100 books like The Christmas Wager

Imagine The Terror but with more gay romance and fewer allegorical monsters. I’m a huge polar exploration nerd, and this is one of the best polar novels I’ve read and one of the best queer historical romance novels as well.

It’s an incredibly well-researched beautiful love story that unfolds via letters and ship’s logs. The fact that so few people have heard of this gem of a book is mind-boggling. 

Honestly, I could recommend all of Bonnie Dee’s back catalog, but this one in particular has always stuck with me. I think what I love most is that the setup seems like a standard Beauty and the Beast type tale, but instead, a thoughtful (and incredibly hot!) novel that doesn’t shy away from the fact that one of the characters is far from traditionally handsome, but embraces it.

I really cheered him on as he began to see himself in a new light, the way the man who loves him sees him.   

If you told me a few years ago that one of my favorite books ever would end up being a fanfiction of a swashbuckling Silver Screen Era movie based on a Victorian Era adventure novel, I wouldn’t have believed you, but I’ve read this book several times and have the audiobook almost perpetually on loan from the library.

I think most fans of KJ Charles skip this one because they think they need to be familiar with the source material (The Prisoner of Zenda) but this scorching, action-packed novel from the villain’s point of blows the original out of the water. 

I love finding a great new book, and then realizing it’s only the first in the series of many, many more!

A cross between queer romance and Golden Age detective fiction, I love being drawn into the charming English university setting with each novel and curling up to find out how the two professors are going to solve a cozy murder while falling even deeper in love.

Will there be punting on the Cam? Shakespeare puns? Edwardian-era tailoring? Yes, yes, and yes!

This book was like drinking a hot chocolate with marshmallows on a cold winter day.

I swoon over sweet stories and second-chance romances. And, any time you take an original story (especially a Christmas-ish story) and add in a drag queen instead of an angel, it becomes magic, right?

I’m also a huge sucker for dogs being in a book. The writing was cute and snappy, the feel-good story I was craving, and I left this book with a spring in my step.

As an ex-competitive athlete, I’m a sucker for sports romances, and this one was an absolute winner for me.

The characters are all enjoyable, not just the two main characters but the entire supporting cast. I wanted to be a part of the team Tommaso played for and I wanted to join Carter in decorating homes.

For me, this was such a comfort read, and one I’ll go back to when I need something familiar that I can just melt into and enjoy the world these two lovebirds live in. 

This is the first of a trilogy of which any book in the series is worth reading. In this farce written long before marriage equality, a gay man hatches an outlandish scheme to throw a wedding, just for the expensive gifts. What follows is a comedy that incorporates blackmail and the mafia. You read this novel for pure pleasure, enjoying the clever one-liners while the plot spirals out of control. Flamboyant, camp, and ridiculously funny.

The world of The Sea of Stars is amazingly creative; a modern setting that flawlessly incorporates magicians, scheming courtiers, enchanted animals, and prophetic astronomy in an age of cell phones, animal activists, and labor agencies. The majority of common people are ruled over by nobles and magicians who regularly strip human beings of their souls and lock them away inside animals, thus creating a soulless human workforce as well as intelligent animal servants. As weird as that may sound, the characters are so well written that the book is astoundingly humane and moving.

I sympathized completely with Grand Magician Zachary Drake in his disdain for the ruling class and its dehumanizing practices. Though, I’ll admit, a couple of times I was so fascinated by the unexpected creativity of the world that I almost wanted to see more. And I definitely appreciated Drake’s snark and cynical commentary.  

But the story truly… show more.

This book resonates with me for a lot of reasons. The first is that I was married to a gay man before I met my current husband. Friends said his being gay would break us up, and they were right.

One of the protagonists in Reed’s book is a gay man married to a woman. So I was anxious to see what Reed, a gay man who was once also married to a woman, would do with this.

Secondly, I taught in a community college where many of my students had dropped out of school because they’d been bullied like one of the key characters in this book. One of the first essays the first year students were asked to write was a self-examination.

Many of the formerly bullied students wrote about how traumatic high school had been and how they felt unlovable because of it. My first published books… show more.

Maybe Next Year, by Dave Hughes, a coming-of-age love story of two young men that touched my heart. It's all about Bryan and Chris, two high school guys that have been best friends for several years, and what happens when they discover their feelings for each other are more than friendship. They come from two very different family backgrounds and will have a lot to navigate.