Here are 100 books that Dear Aaron fans have personally recommended if you like
Dear Aaron.
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I’ve been reading and writing romance for most of my life, and I found the stories I was truly drawn to were the ones where I got to know the characters deeply and personally before they got their hard-earned happily ever after. I want to feel like not only the main characters are my new best friends, but also their friends and families. I want to live beside them as they go through this wild ride called life. So, those are the books I set out to write...stories telling about life’s ups and downs, dreams cast aside and remade, and families found along the way. Achingly heartfelt romance with resilient characters readers will adore.
I love Emma Scott stories not only because they are amazeballs, but also because she’s a pretty incredible human being with her own incredible story. But be warned, her words don’t hold back any punches. I often want to scream and tear my hair out as I’m reading, but in the end, I have the largest smile on my face. Emma Scott knows how to find the perfect ending to her stunning stories.
At Santa Cruz Central High School, they called them the misfits, the outcasts, the weirdos. But most of us knew them as the Lost Boys...Miller Stratton is a survivor. After a harrowing childhood of poverty, he will do anything it takes to find security for himself and his mom. He’s putting all his hopes and dreams in the fragile frame of his guitar and the beauty he creates with its strings and his soulful voice.Until Violet.No one expects to meet the love of their life at age thirteen. But the spunky rich girl steals Miller’s heart and refuses to give…
I’ve been reading and writing romance for most of my life, and I found the stories I was truly drawn to were the ones where I got to know the characters deeply and personally before they got their hard-earned happily ever after. I want to feel like not only the main characters are my new best friends, but also their friends and families. I want to live beside them as they go through this wild ride called life. So, those are the books I set out to write...stories telling about life’s ups and downs, dreams cast aside and remade, and families found along the way. Achingly heartfelt romance with resilient characters readers will adore.
Amy Harmon is another author who you can read anything and love it! The emotions drip from her pages in the full range of laughter to anger to tears. It’s an incredible journey! Even though I read this book years ago, I still feel like I know these characters personally. They are, quite literally, part of the fabric of my life.
Ambrose Young was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that graced the covers of romance novels, and Fern Taylor would know. She'd been reading them since she was thirteen. But maybe because he was so beautiful he was never someone Fern thought she could have...until he wasn't beautiful anymore
Making Faces is the story of a small town where five young men go off to war, and only one comes back. It is the story of loss. Collective loss, individual loss, loss of beauty, loss of life, loss of identity. It is the tale of one girl's love for a broken…
I’ve been reading and writing romance for most of my life, and I found the stories I was truly drawn to were the ones where I got to know the characters deeply and personally before they got their hard-earned happily ever after. I want to feel like not only the main characters are my new best friends, but also their friends and families. I want to live beside them as they go through this wild ride called life. So, those are the books I set out to write...stories telling about life’s ups and downs, dreams cast aside and remade, and families found along the way. Achingly heartfelt romance with resilient characters readers will adore.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I love emotional books. Books where I can feel every heartbeat and every laugh and every smile. Brittainy Cherry always brings this to her stories. The Air He Breathes was one of my first reads by her, so it has an extra special place in my heart.
I was warned about Tristan Cole. “Stay away from him,” people said. “He’s cruel.” “He’s cold.” “He’s damaged.” It’s easy to judge a man because of his past. To look at Tristan and see a monster. But I couldn’t do that. I had to accept the wreckage that lived inside of him because it also lived inside of me. We were both empty. We were both looking for something else. Something more. We both wanted to put together the shattered pieces of our yesterdays. Then perhaps we could finally remember how to breathe.
I’ve been reading and writing romance for most of my life, and I found the stories I was truly drawn to were the ones where I got to know the characters deeply and personally before they got their hard-earned happily ever after. I want to feel like not only the main characters are my new best friends, but also their friends and families. I want to live beside them as they go through this wild ride called life. So, those are the books I set out to write...stories telling about life’s ups and downs, dreams cast aside and remade, and families found along the way. Achingly heartfelt romance with resilient characters readers will adore.
Beautifully written words with a lyrical like feel are what I know I’ll always find within the pages of an A.M. Johnson book. The emotions she wrings from me every time are astonishing, and yet I never feel like I’ve been banged over the head with them like you sometimes get in some heartfelt stories. This is a male-male romance, and even if you don’t think this is your sort of thing, I still highly recommend it because it’s just gorgeous.
I never meant for any of this to happen, to fall for you. It doesn't matter that we're both adults, or how much we want this to work. The college policy is clear. I can't see a way around this without one of us getting hurt. If I would’ve known who you were when we met online, I would have never pursued a relationship. I'm new to all of this, and besides my daughter, getting to know you has been the best thing to ever happen to me. But I can't make you hide again. I won't. It's not…
I’ve been an archivist at Canada’s national archives for more than twenty years. I love my job. Archives are, by their very nature, a collection of miscellany that weren’t created to be preserved or remembered. They are the scraps of paper and hurriedly sent emails produced while the world is out making history. As a result, they offer unselfconscious glimpses into the past. Archives are poorly understood, which means that the folks who decide to devote their professional lives to them are often a little quirky and a bit odd. This makes books featuring archivists celebrations of the off-kilter, the overlooked, and the frankly strange.
A dark meditation on guilt, love, and marriage, it intersperses the story of Matthias, the titular archivist with the life and work of T. S. Eliot, whose letters he’s charged with keeping. When a young scholar wants to read these letters ahead of their scheduled opening, Matthias must wrestle with his own repressed feelings about his past, with some incidents paralleling the poet’s. I enjoyed it for the meditation on how archives can bridge that gap between the past and the present.
A battle of wills between Matt, a careful, orderly archivist for a private university, and Roberta, a determined young poet, over a collection of T.S. Eliot's letters, sealed by bequest until 2019, sparks an unusual friendship and reawakens painful memories of the past
I’ve been the dorky bookworm, the party girl who laughs too loud, the gamer-tomboy, and the doting mother of two kids who is now in a happy, loving marriage. Through all my shifts and changes, the one constant thread in my life was love. But not the rough, I-have-to-hurt-someone-to-get-it kind of love you might find in dark romance novels (although I enjoy those too sometimes). My kind of experience with love is that it’s at its best when it’s fun and when it’s easy. If you can find your most authentic you in the pages of a rom-com, you’re guaranteed an escape from reality that’ll pull you deeper into yourself.
This book broke my heart and stitched it back together. Abby Jimenez's writing style is magnetic, and her characters make me laugh and cry in equal amounts. Every time I need a pick-me-up, I pull out this book.
There are few perfect romantic comedies out there. Some have third-act breakups that don’t make sense. Some are riddled with miscommunication or surprise baby tropes that have a person feeling all the ick. This is not that book. Does it have miscommunication? Yes, in a reasonable, wonderful kind of way. Does it have a surprise baby? Yes! In a way that deepens the two main character’s connection.
The fact that this writer can take my two most disliked tropes and make them entertaining shows just how incredible this author is at her craft. Most importantly, it made me giggle my ass off, and if that is a requirement for you, then this…
A novel of terrible first impressions, hilarious second chances, and the joy in finding your perfect match from "a true talent" (Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author).
Dr. Briana Ortiz’s life is seriously flatlining. Her divorce is just about finalized, her brother’s running out of time to find a kidney donor, and that promotion she wants? Oh, that’s probably going to the new man-doctor who’s already registering eighty-friggin’-seven on Briana’s “pain in my ass” scale. But just when all systems are set to hate, Dr. Jacob Maddox completely flips the game . . . by sending Briana a…
As a lover of history, when I lived in Hawaii, Japan, and Guam, I visited World War II sites. I had a fascinating career as a political reporter. I reported on a “Christmas Drop,” a tradition since WWII. On Johnston Atoll, I did photojournalism on the incineration of chemical weapons from East Germany. I interviewed a Kuwaiti sheik and human shields during Desert Storm. I covered negotiations when the Philippines didn’t renew US military base leases. While at the San Antonio Express News, I researched the WWII Japanese soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, who hid on Guam for nearly 28 years. That was the seed for my novel No Surrender Soldier.
Author Dandi Daley Mackall wrote With Love, Wherever You Are after reading a trunk-load of letters exchanged by her parents during their years as a nurse and doctor on the battlefields of Europe during World War II. Mackall's novel is based on genealogical research and is a story about people and the matters of their hearts, instead of military strategies and battles. Mackall was closer in time, though, since With Love, Wherever You Are is about her parents and set during the 1940s. She had access to primary sources in her research. As “The Greatest Generation” is passing away, it’s important that authors like Mackall are preserving these biographical stories.
Everyone knows that war romances never last . . . After a whirlwind romance and wedding, Helen Eberhart Daley, an army nurse, and Lieutenant Frank Daley, M.D. are sent to the front lines of Europe with only letters to connect them for months at a time.
Surrounded by danger and desperately wounded patients, they soon find that only the war seems real―and their marriage more and more like a distant dream. If they make it through the war, will their marriage survive?
Based on the incredible true love story, With Love, Wherever You Are is an adult novel from beloved…
I love drawing gorgeous, interesting settings. Ever since my parents drove my brother and me across America to visit our cousins in Michigan, I have found myself enchanted by everything from sweet small-towns to pit stops with lots of potential for drama. I have always felt that setting can be its own character. With its bright, sunny suburbs and its dark, shadowy back-alleys, the setting is the centerpiece of any great story.
You might not think about Sparks as a go-to for sweeping countryside settings… and yet his treatment of the North Carolina lends itself so sweetly to this romance, that I bet the story wouldn’t be the same without it. There is something so sexy about a handsome man in blue jeans ambling down a country lane.
A U.S. Marine's brush with death leads him to the love of his life in this New York Times bestseller of destiny, luck, and the redemptive power of romance. After U.S. Marine Logan Thibault finds a photograph of a smiling young woman buried in the dirt during his tour of duty in Iraq, he experiences a sudden streak of luck -- winning poker games and even surviving deadly combat. Only his best friend, Victor, seems to have an explanation for his good fortune: the photograph -- his lucky charm.
Back home in Colorado, Thibault can't seem to get the woman…
I grew up in a medical family, my father and brother both surgeons and my mother a nurse. My parents met while serving in WW2 and that combination of compassion and horror in the field hospitals of Europe have stayed with me ever since. In fact, my first novel A Dangerous Act of Kindness, is set during WW2. I’m also a career hypochondriac. I avoid reading about illnesses or injuries I may suffer from myself, but I am fascinated by disease and pioneering surgery, thus The Summer Fields revolves around a disease that has now been eradicated (smallpox) and pre-anaesthetic surgery, something I hope I shall never have to face.
You may know this strange story as a film, but the different narrators in this gothic tale of John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier being washed and nursed by a group of young girls in Martha Farnworth’s remote school is full of the same sexual tension I hoped to conjure up in my book. What could be more beguiling than the juxtaposition of sheltered women carrying out intimate tasks on a man weakened by injury?
The basis for the major motion picture directed by Sofia Coppola-named best director at the Cannes Film Festival for The Beguiled-and starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning
"[A] mad gothic tale . . . The reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies." -Stephen King, in Danse Macabre
Wounded and near death, a young Union Army corporal is found in the woods of Virginia during the height of the Civil War and brought to the nearby Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Almost immediately he sets about…
I am an author who writes hot-as-sin small-town romance. As an avid romance reader, when I found my love of all small-town things combined with high heat of steamy romance, I was hooked! With steamy, small-town romance you get feel-good, heartfelt romances with steamy, open-door scenes. If it can make you blush and warm your heart, I’m all in! In my list, I’ve included a variety of small-town romance authors that will tug at your heartstrings in one scene and have you fanning yourself in the next.
Elsie Silver was a new-to-me author in 2021 and I’m hooked! A Photo Finish is actually book 2 in the series, but they are interconnected stand-alones. In this book, the female main character is a horse jockey. She’s strong, capable, and determined. The male main character is a veteran with secrets of his own and he is delicious and broody and really, really needs a hug. Those two have a secret, salacious past and it was so fun to see them clash and come together for an amazing, feel-good romance.
I’ve seen every square inch of Violet Eaton’s delectable body and she has no idea who I am.
Until now.
What happened between us online, in our chats, was meant to stay anonymous and in the past.
Until it didn’t.
It’s a small world, but Ruby Creek is even smaller. When I move to the tiny town, the grumpy facade I’ve created slips when we’re forced to live under the same roof.
Every flush of her cheeks, every time her eyes flare with heat, every time she begs me not to stop, the ice I’ve encased myself in melts. She…
