8 Romance Books that are living in my head rent free right now.
These are in no particular order I’ll flag spoilers and mention content warnings where relevant but I just want to share with y’all about the books that just won’t leave and maybe if other people read them and tell me about them my brain will give up a bit more real estate for other thoughts like work and snacks.
The Land of the Beautiful Dead by R. Lee Smith
Content warnings: Violence, so much violence, zombies, abuse, suicide, parental death, child death, torture, and mentions of sexual assault (there are probably more but I can’t recall off hand go in assuming more content warnings)
This book has broken me. In all the worse and best ways. It is a tome. Coming in at a whopping 733 pages, this book is intimidating to start. I’ll admit, when I went into it, I fully thought I’d DNF it after 25% percent.
The writing of Smith is elegant, the story unfolds in a way that reminded me of floating down the river. The hours passed, the scenery passed, but I didn’t realize how much had changed (in the book and about myself) until I finished it and put the book down. That’s right, I read it in one sitting. I couldn’t stop.
This book has all the story elements I usually avoid. An immortal lead, zombies, characters put into situations where they have to sell their bodies for safety, bitter hopelessness in a miserable world. And yet, I could not stop reading.
When I was done reading The Land of the Beautiful Dead, I was so enraptured by the way Smith approaches themes of death, dying, immortality, undying, and most importantly the good death. What does it mean to die a good death? What are you willing to sacrifice to have it? Who deserves a good death? And for the truly evil, should suffering continue after death.
Standing ovation. Gold Star. This book is a 10/10 thought provoker. There is steam, smut, and a brilliantly built romance that I should probably mention more, but you can get those in any Beauty and the Beast retelling. What I haven’t found anywhere else is the thought provoking, emotion churning, terrifyingly beautiful story in The Land of the Beautiful Dead.
Serpents Mate by Susan Trombley
Anyone who follows me on Goodreads knows that I love alien romances. It is my current favorite sub genre to read. I like them campy, I like them scary, I like them weird, I like them steamy. Susan Trombley is the queen of making the truly alien romantic.
The first book in the Iriduan Test Subject’s book (The Scorpion’s Mate) is brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but The Serpent’s Mate is the one that lives rent free.
Particularly one scene. If you’ve read the book, the scene is the kiss.
Unlike the first two books of the series, the alien male lead in Serpent’s Mate had volunteered to be a test subject. This book explores themes of patriotism, sacrifice, and what it means to choose between ideologies to find the truth.
The sex scenes are steamy, the biology is fascinating, and the romance feels natural in the strangeness of a human and a serpent alien genetic test subject.
To be honest, I adore every book I’ve ready by Susan Trombley. She really understands how to make the gaps in culture, language, and biology challenging to the characters and a key part of how the romance builds. Her books are wild rides of weird and I’m here for it. But this one is the one I can’t stop thinking about....and I first read it in October 2018.
Glint (The Plated Prisoner Series Book 2) by Raven Kennedy
Content warnings: Most warnings related to violence and sex, power imbalance related abuse, cheating, harems, rot.
The most recent inclusion on this list, I read the first three books of the Plated Prisoner series over the weekend. The second book is the one that’s just broken me in all the best ways.
This series is a King Midas retelling that is honestly a little hard to read. Not because of the prose (which are lovely) but the way that Raven Kennedy hits hurts.
This wasn’t the first series of Raven Kennedy’s I’ve read (I loved the Pack of Misfits series and couldn’t get into the Cupid series and intend to try out her other books), but Gild, Glint, and Gleam punch with an accuracy and strength I was not prepared for in a King Midas retelling.
The gut punches started in book one chapter one and didn’t stop (book three ends in a cliff hanger and book four isn’t out until May 2022 and I’m only a little bitter about it).
The themes that have captured my mind in a gilded cage are why this book has been placed on this list before the welcome is even overstayed.
The series could have been titled:
Power, Security, and the Art of Weaponizing Love: What we give up to feel safe and how to get it back.
I stayed up until 3am reading this series and I don’t regret a second of my lost sleep. I felt every cutting word as Auren’s story developed. The world unfolded like a golden sheet floating into a fire. Absolutely brilliant and I feel my understanding of how I as a person have traded my own power, love, and sense of self for feelings of safety. I receive a catharsis I didn’t know I needed related to this trade off and I’m earnestly grateful for having read these books. That said, they’re absolutely brutal. Had I tried to read these ten years ago, I probably would have ended up in a much worse place. Please take the content warnings at the top into consideration before proceeding.
Beyond the Next Star by Melody Johnson
Content warning: PTSD, violence, medical related humiliation and trauma, alien abduction, human/non-human pairing
Beyond the Next Star is a different sort of alien abduction romance and it’s beautiful. The story is in dual POV and we learn early on that the alien male lead has purchased a human as an emotional support animal.
Yup, you read that right.
Alien romances have referenced humans as pets for years so I didn’t think this book would be as earth shattering for me as it was. But it was.
The story is a series of emotional whiplashes as we follow these two sentient beings coming to grasp with the reality of their individual situation. There are hilarious scenes, like the alien trying to train the human in much the way humans train dogs. And there are gut punches as we follow the female human character as she’s treated like a pet and regular vet trips and all the misery that entails.
I think of this book all the time. How much agency do our pets have? I’ll be honest, as a pet lover this book has really made me question my life and what I’m doing with it.
Grr!: An Alien Warrior Romance by Zeta Star
Content warning: Alien abduction, non-human/human pairing
This book made me angry. Immediately after I read it, I wrote a several hundred word diatribe to my friends explaining how angry this book made me.
Why did it make me angry?
A book called Grr! Has no right to be as good as this book was. The title and blurb do not do this book justice.
It hits all the charming, steamy, campy, fun that the rom-com sphere of alien romances hit while having an action packed adventure without the deus ex machina that seems to happen in most alien romances that would compare.
I adored the way that the characters worked together despite a language barrier. I loved that they worried about each other feeling taken advantage of as they fell for each other. I loved this book so much, after reading it on KU....I bought it and then proceeded to pester everyone I know to read this book because I needed more people to be as aggressively angry about how stupidly good this book is when it has no right to be with a title of Grr!
Love Code by Ann Aguirre
This is another sequel that outshines the first book in my opinion. Strange Love is the first book in the Galactic Love series and it’s precious. I mean, there is a talking dog. What more do you need?
Apparently a lot because that’s what Aguirre gave me in Love Code. I downloaded this after a glowing review on reddit and this book did not let me down. It’s probably the least dark of all the books on my list. Just thinking about the characters in this book lightens my heart, warms my soul, and makes me positively giddy.
The amount of consent and consent affirmation in this book is a breath of fresh air (particularly compared to the rest of the books on this list).
The romance is genuine and explores a lot of the themes from the other books, but in a positive context. When the power imbalance between the leads in Love Code is addressed, it’s to affirm that both characters understood the power imbalance and how to make sure the one with less power was safe, secure, and knew they were not expected to behave in a certain way to continue getting that safety.
The book explores life, living, and unlife through the lens of an AI into a meatsuit. Aguirre approaches discovering what it means to be alive with and without flesh in a hilarious, heartfelt book that will forever be embedded in my brain.
Gladiator Queen by Auryn Haley
This is another series I read back in 2018. The whole trilogy is available in a bundle on Kindle Unlimited. It was a story I initially clicked on because the title cracked me up and I was in an ironic mood. (Sidenote: this is how I fell down the Ice Planet rabbit hole also in 2018. My irony reads often lead to obsessive fandom).
The details are fuzzy on what happens in which of the three books so I’ll keep my discussion to why this lives rent free in my head.
Gladiator Queen is a story of a delicate princess thrust into the gladiatorial pits of her country because of political machinations. The world building enraptured me. The action sequences were heart pounding, terrifying, and gut wrenching in a way that I couldn’t look away, even when I wanted to. It’s clear that Hadley spent a lot of time researching gladiators, fighting styles, and common injuries.
That alone might have been enough to make this series refuse to leave my cranial apartment complex, but there is so much more to the Gladiator Queen. The romance is a slow burn that at no point feels guaranteed. The stakes are high and when the life and death stakes seem to go away, higher stakes take their place.
This series also spends time to live in the horror of the pits, but, unlike a lot of violent content in romance novels, it spends the time after to process the pain. The characters struggle with the guilt of what they’ve been forced to do to survive and lean on each other to make it through. The characters’ emotional struggles and handling of their trauma in a way that feels both real and cathartic is art, pure and simple.
That said, I cannot get myself to reread this series, which is rare for me. I think about this book a lot and it has had an impact on the way I see references to gladiators in the media.
Phoenix Unbound by Grace Draven
Grace Draven is an absolute character queen. I waffled between Radiance and Phoenix Unbound for this spot because both books of Draven’s live rent free in my head, but I went with Phoenix Unbound because it has a few more elements that linger for me.
This book hits a few themes that other books on this list have hit. As I wrote this paragraph I discovered that this book has all the elements of the other books that live rent free in my head in one way or the other.
The characters struggle with themes of self vs the whole, hiding elements of the individual’s identity, trading power for security. There is exploration of the good death, and culture shock. The characters have to grapple with what it means to perpetuate their own ideologi
On top of all that, it also has gladiators. I know what doesn’t this book have?
So those are eight of the books living rent free in my head. Honorable (non romance) mentions: ,most books by Drew Hayes (if you play DND and haven’t read NPCs what are you doing with your life), Caitlin Doughty, and William Shatner’s autobiography Up Till Now.
What books are living rent free in your head? I’m dying to know.
