“It has all of my favorite romantic tropes: enemies to lovers, found family, a misunderstanding that threatens everything, and a tall man who has some emotional baggage that he needs to deal with promptly before he loses the only one that he’s ever loved. I finished this book and felt my heart swell. Actually, it just swelled again because I thought of the ending once more. It’s just so good.” Read more...

The Best Romance Books of 2022

Katherine D. Morgan,

“This…is a space opera that takes place after a war. The main character, Kel, is a refugee who has holed up on a planet, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars. She’s a hermit, and she doesn’t want to deal with anything. The love interest in this book is Dare. He is a former soldier, and eventually she discovers this. The two of them are very similar, in terms of having a stoic personality and a wry sense of humor that emerges at unexpected times. They tend to be very quiet, but in a fight, they will go all out. They both are sword fighters, but Dare is a brute-force, giant sword guy while Kel has a more sword-and-board technique using a shield. She is more of a bodyguard; he is more of a whirlwind. Unbeknownst to each other, they are enemies from opposite sides of the previous war. They do have to overcome their distrust and that underlying enmity while acknowledging their mutual attraction. And they have to fight back to back, because that’s what battle couples do!” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“Hunt the Stars is the first book in a trilogy of space opera romances. It takes place in a future where we’ve colonized the stars, and we zip through wormholes to get from one place to the next. The book sets up a galaxy where you have two factions: humans and Valoffs. Valoffs are predominantly human but have some key differences. The two groups were at war and now they’re at peace, but there’s still hostility between them. The humans fear the Valoffs because they have psychic powers, including telepathy, telekinesis, healing, and teleportation. The humans think, ‘If this person can lift me into the air and crush my bones with his mind, this is very intimidating and scary’…The main character, Octavia ‘Tavi’ Zarola, is a soldier—technically, a captain—turned bounty hunter. Her crew is made up of former squadmates of hers from the military. When Torran Fletcher, a former Valoff general, offers Tavi a significant sum of money to find a stolen family heirloom, she wants to decline, but her crew reminds her that ships and food cost money. After some grumpy negotiations, she accepts the job.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“The Blue Sword is a secondary world fantasy. It takes place not on earth but in a different place with some overlap of certain experiences and ideas…The main characters in The Blue Sword are Angharad ‘Harry’ Crewe and King Corlath. Harry is part of the colonizer culture. Because she is orphaned and has no money and nowhere to live, she’s sent to live at a desert outpost in another country to be near her soldier brother. Corlath is the king of the Hillfolk, who are native to this area. Supposedly he has very powerful magic, but Harry’s people don’t believe it. Corlath’s magic tells him that he needs to kidnap Harry, so he does, and she is once again displaced from her home. Now she’s stuck with these desert nomads who have no idea why she has been kidnapped by their king, because he himself doesn’t know. He only knows that it’s important because the magic said so. This is a ‘fish out of water’ story. Harry has to learn the language and the customs. She learns to sword fight and to ride horses the way that the Hillfolk ride. They don’t use bridles and bits.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“This is an urban fantasy series about a coyote shapeshifter named Mercy Thompson. She works as a mechanic in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state. These books initially straddle the line between open magic and secret magic. The fae are the only-non human group that is currently ‘out’ as the series starts, but there are also vampires, werewolves, witches, and other magic creatures going bump in the night, so to speak. Mercy is a mechanic, both literally and figuratively speaking. She fixes cars—primarily Volkswagens—and solves paranormal problems between the various factions in this Tri-Cities area. In the first book, Mercy helps a werewolf who shows up at her shop looking for work. It turns out he is being chased by evil people who want to run experiments on him.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“It’s urban fantasy, but it isn’t secret magic, where everyone has to keep the magic hidden. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Atlanta, which is where I live now. These books are set in a contemporary world, but one where magic suddenly came back into this world of technology after thousands of years of being dormant. There was a cataclysmic event, and society crumbled and then recovered. Technology still exists, but it alternates with magic, in waves. One will work and the other won’t. That’s a fun complication. People have learned to live with the mess that this causes. A car may have two engines: a gas engine and a magic engine, or some people ride horses instead because they don’t want to have to deal with it. Compared to our world, it’s more dangerous because you have shapeshifters, vampires controlled by necromancers, mages, witches, and monsters. The monsters range from low-key nuisances to the extremely nasty, people-eating kind.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“It’s an urban fantasy series about secret magic in the modern world. October Daye, also known as Toby, is a half-fae changeling, which is a marginalized group within the fae world of the story. The first book in the series is titled Rosemary and Rue, and the rest of the books are also named after Shakespeare quotes. I love that. Toby initially works for a fae duke as a knight-errant, which is like a private investigator. Even though Toby is only a dogsbody, she has sword-fighting skills, low-level illusion skills, and a specific blood magic that is particular to her. In the prologue of the first story, she’s living in San Francisco with her steady boyfriend and their daughter. Then she gets cursed to be a fish for fourteen years. Between the prologue and the first chapter, she comes back, but by the time she’s back to normal, her boyfriend has married someone else and their kid is in high school. It’s very tragic. She’s alone in the world. She works at a grocery store. She avoids everyone from her old life, and she becomes a hermit. Then she is, once again, magically cursed. In this case, she’s cursed to find her friend’s killer. The rest of the books follow this format. She’s solving a mystery, finding a missing person, finding a missing object, or figuring out who murdered whom.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist