to put him too much in the public eye, so with regret he takes all his kinky activities out of the world and onto the web, writing sexy stories anonymously as the Scarlet Pimpernel. When he starts getting messages from someone calling themselves Curious Rose, their flirty chats develop into some gloriously naughty romps in their separate spaces. These bits are wonderfully hot and emotionally tense.
But Rose and the Pimpernel aren’t as far apart as they think: Curious Rose is Maggie St. Claire, Blake’s new roommate and a journalist who has been hired to write a story about the Scarlet Pimpernel’s sexual magnetism. Winters wrings every possible drop of the most delicious angst out of her leads’ dual identities, with a single-minded focus that makes the developing romance feel unusually vivid and weighty. It’s a thrill to see someone really making a trope earn its keep while still setting a nimble pace.
All Hail Chaos
by Sarah Rees Brennan
Our final book is an unusual one, because unlike every other romance in the history of this column, it does not have a happy ending. Instead it has one of romantasy’s hallmark mid-series cliffhangers, one more jaw-dropping than most. So, you know, be warned.
ALL HAIL CHAOS (Orbit, 480 pp., paperback, $19.99) is the second novel in Brennan’s Time of Iron series. The first, “Long Live Evil,” gave us 19-year-old Rae, dying of cancer, who was offered a chance to escape into the world of her favorite book series and found herself in the body of the fantasy realm’s villainness. Now she’s engaged to the emperor, Key — a resurrected assassin-god — and the small changes she’s made to the narrative are starting to have epic effects. Rae faces losing her life, and so do many others — including Alice, her younger sister. Alice slipped through the door into the book world behind Rae, and has been working the story from another angle.
Love and betrayal are so often a blade’s width apart in this series: We have the chaste warrior paladin Marcus bound by oath to the theatrical, quixotic spy known as the Golden Cobra — a.k.a. Eric, another refugee from the real world — as well as the series’ original heroine, Lia, a princess who is sharper and perhaps more sinister than anyone (including Rae) has realized. All of them face terrible choices.
Romantasy is a young genre, still formulating the questions it most wants to ask. But its mythic scale and maximalist character archetypes lend themselves beautifully to Brennan’s twisting of the authorial knife. As a reader and someone who wants this new genre to fulfill its expressive potential, I’ve rarely been so thrilled to feel so betrayed.
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