The romance genre is an endlessly elastic one—it encompasses fun, trashy beach reads, sensitive YA coming-of-age tales, high-minded historical epics, and spicy titles with covers you feel compelled to obscure while taking public transportation. The following Indie offerings all received starred reviews from Kirkus and suggest the vast tonal range of engaging novels devoted to plumbing the eternal mysteries of love (or at least the chronic pangs of desire). Romance hasn’t always gotten the respect it deserves; these Indie authors are in the vanguard of elevating traditionally guilty pleasures to simply pleasures, full stop.
Hockey-themed romance is having a moment, so it’s an ideal time to check out Rebecca Jenshak’s Lucky Shot, which will “leave readers swooning,” per our review. Ruby, a struggling writer recently burned by a bad boyfriend, needs to revise her baseball-themed love story to instead depict infatuation on the ice (her editor is evidently an ace trendspotter). Ruby heads to Moonshot, Montana, where she gets up close and personal with a guarded, ruggedly handsome hockey star named Nick Galaxy to conduct…research. It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going, but Jenshak hits every beat (and biscuit) with satisfying precision. Our reviewer praises the novel’s balance of “playful banter and emotional depth”; the narrative’s “bookish charm” and “wholesome” central relationship will appeal to romance fans looking for some less heated revelry.
E.L. Starling’s YA novel Bound by Stars is nothing if not high concept: Titanic in space, with the leads’ socioeconomic circumstances swapped. The teenage Weslie is a struggling Earther who wins a trip on the starship The Boundless’ maiden voyage to Mars by designing an advanced robot; the free-spirited Jupiter is the wealthy inheritor of a tech company that employs Weslie’s mother. (The poor scrape by on Earth, while the rich live in luxury on the red planet.) Romance blooms amid scenes from the class struggle as the artistic Jupiter and the brilliant inventor Weslie are repeatedly thrown together by an obliging plot. Our reviewer notes, “Starling manages to make a critique of classism romantic and thrilling, with high stakes and heavy swoons.” Interstellar romance with a social justice bent—what could go wrong? (Are there icebergs in space?)
More literary-minded romance fans should make a beeline for Catherine Taylor’s The Many Seas to Guernsey, a sweeping historical novel that charts the star-crossed connection between Kitty, a young Englishwoman from a bohemian family, and Lukas, a handsome, poetic German. The obstacles to their bliss are considerable: Lukas is determined to become a Catholic priest, and World War II lurks on the horizon. The two quickly fall in love, but their irreconcilable agendas drive them apart—until they reconnect to aid Jews persecuted by the Nazis and Lukas renounces his priesthood out of disgust over the Church’s compromises with the German regime. They begin a passionate affair, but the young couple’s troubles are only beginning as they’re inexorably engulfed by the horrors of war. Our reviewer raves, “Taylor beats the hell out of her flawed and very human characters—and thus makes their responses to some of history’s most desperate circumstances all the more convincing.”
Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.
