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The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics
RECOMMENDED: The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite is $3.99! Carrie read this one and gave it a B+:
The book is evocative, interesting, and full of competence porn, fashion, art, and intelligent people saying intelligent things. Anyone who doesn’t mind a slow pace will love this.
As Lucy Muchelney watches her ex-lover’s sham of a wedding, she wishes herself anywhere else. It isn’t until she finds a letter from the Countess of Moth, looking for someone to translate a groundbreaking French astronomy text, that she knows where to go. Showing up at the Countess’ London home, she hoped to find a challenge, not a woman who takes her breath away.
Catherine St Day looks forward to a quiet widowhood once her late husband’s scientific legacy is fulfilled. She expected to hand off the translation and wash her hands of the project—instead, she is intrigued by the young woman who turns up at her door, begging to be allowed to do the work, and she agrees to let Lucy stay. But as Catherine finds herself longing for Lucy, everything she believes about herself and her life is tested.
While Lucy spends her days interpreting the complicated French text, she spends her nights falling in love with the alluring Catherine. But sabotage and old wounds threaten to sever the threads that bind them. Can Lucy and Catherine find the strength to stay together or are they doomed to be star-crossed lovers?
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69 Million Things I Hate About You
69 Million Things I Hate About You by Kira Archer is $2.99! This is a contemporary workplace romance with an enemies to lovers trope. The heroine is determined to make her boss’ life miserable after winning the lottery. Some readers feel the romance wasn’t as strong as it could have been, while others loved the banter.
After personal assistant Kiersten Abbott wins sixty-nine million dollars in the lotto, she suddenly has more than enough money to quit her impossibly demanding job. But where’s the fun in that? She decides to stay and exact a little revenge on her insufferable ass of a boss.
Billionaire Cole Harrington quickly figures out something’s afoot with his usually agreeable personal assistant. When he finds out about the office pool betting on how long it’ll take him to fire her, he decides to spice things up and see how far he can push her until she quits.
The game is on, with everyone waiting to see who will crack first. But the bet sparks a new dynamic between them, and soon they realize they just might have crossed that fine line between hate and love.
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The Winter Companion
The Winter Companion by Mimi Matthews is $3.99! Claudia is a fan of this series and notes that they’re tender, slow burns, with often closed door sex scenes. I’m relatively certain they can be read out of order, though chime in if I’m wrong.
She Needed to be Seen…
As a lady’s companion, Clara Hartwright never receives much attention from anyone. And that’s precisely how she likes it. With a stormy past, and an unconventional plan for her future, it’s far safer to remain invisible. But when her new employer is invited to a month-long holiday at a remote coastal abbey, Clara discovers that she may not be as invisible as she’d hoped. At least, not as far as one gentleman is concerned.
He Wanted to be Heard…
Neville Cross has always been more comfortable with animals than people. An accident in his youth has left him with a brain injury that affects his speech. Forming the words to speak to his childhood friends is difficult enough. Finding the right things to say to a lovely young lady’s companion seems downright impossible. But Miss Hartwright is no ordinary companion. In fact, there may not be anything ordinary about her at all.
During a bleak Devon winter, two sensitive souls forge an unexpected friendship. But when Clara needs him most, will Neville find the courage to face his fears? Or is saying goodbye to her the most heroic thing he can do?
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A Taste of Heaven
A Taste of Heaven by Penny Watson is 99c! This cover is making me so hungry. This is a contemporary romance with an older hero and heroine (late 40s) and a food competition show. Readers loved the heroine and her relationship with the grumpy Scottish chef hero. However, some readers felt the action of the book happened a little too quickly. It has a 3.9-star rating on Goodreads
“Create one perfect bite.”
Good little widow Sophia Brown always follows the rules. When the producer of a cooking competition requests an amuse-bouche, the chefs stick with proteins. Sauces. A savory concoction. She has only one shot to impress the judges on A Taste of Heaven. But in a moment of defiance, she creates an extraordinary dessert, one that combines both the bitter and the sweet, just like her own life.
That one bite changes everything.
After a year grieving for her dead husband, forty-seven-year-old Sophia is finally ready to break out of her shell. Unfortunately, there is a large, angry obstacle standing in her way. Scottish chef Elliott Adamson has a chip on his shoulder the size of Loch Ness, and he’s blocking her path to victory.
Spurred by her daughters, she embarks on a poignant adventure that takes her from the wildflower fields of Vermont to the wind-swept vista of North Berwick, Scotland. Fear, courage, and inspiration from unlikely places will mark this journey, and Sophia is determined to persevere until the very end.
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I really liked The Winter Companion. I’ve read only the first one and this one and it didn’t seem anything necessary for this story was missing. The couples from the books in between are present but definitely secondary characters for this one.
Cecilia Grant’s A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong is free on Kindle. It’s an excellent historical novella.
Highly recommend Penny Watson’s Taste of Heaven. It’s an embrace of a book, worth many a reread for the warmth and comfort of people coming back alive when they’d thought it might never happen.
I agree with @Mzcue-I really enjoyed Taste of Heaven. It WILL make you hungry! I loved the heroine, and her attitude of calmness when working with the professional chef, she wasn’t a pushover-she did her own thing.
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics was fascinating (if a bit overstuffed — at least one subplot deserved a separate novella). The scientific women in it and their work are based on real people, who are named in an afterword. The real attraction of Olivia Waite’s books for me is the writing; both of her novels I’ve read (I liked The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows even better) have two or three sentences that I instantly quoted.
Alyssa Cole’s When No One Is Watching is $3.99 on Amazon right now.
I read the Abbott recently and agree that the romance was the weakest part of the story. Up until the relationship turns romantic, I had mostly been enjoying it immensely (apart from one part where it used the “it’s funny when rich drunken white women get arrested” trope), but it kind of fell apart after that, in my opinion. There’s a very stark “before” and “after” in terms of tone and tightness.
@Star: do you mean the Archer? Because my take on 69 Million is the same as you. Their one upmanship has its (very) funny moments, but after a while, it’s like running empty. There’s no growth, just devising new tricks. And when things change between them, it feels more like a 180 than a progression. I also found the hero to be such a hypocrite.
Have a fun Christmas Eve!
Ooh, A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong is lovely—Grant packs an impressive amount of character growth into a novella without it feeling rushed. I don’t particularly seek out Christmas romances, but that one’s great.
Agreed with the other comments on the Archer. I’d expected the hero’s character arc to go in a different direction, and when it became obvious that wasn’t happening, the romantic relationship didn’t make sense to me because it felt like there wasn’t real resolution for all her initial (and valid!) issues with him.
I really like The Winter Companion and you could read the whole Parrish Orphans series out of order but I’m very glad I read them in order. Excellent series!
@Arjio — Ack, yes, I do mean the Archer, sorry! Mea culpa, and thanks for correcting that.
@Annie Kate — I like the way you put that. It was almost like Archer thought that a Romantic Resolution required them to Meet In the Middle or something? Which… assumes a lot. In many situations, yes, people do need to meet in the middle, but in others, one person is in fact more in the wrong, and the other person is not required to meet them in the middle. People do this in real life too — “there are two sides to every argument!! so my point is valid!! and you have to compromise!!” well… that doesn’t apply across the board. It depends on your starting position. If your starting position is beyond unreasonable, then no. It felt like that with this book. Her issues with him were so valid! Why did she have to backpedal?
Also, her friends were awesome, and his friends sucked, but it looks like the series follows his friends and not hers, which grumph.