100 books like Role Playing

This book is a celebration of many things: embracing your visible markers of age, seeking a new kind of relationship with an adult child, and the fabulous music of the 80’s and 90’s.

Any person from Generation X will absolutely see pieces of themselves and their friends in the characters in this book. Originally college friends, our couple finds themselves both back in New York and via a series of missteps and then some forced proximity (not only do they have to work together, they have to work for his daughter), they fall gloriously in love.

This is less a romance novel and more a high fantasy novel with romantic elements, but the romance subplot is exceedingly strong.

(I can highly recommend a mental fan-casting of either Arhys or Ilvin as Pedro Pascal, because he’d absolutely knock one of those roles out of the park if this was ever made into a miniseries).

Ista is over 40, a queen, a new grandmother, a recovered madwoman, and…wait for it…a living saint. Seeking to get away from the suffocating (yet loving) arms of her family, she goes on a pilgrimage (Road Trip!) with a group of younger people and ends up getting into multiple adventures and a more than near miss with outright war. It’s an absolute romp and one of my all-time favorites.

Kennedy Ryan is unafraid of making her characters go through hell.

Before I Let Go is maybe one of the hardest, rarest tropes in romance: ex-spouses sharing custody and running a business and working through their own mistakes and the heartache they caused each other. It’s akin to marriage in trouble, but in this case, the marriage isn’t in trouble: it’s in broken pieces on the floor.

At the outset, it seems irretrievable, but slowly, oh so slowly, with care and attention to a thousand tiny details that make this ring heartbreakingly then heartwarmingly true, we see these characters come back to one another stronger, more loving, and ready to take on all the challenges life will throw at them. Together.

A historical sapphic novella with women over 60? And they’re going to get revenge on a very bad man in very inventive ways? Do you really need me to sell this book harder to you?

Okay, fine: it’s Courtney Milan, whose wit, creativity, and compassion for humanity in general and her characters specifically always awe me. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing Courtney couldn’t do. 

Even though this book has an element of girl-meets-guy-in-Paris, I included it under the title of ‘books set in France that go beyond the rom com’ because it was so refreshing to read about a woman of a ‘certain age’ who comes into her own during a stay in Paris. The protagonist struggles with real-life issues, not the usual Emily-in-Paris dilemmas. Cram knows Paris like the back of her hand and deftly titillates all the senses with her food-inspired passages.

Annie, Brenda, and Elise have been wronged. Not only have their husbands taken them for granted, but they have gone so far as to deceive, betray, and hurt them. Now these friends, sisters in humiliation, want justice.

I understand. I felt similarly when I was soldiering through my divorce. What reasonable thing could I do to get back at him without hurting anyone else, especially my kids. I never found a specific answer, but therapy and this book helped.

I enjoyed the way the girls were there for one another and wished I had friends in my boat who would get me like that and support me like that. Betrayal is rough, especially when you’ve given love with your whole heart. This book is a cathartic ride through the weeds.

Flavor Pick: Neapolitan

Cynthia, a forty-something English professor in the throes of perimenopause, develops unusual abilities and slowly learns to channel them, with help from a visiting faculty member from Faerie. I was lucky enough to read this book in an early draft, and then in its final version. What I love about this novel is how it treats magic as yet another weird thing that happens to you as you get older. I also relished watching Cynthia figure out her new powers in the context of ordinary life: navigating faculty politics, being a mom, working on her marriage. A smart, wry twist on the School for Magic trope.

I love this memoir because Robin Rinaldi fiercely loves and trusts herself for being sexual, and shows us from the inside what it means to positively claim our sexuality in midlife.

Rinaldi undertook a brave and vulnerable journey—a year-long break from her companionable but passionless marriage to find passion by pursuing a variety of sexual traditions and relationships with men. Her story is not only an entertaining page-turner, but deeply vulnerable and satisfying. 

She chronicles her heart as well as her body, and reminds us that it is not always easy to take risks—there are challenges, heartaches, and rewards in creating a deeply satisfying life. Further modeling bravery, she also wrote an Atlantic article about transcending the slut shaming she received from writing the book.  

A contemporary romance written with lush prose and a transportive southern setting, this untraditional love story sticks in my mind. 

A wife and mother is stunned to learn that her first love is the father of her son’s new girlfriend. Their secret, unresolved past unravels as she assesses her present life and the choices she’s made. The temptation of the one that got away lurks in her mind as she navigates a precarious balance between family, obligation, and desire.  

A teenage girl in Maine steals a dictionary at the mall and is sentenced to do community service in her small town’s library. The middle-aged head librarian there has exiled herself from a divorce accompanied by public scandal. A much younger New York City stockbroker who had piles of money turns up in town after losing everything in the 2008 crash. He believes his aunt’s savings booklet from a bank long subsumed by another—he just needs to figure out which one—will put him back on his feet. I love how gently this novel reveals these damaged characters’ foibles and hopes. They seem to have nothing in common, yet they heal each other. And there is (spoiler alert) a sexy little romance between the librarian and the stockbroker.