It’s officially spooky season y’all, and we’re jumping in with both feet. This week, Morgan and Isabeau explore the categorical and the supernatural in Angie and the Ghostbuster, by Theresa Gladden. When paranormal investigator Dr. Gabriel Richards is drawn to a mysterious home, what he finds there raises more than just his neck hair. There to greet him is the blonde and dream-eyed Angie, Gabriel’s high school crush, who has been living alongside the very same ghostly presence he’s come to eradicate. But when passion overtakes profession, the otherworldly isn’t the only thing getting a little exercise. What’s a category romance? Are ghosts just unresolved trauma? Does anyone ever get their affairs in order? We’ll be putting a little ectoplasm in your feed all this month, so stay tuned and live deliciously.
Everyone experiences the agonies and ecstasies of expanding a circle of friends, but what about the trials and tribulations of expanding a circle of lovers? This week, Morgan and Isabeau mix with the hoipolloi of Edwardian elite in Jude Lucens’ polyamorous historical Behind These Doors, Radical Proposals Book 1. When a gossip columnist stumbles on the harmonious throuple of a Lord and Lady, and an Earl’s second son, a delicate balance of lust and heart strings is shifted. But buttoned up cultural norms be damned as passion mounts, and all involved grapple with the implications of propriety and class. Is love a scarce commodity? How do we navigate an array of uncontrollable feelings? May we share in this wash basin? Live free and love wide y’all.
It’s no secret that Whoa!mance is a product of the university — a meeting of minds that began with the pursuit of knowledge and ended in a holocaust of emotions. But we digress. This week, Morgan and Isabeau audit a few classes with Katrina Jackson’s ivory tower romp, Office Hours. High-achieving and beleaguered Assistant Professor of Sociology Dr. Deja Evans is in a rut. With her 3-year track to tenure review looming, her separation between work and life has blurred into non-existence. But her desire for the tenured history professor and dressed-to-the-nines hunk of all things past, Dr. Alejandro Mendoza, is keeping her pilot light aflame. What’s a proper work/life balance? Can a romance novel test the depth of our allyship? Why does higher education make us feel so low? This one’s for all y’all left jilted by the educational-industrial-complex.