In anticipation of Sarah MacLean’s upcoming novel, Bombshell—the first in the Hell’s Belles series—I have decided to embark on a Summer of Sarah MacLean, in which I will be re-reading all of her novels leading up to Bombshell’s release on August 24 (which you can, and should, pre-order now). To help me mark my progress as I read through her whole booklist, I created the above (Sarah MacLean-approved) tracker for my bullet journal, because that’s just the kind of person I am. I also plan to write up a short blog post occasionally along the way.
The purpose of this exercise is twofold:
First, although you absolutely do not need to read her previous books to understand Bombshell, all of MacLean’s books take place in the same “universe,” as it were, with character cameos and easter eggs crossing through each of her four (soon to be five) series. For instance, jilted fiances from one book show up several books later as heroines, and the club established by the heroine of one book is frequented by characters from previous (and future) novels. In other words, Sarah MacLean offers tasty little tidbits for her dedicated readers, and while I caught some of them the first time I read her books, I also missed a lot of them, in large part because I read her books entirely out of order.
In general it is accepted that one can read most novels in a romance series out of order without losing too much, as the central romance will always have a complete arc within a single novel. That’s certainly true for MacLean’s books as well, but if you’ve never read her before, I urge you to begin at the beginning of a series (if not at the beginning of her entire oeuvre), not because it’s necessary* but because it’s so satisfying.
(*The Bareknuckle Bastards trilogy is an exception. You really kind of have to start at the beginning with that one, but trust me when I say the payoff is extremely worth it.)
The thing is, romance series generally don’t have the strongest concepts. Typically, a set of siblings or a group of friends all find love in sequence, and each get their promised happily ever after. This is completely fine, and is in fact how I’m writing my own romance at the moment, but it’s certainly fun when a series does have a strong concept tying it together, so that by the time you get to the final book there is a reward greater than simply seeing the last of the characters pair off. Sarah MacLean does this with truly enviable skill and I, at least, want to read all of her books in order to fully experience that skill. (For a full list of her different series, click here.)
The second purpose of my re-read is more selfish. As I mentioned, I am myself writing a romance novel, and in reading all of Sarah MacLean’s books in order, I am able to pay attention to how her storytelling develops and deliberately pay attention to how she structures and paces her novels, something that is easy to miss if you’re simply barrelling through a book (as I often am) because it’s so unputdownable.
I’ll be checking in again in the next week or so to let you know how the reread is going and with an updated tracker image. Until then, happy reading! And pre-order Bombshell!