Romances are blooming like mid-summer peonies on my to be read list as I prepare for a Romance Roundtable in July.
What am I reading? Here are two romance novels I’m savoring and one more out at the end of the summer.
"Funny Story" by Emily Henry. A winsome lakeside setting in Michigan. (Who doesn’t wish Waning Bay was a real place?) Two jilted fiancées with sassy and sexy chemistry. And the kind of terrific dialogue that inspires fans to compare Henry to Nora Ephron.
Henry’s romances show there’s more to the genre "than moving Barbies around and making them kiss," Julia Whelan, the audiobook narrator of “Funny Story,” told the New York Times:
I’m also listening to Yulin Kuang’s “How to End a Love Story.” Kuang is a Hollywood writer and director who is a pro at bringing romance novels to the small screen and her own romance novel unfolds in the writing room of a TV show, complete with lots of smoking sexual tension.
And coming soon? Ellie Palmer’s “Anywhere With You,” out in August.
— Kerri Miller, MPR News