Certified Whoa!s to Bust Your Reading Rut
Reading right now is hard. Minds fogged with economic and social and death anxiety, bad feeling reigns. For us, it is almost impossible to clear a path and make way for the latest romcom. Escapism makes sense. But the idea of a clear blue morning and whimsical dress feels exhausting.
Rather than trying to clear the fog, let it envelope you even more. Retreat deeper into that dark id, find titillating little nuggets waiting for you there. Trust us - this is what we do here.
Here are five recommendations, signature pieces on our Whoa! Shelf, to bust that slump wide open. Please note, pretty much all titles come with a hefty content warning.
The Foggy Outsides, Insides
Sleeping Together (Perfect Drug #1) by Kitty Cook
There’s this thing called the Seattle freeze that happens in late fall and lasts until March. Denizens of the Emerald City hole up when the sun sets at 3:00pm and drink their IPAs and snuggle further into their flannel alone, or with a perfectly curated friend group that is loath to accept newbies during the freeze. Maybe Washington is killing the curve because they practice isolation so much already.
Mewd.
In any case Sleeping Together is the perfect book to luxuriate in that feeling of aloneness. A tome about the ways we isolate ourselves from connection only to find it in the unexpected caverns of a shared dreamscape. It’s one part drug trip, one part forbidden office romance, and all parts hot.
-Isabeau
No one in the book looks like the people in the cover.
Outlander + Slaughterhouse Five =
Awaken, My Love by Robin Schone
When this book was first released, the opening scene was a hot topic--the heroine masturbating next to her sleeping husband. Outlander’s trimmer, wackier cousin, Awaken My Love pulls no punches. The heroine time travels via shared, sad orgasm to a place even more unstuck in time than she is.
Features include:
Sex on a horse
A weird picnic
Uncomfortable Orientalism
A witch seeking incest revenge
...and so much self-annihilation.
Our overweight, middle-aged, independent, unmarried heroine is “fixes" her self-esteem. Not by learning to love herself (whattup 1995?!) but by becoming a hot, teenager in the 19th century who prefers to live as if she is in the 18th century.
Possibly one of the most neccessary gifs in Romance
It is a lot. But no more than is needed.
-Morgan
TL;DR: The book lives up to the cover
The Little Mermaid meets Coast to Coast FM
Mermaid’s Kiss by Joey W. Hill
Listen. Listen. Listen. I love this goddamned trash book so much. You want hot angels fighting with God? You got it! You want God to be a woman? Sing it sister! You want to be fucked like Ariel with her floating red tresses and adorkable je ne sais quoi? LOOK NO FURTHER.
God is a woman.
Did I mention there’s a giant naked mole rat that enthusiastically consents to be a waterbed in an erstwhile threesome? I didn’t???? Try and get that image out of your head now. I dare you.
Mermaid’s Kiss is the kind of book that people who don’t read romance like to imagine the genre is like. It’s dramatic, unrealistic, full to bursting and more than a little ridiculous. But that’s where this book shines. It is so fun--you literally never know what is going to happen next--and no rational person could guess.
This is the kind of book that you let wash over you, where you allow yourself to laugh out loud at the absurdity, it’s the whole cake and you get to eat it too. It’s guilty pleasure turned up to eleven and it makes no apologies for itself. Which makes this mess just a little bit bad ass too.
Did I mention the Sea Witch could turn into a dragon?
-Isabeau
This book also lives up to the cover.
Understands the true appeal of Gothic Romance, delivers Gaywyck by Vincent Virga
AKA The Grandfather of Gay Romance, AKA The First Gay Gothic Novel, is a saga. It is also a collage of references. From Poe to dialog lifted directly from Joan Crawford’s cellophane lips.
Ye olde Twink Robert Whyte takes a job when his mom dies. Organizing a decrepit, bursting library on Gilded Age Long Island, he starts to fall for his boss. Who could resist certified mysterio-hunk Donough Gaylord (it gets even more on-the-nose than that last name)? Whyte finds himself in a shimmering, pulsating, very gay gothic mystery-mance with keyhole love scenes to boot.
The metaphor is…there.
Crashing waves and crashing emotions, sex, violence, exotic birds, the pleasure of library-ing, opera and erotic statuary abound. Wrap yourself in the strange mysteries of the house, as well as the strange pleasures of the wealthy elite, and brace yourself for a far more bloody baroque payoff(s) than just a wife in the attic.
-Morgan
An e-book
Love in thin air
Improper Arrangements by Juliana Ross
I love every single Juliana Ross book I’ve ever read. The real crime is that there aren’t many. She packs a thorough historical punch into as few chapters as possible. Her sex scenes explode on the page like summer storms, the prose between is concise, detailed, and lush. Improper Arrangements follows that mold exactly, with our botanist, mountaineering heroine and her insanely hot guide locking eyes on the path to town and setting the door to her suite on fire before they even know each other’s names.
This is the kind of thing the heroine was up to when not macking.
One thing I do want to mention about this historical romance is that our heroine has weathered the scandal of having an affair with her art teacher. And when asked about this, whether she was duped, seduced, taken advantage of--she says no. That she was simply curious about sex, and her body wanted him, damn the consequences. This frank appraisal of a woman’s desire was met by our hero and heroine both as the plain fact it was. And I love this book for that, for making sexual desire be the banal thing it can be sometimes. That it can be about curiosity, or boredom as much as it is about fireworks and adventure.
The sex is so hot, the characters so impressively opaque to each other that their obstacles feel totally uncontrived. For me the whiff of death in the mountains makes this hard hitting novel a chef’s kiss of a romance. And one I return to over and over again because I love it so much.
-Isabeau
See Awaken My Love Caption
Oldie but a Baddie
Beast by Judith Ivory
While the stepback would have you believe otherwise, this hero is not traditionally attractive. He compensates with a sense of humor, oozing charm, and being a very generous lover, but is also super chippy and obviously self-conscious. He meets his match in the form of a pretty American teenager, that paper doll archetype of pop-culture desirability, who has never tried to compensate for anything. As a result, she is flaky, selfish, and direct in a way that isn’t charming.
They both kind of suck, and yet--how I looooonnnnnnged for them to just be in love like a couple of normals. Two words: wrist kissing. Five more words: at your parent’s garden party.
This through-a-mirror-darkly Beauty and the Beast retelling has sumptuous surroundings that surely had a direct influence on one-on-one dates on The Bachelor (you sit outside and no one eats). And screaming matches, and webs of lies, and perfumerie, and FRRRRRAAAAAHHHNCE, and a steam ship, and, and, and….
Does happen, multiple times, in this book
Way back in 2018 this was the second book reviewed on our podcast and our first divergent decision. Upon further review, this is one of the signature Whoa!s that we return to again and again. This is a sore tooth of a romance, I can’t stop licking.
-Morgan