Romantasy loves to gild its protagonists with royal lineage and awe-inspiring powers, but sometimes we find books that take the ground-up view rather than the crown-down one. Rebecca Ross’s DIVINE RIVALS (Wednesday Books, 357 pp., $18.99) and RUTHLESS VOWS (Wednesday Books, 420 pp., $20) is just such a duology, starring a pair of prickly young reporters who banter and flirt against the backdrop of a war between newly awakened gods.
Iris Winnow’s brother enlisted and then went missing, causing their mother to take to drink and Iris to scrabble for a columnist job at the local paper. Her rival for the position is Roman Kitt, snobbish and wealthy and irksomely handsome — a stark contrast to the mysterious stranger whose gorgeously heartfelt letters keep magically appearing in Iris’s wardrobe. (If you guessed Roman is also the letter writer, give yourself a prize.)
When Roman wins the columnist position — partly thanks to help from Iris — she rashly takes a job as a war correspondent for the rival newspaper. To her surprise, Roman joins her on the front lines, helping tend to wounded soldiers and venturing into the trenches at Iris’s side. This is a WWI-inflected fantasy, with all the brutality that entails. Roman and Iris’s sparring dissolves in the face of so much horror, and a vibrant passion takes its place.
The war may be chaos, but the symmetries of these books are exquisite. Iris flees, Roman follows; her brother disappears and reappears; sharp words are uttered in public and soft confessions whispered in private. And, aah, those letters — they are a feast and a delight; they bridge our lovers’ long physical separation in ways that keep the tension thrumming while offering love an opportunity to overcome the malice of the war.
Billionaires, like fantasy monarchs, are relentlessly celebrated in romance — which makes Rebekah Weatherspoon’s MEEGAN (self-published, ebook, $4.99) such a delightful change of pace. Olin Breivik is an autistic loner who struck it rich in tech, and now has too many people pushing him to star in their personal billionaire romance fantasies. His friend Xeni offers to set him up with a fake date to keep the social wolves at bay.
Meegan is nursing a lot of complicated heartbreak: All her friends and kink partners have found soul mates in Weatherspoon’s previous books, and she’s getting tired of being the one who always goes home alone. Being a fake date is better than playing second fiddle — and then she meets Olin, with all his stern beauty and focused attention. Sparks fly at once, and sensibly Olin asks Meegan if perhaps he can ask her out for real sometime.
The rest of the book is Meegan and Olin exploring one another, sexually and otherwise. Meegan is an experienced hard-core submissive, and watching Olin learn to dom to please her is a lovely subtle bit of power play. Weatherspoon is also reaching back to her erotic romance roots: The grand gesture at the end of this story is single-handedly trying to put all the spice back into today’s fade-to-black rom-coms. I absolutely cackled — once I could catch my breath.
Finally we have WAKE ME MOST WICKEDLY (Forever, 344 pp., paperback, $9.99), the second of Felicia Grossman’s fairy-tale-inspired romances set among the complicated histories of Regency London’s Jewish families.
Hannah Moses is not a good person. She’s a fence, the daughter of two convicted thieves, and she lives her life at odds with both the Jewish and gentile communities. She’s stubborn and sharp-tongued and wary and has no business even talking to our hero, Solomon Weiss.
Solomon is the sheltered but saucy scion of a once-wealthy Jewish family trying to brush off the cobwebs of debt and disgrace. Raised by his strict older brother, Frederick, who has been baptized and is courting a non-Jewish woman, Sol knows he’s supposed to be on his best behavior at this critical moment. He’s meant to marry whomever Frederick chooses for him, but he can’t stop chasing the dark-haired, velvet-voiced pawnshop owner he has no business speaking to, let alone falling for.
Based on “Snow White,” a fairy tale all about trust and betrayal, “Wake Me Most Wickedly” thrives in the space between what people hide and what they reveal. Threats and circumstances force both Hannah and Solomon to guard their tongues, to tamp down their riotous hearts and put others’ needs before their own. It’s difficult for Hannah to trust that Sol means what he says when he confesses his love. Meanwhile, Sol has to learn the hard way that people who insist they mean well — people he’s close to, people he depends on — may, in fact, be lying to him. Rich and complex and a little discomfiting, this book prefers difficult questions and nuanced truths to comfortable reductions. Grossman will be writing two more books in this series, and I cannot wait to see what else her world will bring us.
