This HaBO is from Rachel, who is looking for this contemporary sounding romance:
I’ve been googling and searching SBTB trying to find a novel I remember reading last year or the year before.
It was the first in a series. Though the others hadn’t come out yet at the time I read it.
The protagonist had recently lost both her adopted parents in a car crash and, out of the blue, her birth mother– a billionaire comes to pluck her from her life and places her in a boarding school for the elite.
As she adjusts to her life she meets three other boys who, along with their and her own biological parents are involved in all sorts of nasty wealthy/criminal shit. The boys are sort of protecting/sort of mocking of her, especially since her recently deceased brother had died during the course of some mission they had undertaken. The training, expertise, and missions they undertook were so over the top for what were supposed to be either teenagers or early 20 somethings.
Ultimately she starts to realize that with the loss of her brother, her bio mom needed a new heir for their secret illegal billionaire council/shenanigans, and may have been responsible for the protagonist’s adopted parents’ car crash.
I know a couple of “elite boarding school” setups, but nothing matches this.
No idea what it is, but sounds like the start of a YA series.
I thought at first that this sounded similar to Gemma James’s Zodiac Queen series (a young woman, orphaned by a car crash, surrounded by a number of men, all of whom want her), but it sounds YA and James’s series is decidedly NOT YA (although the heroine is only 18 at the start of the series).
Could also be reverse harem series. Do these count as romange?
Broken Wings by Jaymin Eve? Looks like it came out last year.
I tried searching “reverse harem bully academy romance” on Amazon and got too many results to wade through. :/ There have also been quite a few RH academy anthologies put out in the past year.
If no one on SBTB knows this, you might want to ask in one of the Facebook RH groups. “Reverse Harem Readers and Authors” is huge, and someone will probably have read this & be able to tell you.
@LizaS: I used to assert that “Reverse Harem” was just 1970s gang-rape porn updated for the new millennium…but I must admit, I’ve read a few fairly good ones that seem to be able to make the concept somewhat romantic. I’m still amazed at how popular it is, however. I’ve said it before, but I think a woman who is involved with more than two men is going to find herself somewhat…oversubscribed.
As someone commented earlier, it’s Broken Wings by Jaymin Eve. All three books in the series are out in a box set.
@DiscoDollyDeb: It can be very well done, but I’m a bit biased because, full disclosure, I sometimes write it. 😉 What’s incredible to me is that the concept itself sounds so steamy, but it can be written with varying degrees of steaminess. Some reverse harem books are crazy-hot and alllll about the sexytimes, and some of them will go several books into a series before anyone even kisses.
I could probably write pages about RH, its origins, variations, and its rise in popularity, but I’ll stop here. I’m glad you found some good ones that worked for you!
@Liza, a dissertation on reverse harem is exactly the kind of content I come to SBTB for. I would totally attend your TEDTalk on it, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually read RH.
@Yota Armai: If you’d like to try a RH, I’ve enjoyed Annika Martin’s KIDNAPPED BY THE KINKY BANK ROBBERS, which is a five-book series about a bank teller who—surprise!—gets kidnapped (or, actually, goes willingly with) four bank robbers. These are funny and sexy—and the first book is usually free in the kindle store.
And I just read Penelope Douglas’s emotionally-nuanced CREDENCE, about a young woman in a snow-bound house in the mountains with her step-uncle and his two sons. Transgressive but also very sensitively written.
Oooo thanks for the recommendation!
Available on Kindle Unlimited
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07NQYV4HK?searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_aps_series_rwt
I’d also love to read about the rise in popularity of RH.
lils
I am also raising my hand for a dissertation on the origins and rise in popularity of reverse harem romances. (Full disclosure: I have no interest in reading one, but I can’t help but see it’s a popular subgenre when I’m browsing Amazon’s bestseller lists and I would love to hear about it from someone who really understands and enjoys it.)
@Everyone who’s asking for an RH Dissertation: I shall approach the SBTB people with this idea. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, despite having penned a few, but I certainly love chatting about it, so it could be fun to write out my thoughts & discuss with everyone. 🙂
I enjoy the odd reverse harem but like @DiscoDollyDeb I think there has to be a limit to the men. Otherwise it turns into the same problems as the Anita Blake series faces, with too many lovers it gets confusing and you start wondering if they ever have a night when they just lounge around watching box sets (or videos in Anita’s case, the series seems stuck in the 80’s/90’s).