Fans pick 100 books like The Romantic Pact

Tara Sivec, in my mind, is like that crazy aunt who has an unfiltered mind and says what she wants and it’s funny every time! Her words make me cackle and this story is filled with crazy fun, witty banter, and a really hot rainstorm scene! Kiss My Putt is a friends-to-lovers mixed with enemies-to-lovers mixed with second chance romance. The story revolves around a cool, calm, and collected pro-golfer who is forced to take some time off after throwing a royal tantrum on television during a tournament.  He goes home, to Summersweet Island, where everybody knows everybody and there’s no place to hide. Especially when he runs into his best friend, Birdie Bennett. This book is a must-read!

There’s something about a younger sister falling for her older brother’s best friend that gets me every time and this book does not disappoint. Maybe Willis moves to the big city and her brother’s best friend vows to help make sure she finds her way. But he’s in for a surprise when she accidentally sends him a text with a proposition he doesn’t see coming. The characters in this story feel remarkably relatable which is what sucks me in every time. And I’m a sucker for a protective Hero, so there’s that. 

I said I was a sucker for the protective Hero and this is just another shining example except that this time, the protective Hero is also the grumpy boss! This is the classic story of Grumpy guy gets girl fired from her job only to have her start working for his family’s business. The pair hate each other, but they each have internal personal struggles and when those start coming to light, their relationship shifts into an angsty, compassionate, protective, steamy love that I can’t ever stop reading! All the feels with this one!

KB Cinder is totally my cup of tea and I want to be her best friend. Circle Jerk is a single mom meets neighborhood grump trope and it has all the feels! The one-liners and the laugh-out-loud scenes coupled with the romance and steam through this story make it the perfect book to kick back and relax with! Think Beauty and the Beast but with a single mom in a modern neighborhood. It’s not super long and can be read quickly.

KB Cinder is a hilarious up-and-coming author who should not be overlooked!

This is an extraordinary story of a brave German woman whose diplomat father and Italian aristocrat husband decide to resist the Nazis.

When German troops enter Italy, Fey von Hassell finds herself trapped with her young children in a 12th-century villa in northern Italy while her husband joins the anti-fascist underground in Rome and her father decides to join the group that plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Nazi stormtroopers take over the villa and later arrest Fey.

Using archival materials and family letters, Caroline Bailey reconstructs Fey’s harrowing journey—moved from prison to prison and concentration camp to concentration camp. Her two young boys are taken away from her, and sent to a Nazi orphanage. Fey’s single-minded mission to find her children reads like a good thriller.

Nothing epitomizes the striking success of the Berlin Airlift more than the true story of the so-called “candy bomber.”

This was a USAF pilot who on his own initiative started dropping candy tied to handcrafted mini-parachutes out of his transport plane to give the children of Berlin a little sweetness in their otherwise bleak lives. His gesture more than any transformed the “terror bombers”—responsible for so much of Berlin’s destruction—into friends in the eyes of the Berliners.

This book is an autobiographical account by the candy bomber himself, Lt. Gail Halvorsen. It is written with candid clarity and heartwarming charm. A gem!

Fiction can help parents and children put our situations into perspective. During lockdown, my 10-year-old and I treasured some rare moments of calm reading Judith Kerr’s book.

This classic children’s book tells the story of a Jewish family’s escape from Nazi Germany and subsequent exile in Switzerland and France. It surveys some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century with a convincing child’s-eye view and reassures us that a loving family can survive and even thrive in the very worst of times.

A fantastic work of a surefooted wordsmith takes an equally talented translator to carry it across the linguistic barrier in a way that makes it a literary treat in its own right.

I’m envious of Breon Mitchell’s limpid linguistic manoeuvering that has rendered the German modern classic very enjoyable in English. The narration set in Nazi times as told by a dwarf – who is rather unlikeable by all counts – is an ingenious technique of stripping bad politics to its bare bones and laying out the nonsense that remains.

It is political without being political. There are signs galore in the book for metaphor hunters, but I simply revelled in the language of this remarkable debut work.           

Even those of us who are familiar with historical details of the Holocaust have a mostly generalized understanding of the fraught relationships between US-based Jews and Jews in Europe.

Bonelli uses primary source materials, mainly letters, to inform a very well-crafted narrative in service of educating American Jews about the travails of European Jewry and helps explain the older generation of Jews to an often-befuddled younger generation.

How do people react when a dictatorship forces them to make choices? To learn more, read this brilliant memoir by a journalist looking back on his life in 1930s Berlin. Happily focused on his legal training and circle of friends, Sebastian Haffner at first showed little interest in politics and rejected the Nazis out of instinct rather than principle. Disgusted but powerless, he was content to keep a low profile under the new regime. To his own lasting shame, however, he one day answered “yes” when an SA stormtrooper demanded to know if he was “Aryan.” But Haffner’s friendships and liaisons with Jews, and his belief in the rule of law, ultimately made him realize that he couldn’t live in Nazi Germany. His final choice? Exile in Britain.