100 books like Love in Catalina Cove

Enchanting, action-packed, and full of heart, this book is everything an urban fantasy novel should be. I picked this book up at a library sale, not realizing it was a later book in a series, but the story stood on its own and made me want to run out and buy the rest. The idea of magic families as corporations was unique and intriguing, and Andrews handled it beautifully.

The plot was tightly woven and intense enough that I had trouble setting the book down and blew through it in a few days. I loved the two main characters and their lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers backstory that set up just the right amount of heat for me.

This book offers a perfect escape. It has swoony nostalgia, down-to-earth characters, and an idyllic seaside setting. The heroine, Meg, is a seasoned woman at 39. She owns a quaint bed and breakfast that needs repairs. Seth is a mysterious loner who breezes into Meg’s life at the right moment. He has handyman skills, a Southern accent, and deep secrets. The truth is revealed in slow measures as they fall hopelessly in love.

I can’t resist a fixer-upper romance, and I love the scene where they make lilac water together. This Summer Island book gave me a peaceful, easy feeling from start to finish.

This intricately plotted semi-comic, semi-tragic novel, riffing off Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, keeps the reader guessing to the end.

Simon and Axel are the best gay male couple in fiction, for my money, quirky; adorable; absolutely believable characters whose relationship the villain tries to destroy as he does several other relationships.

I love the story of how they first met, their erotic banter, their clothes, their food and wine, and the way they move towards being more open about their relationship.

I love the humor in writing or reading. A subject can be related to when we see the funny side of a situation in real life. This is there in spades in the first sentence. Not for the prudish.

Suzy and her capers are spot on, shocking at times, but always plausible. The dialogue is well-written. Not roses and chocolates but the real capers of relationships and the bedroom. The conversation between her conquests and friends is perfect. I couldn’t stop smiling.

If you want sweet hearts and polite, formal wooing, this is not your book. However, the realistic reality and hazards of life that jump on us are all part of this story. A modern romp to make you think your love life isn’t that bad after all.

First of all—a holiday story set in New York City? Who can resist that? Like the heroine, I am one of those people who loves immersing myself in Christmas as soon as Halloween is over. That usually means reading several holiday-set novels. With this book, I found myself turning pages faster and faster, yet never wanting the book to end.

The hero worried me. He’d faced a tragedy and shut himself off from the world. Sometimes, that can be too dark for my reading pleasure. But Sarah is a masterful storyteller. Her heroine is so empathetic and caring (possibly at the risk of breaking her own heart) that the hero is ever-so-slowly coaxed back from the brink of disaster.

Even for readers not from the Christmas tradition, the unfolding story will be satisfying. 

The greatest pleasure of an enemies-to-lovers romance? Witty banter. Which you'll find in droves in Brockway's Victorian-set epistolary romance. A conservative Englishman leaves his estate to 19-year-old suffragette Lillian Bede—not because he admires Lily, but because he’s sure she’ll fail to make the estate profitable in five years.

The letters between Lily and her benefactor’s peripatetic explorer nephew Avery Thorne, the man who will inherit the estate if she falls flat, charmed me as they gradually move from competitive satirical banter to mutual tolerance, and then to something more: friendship, affection—and perhaps even love? 

I loved the premise of this funny, charming romcom, where two babies are born on New Year’s Eve, one minute apart in the same hospital. Minnie is a feisty, lovable heroine, and when she meets Quinn again when they’re both thirty, the dynamic sets the pages on fire.

I loved how the book was sprinkled with star-crossed lovers, fate, and the sense of magic and things being meant to be.

The surrounding cast of characters is also brilliant, and I felt like I knew them all by the end. It’s so heartwarming and romantic, and a book that’s dusted with stardust. 

In both my novels I explore the cultural, almost exclusively oral history of Maine woodsmen and -women. An old man now, I knew people who worked as loggers, river drivers, and so on before the advent of power tools, electricity, or motorized hauling.

A non-writer friend told me about this book, which is concerned with the same culture across the New Brunswick border, mere miles from where my novels are set. His evocation of that arduous, raconteur-populated, dangerous world bolstered my own seat-of-the-pants knowledge and offered a wealth of specific physical detail and a sense of storytelling’s central importance in the old logging communities.

The book, then, served as a model for my own explorations of a culture whose likes we will never see again and whose preservation in words is among my own most passionate aims. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when talking to a stranger online, one immediately hopes that they are seriously good-looking (and also hopefully kind of tall). It is also a truth universally acknowledged that Ali Hazelwood will deliver big, hulking, hot guys who seem grumpy but have hearts of gold in her novels. Love on the Brain combines these two universal truths into a workplace enemies-to-lovers romp that is stuffed with fluffy STEM goodness. 

This book is off the rails in the best way. It delivers secret penpals who don’t realize that they are grad school enemies and current coworkers, a NASA lab setting, an alternative heroine who faints all the time for swoony rescue-me moments, cats, nerdy references, terrible puns, and spicy scenes. But truly, the romance wasn’t even my favorite part.

What I enjoyed most was putting on my HR hat and trying to investigate just who… show more.

Reading Jasmine Guillory’s books is one of the first times I’ve been able to relate to modern fictional main characters as a Black woman. This book has steamy romance (whew) but also has characters who are able to learn from each other and grow together, which makes the romantic element that much sweeter.

Throw in a dash of local politics (it’s still enjoyable, I swear!) and the media attention that comes with that, and I was hooked! A main character who seems to have it together but is still grappling with how others perceive her and her past. Who can’t relate to that? Plus, I can’t resist a couple that finds their connection in the bedroom (or office) and through exploring food spots together and bonding over local places.