Some authors try to make their craft invisible to the reader; others, like Chencia Higgins, write to steal the spotlight. In A LITTLE KISSING BETWEEN FRIENDS (Carina, 303 pp., paperback, $18.99), we meet a Black Sapphic stud music producer and a femme fat bisexual dancer at Houston’s premier strip club, Sanity. Cyn Tha Starr (a.k.a. Poppa) mixes the tracks, and Juleesa (a.k.a. Jucee) makes the dance videos that turn them into viral hits. They’re best friends and absolutely, definitely, not even a little bit in love with each other. Until they start hooking up, that is.
Romance loves a couple who have to overcome a messy shared history: Lizzie and Darcy, Harry and Sally, and now Poppa and Jucee. They know each other so well, yet somehow not at all. It’s a wonderful, low-stakes ride as each relearns who their partner really is.
Time-travel romances are often a fantasy of knowledge: Someone ventures back into history and dazzles the rubes by understanding germ theory, or else a historical figure is brought forward and gapes at the marvels of present-day technology. They can also be fantasies of power, as Kaliane Bradley’s THE MINISTRY OF TIME (Avid Reader Press, 339 pp., $28.99) makes clear.
When the Arctic explorer Cmdr. Graham Gore is hauled into the 21st century along with a handful of other expats, their government handlers — bridges, as they’re called — are granted an extraordinary amount of control. Bridges are not only responsible for explaining modernity, they also share quarters with their expats, monitoring their bodily functions, mental health, internet searches, geographic movements and political adjustments.
But of course, when you have two strangers with secrets trapped in a house together, someone’s bound to ruin it by falling in love.
Gore’s bridge and eventual lover is a protagonist whose name we never learn, like the second Mrs. de Winter from “Rebecca,” or the narrator of R.F. Kuang’s “Babel.” Bradley’s story blends the claustrophobic passion of the one with the bloody anticolonial critique of the other. It’s a bold, uneasy romance that defines history as both something we make, and something that makes us. We are implicated — in every sense of the word — in the events of our particular era. Or, as Gore’s bridge puts it, “If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.”
Finally, we have two short historicals in a series by Bronwyn Scott, where Victorian friends widowed by a catastrophic flood find second chances at romance. LIAISON WITH THE CHAMPAGNE COUNT (Harlequin, 280 pp., paperback, $7.25) sees the gin heiress Lady Emma Luce banished from her home by her late husband’s horrid heirs. Left with only the Champagne chateau where they honeymooned — we should all be so destitute — Emma decides to use her marketing savvy to turn the languishing winery into a success.
Standing in her way is Julien Archambeau, the chateau’s capable land steward and the former Comte de Rocroi. Descended from the vineyard’s pre-revolution owners, Julien has made it his dream to regain his family’s estate — even if it means undermining Emma’s power. She may have legal title, and she can fire him at any time, but he has the weight of winemaking expertise, not to mention experience with fussy local politics. This is an elemental little masterpiece, where earth and fire and water become terroir and passion and tears. The cameo from Madame Clicquot herself is the cherry on top.
In the sequel, ALLIANCE WITH THE NOTORIOUS LORD (Harlequin, 265 pp., paperback, $7.99), Emma’s swift second marriage baffles her friend Antonia Lytton-Popplewell. Like Emma, she has a business enterprise — the department store her late husband envisioned — and a partner who’s keeping things from her: Cullen Allardyce, the estranged son of a marquess. Cullen once fled scandal for life in the tropics, and now he’s eager to get back to the warmth and waters of Tahiti. It’s only his growing admiration for Antonia that’s slowing his return.
There’s a long sordid history of using “exotic” locales to give white romance heroes flavor, but this book leans more “tropical beaches are superior to London chill” and less “I made my fortune in India.”
One of the great games of romance is seeing writers riff on a premise, like a classical composer improvising variations on a theme. Where Emma’s vineyard blossomed into an Edenic refuge in the first book, Antonia’s department store is an anchor, chaining her to the past and threatening to drag her under. But in both stories momentum comes from the pursuit of knowledge: Our heroines are exploring a new world and new selves, and are also driven to delve into the heroes’ secrets. Because mystery can encourage a romance, but only full understanding can complete one. You’ll know, if you’re in love.
