Not your average friends-to-lovers romance: The Roommate Risk by Talia Hibbert

Talia Hibbert recently re-released her 2018 novel Wanna Bet? with a new cover and a catchy new title: The Roommate Risk, currently available as an ebook for $0.99 and, in my professional opinion, worth every single one of those pennies—and then some.

The newly re-covered and renamed The Roommate Risk by Talia Hibbert.

The Roommate Risk is, essentially, the story of two best friends who have been in love since approximately the moment they met. However, while Rahul—controlled, responsible, and perhaps a little too tightly-wound since his father’s death a year earlier—is painfully aware of his feelings and has spent seven years trying to keep a lid on them, Jasmine, who doesn’t do romance or relationships (and is certain she would fail at them if she did), sees Rahul as her beloved and dependable friend. No matter how hot he is (and Jasmine has to admit, he is very hot), Rahul is too important to her to risk complicating their relationship with sex.

However, as the book’s new title might suggest, a series of unfortunate events leads to Jasmine having no choice but to temporarily live with Rahul, and the easy domesticity and thick sexual tension have them both struggling to keep lines from growing blurry.

There are a few things that make this book stand apart from other friends-to-lovers romances. First, Hibbert is just a plain great writer with a light touch, equally successful in the hilarious banter she writes between Rahul and Jas as she is in the bleak moments where Rahul and Jasmine face grief, disappointment, and pain, often regarding their familial relationships. Like Hibbert’s most recent novels, The Roommate Risk is a “rom-com” that grounds itself in the often-uncomedic reality of life, giving both the humor and the romantic fantasy a heft, a solidity, that keeps the story and characters in your mind after you’ve finished.

The second thing that I loved about this book was the use of flashbacks. Friends-to-lovers can be a tricky genre if the reader is unconvinced of the characters’ history with each other, or if they can’t quite understand what that history is or how it’s changed. Flashbacks are a great way to solve this problem. At the same time, flashbacks, if not handled well, can start feeling redundant or frustratingly in the way of the main narrative; they become something to slog through rather than a treat that provides key insight into the relationship.

There are several flashbacks in The Roommate Risk and every single one feels necessary, revealing essential information that allows us to understand how Jas and Rahul reached the point in their relationship that they are at in the present and why they are perfect for each other. The chemistry between the leads is explosive, and Hibbert writes some truly amazing sexual tension and pining in the “present” sections of the book, but the flashbacks add a depth and complexity to that pining that make it all the more delicious.

There’s a lot more I could say about this book because I really loved it, but the last thing I’ll highlight is that it’s also hot as hell. There are multiple on-the-page sex scenes, all of which are steam-coming-out-of-your-ears sexy. There’s one that takes place at an arcade/bar that nearly killed me.

Honestly, my only complaint was that the epilogue felt a bit tacked-on and unnecessary, though I’m sure those who prefer a more explicit HEA would disagree. Either way, I don’t think it detracted from the book.

Bottom line? Read it. It’s on sale, so what are you waiting for?

Sports meets sex in Naima Simone's scorching-hot WAGS series

As soon as I closed the final page on Scoring With the Wrong Twin by Naima Simone, the first in Simone’s football-centric WAGS series, I hurriedly clicked over to the Kobo website and downloaded the second one. And within twenty-four hours, I’d devoured all three books, emerging on the other side sated if a little hungover from all the drama, all the feelings, all the scorching, sizzling sex scenes.

Here’s the thing: I don’t read a lot of contemporaries. I’ve never read a sports romance before. I think American football is, at best, a modern-day Gladiatorial sport, one that destroys the minds and bodies of players, in exchange for which society lets those players literally get away with murder. Yes, it’s more complicated than that … but my bias against football goes all the way back to growing up in a midwestern state that lived and breathed the sport. It’s hard to shake. However, as it turns out, in the hands of a writer like Simone -- whose fast-paced storytelling draws a reader in and refuses to let them go -- even football isn’t so bad. Actually, as it turns out, it offered the kind of embedded, idiosyncratic setting that I often miss with contemporaries, one that gives me more of a fantasy to hold on to than a typical contemporary meet-cute or romcom might offer. It’s a different world, with different expectations and different stakes, and while I suppose there might be a difference between a gentleman’s duel and the big game against the rival team, or White’s club and the locker room, the problem of powerful men in a masculine world struggling to acknowledge their tender feelings is the eternal stuff of romance.

Simone’s novels follow a group of friends composed of three professional football players: Zephirin Black, Dominic Anderson, and Ronin Palamo. All of them are huge, handsome, and cautious about love, having experienced betrayal and loss in the past. They’re also all phenomenal lovers with dirty mouths and massive dicks. Each book follows a similar pattern: the hero tries to have no-strings-attached sex with a woman he’s powerfully attracted to, but pesky feelings get in the way. However, each novel offers enough variation on this theme as to still be compelling. 

Scoring With the Wrong Twin is, as you might imagine, a classic twin-swap story. Zeph thinks he’s hooking up with the confident, successful model Giovanna Cruz, but the woman he can’t stop thinking about is actually Sophia, Giovanna’s shy, non-famous identical twin. What really makes this story work, aside from the flame-hot chemistry between the lovers, is the relationship between Sophia and Giovanna, whose dissimilarities could easily have put them into a good twin/bad twin (or innocent twin/slutty twin) dichotomy. Instead, the sisters love each other deeply, with Sophia desperate to protect Giovanna’s career and Giovanna clearly invested in protecting Sophia’s heart. More than that, they don’t fit easy stereotypes. Sophia is the shy sister who works in app development, but she’s also the sister with tattoos and nipple piercings, and the inevitable moment when Zeph spots Giovanna embracing another man -- the slutty sister inadvertently confirming his fears about the unfaithfulness of women! -- in fact reveals nothing more than Zeph’s own insecurities.

Scoring Off the Field was my favorite of the three books. At first it seems like it’ll be the Two Weeks Notice of the sports world: Tenny works as Dom’s personal assistant, and her life revolves around him, which is a problem because she’s been in unrequited love with him for years; the solution, she decides, is to give notice, hire a replacement, and start dating men who aren’t her long-time boss/best friend. Where this novel excels is in the nuances of Dom’s and Tenny’s relationship, which simultaneously feels deep and essential, with a long history, and also extremely fraught with unspoken tension. Tenny is not exactly a mere overlooked assistant; it is apparent from the very beginning that Dom loves her dearly. They met as children in the same foster home, where Dom instantly took the younger Tenny under his wing, and in the years since, he’s paid for her college, offered her a job, and looked out for her as much as possible. However, Tenny’s romantic love for Dom -- which she has good reason to believe he doesn’t reciprocate -- combined with both a desire for independence and a fear that she has been a burden to him, lead her to attempt to get some distance from him. The more distant she becomes, however, the more Dom realizes that he loves and needs her in ways he’s never before admitted to himself.

The third book, Scoring the Player’s Baby, is a classic variation of the “oops baby” trope: Kim, who recently divorced her cheating husband, a football player, has a one-night stand with the magnetically sexy Ronin, not knowing that he’s also a football player. When she learns of his career, she vows never to see him again -- except, oh no, she’s pregnant! Ronin agrees to “platonically co-parent” the child with her, but of course, the platonic part is easier said than done. What sets this book apart from other accidental pregnancy stories is that both Kim and Ronin are dealing with significant and in many ways unprocessed grief: Kim, over both the end of her marriage and a previous miscarriage, and Ronin, over the chronically ill girlfriend who died two years earlier. This grief makes the reader more aware of and sympathetic to the vulnerability and fear these characters feel upon being thrown unexpectedly into parenthood and into each other’s lives.

These books do go wrong in a few places. There’s the occasional pop culture zinger that doesn’t land (quips about Britney, aside from being in bad taste, feel at least a decade out of date, and joking about Taylor Swift’s dating track record in 2018, after she’d been with Joe Alwyn for years, just feels lazy). There’s the off-puttingly essentialist lines like the following, when the heroine of one of the novels sees the hero’s penis for the first time: “the thick, long part of him that made him a man.” And then there are the grovels, which in my opinion, just miss the mark every time. Simone is evidently a fan of her characters performing grand gestures, but most of the time those gestures come across as awkward to me, and occasionally entirely out of place. In the second book, the hero’s grovel bizarrely takes the form of an on-camera interview; he says all of the things I wanted him to say, but for reasons I didn’t quite follow, he didn’t say them to her directly. Instead he … played her the video of the interview on his phone? Less confusing but still strange were a direct reference to a famous scene in Love, Actually in the third book and an extravagant financial offer in the first book, which had implications that didn’t feel entirely thought-through. Following all of the emotional build-up and moments of intense intimacy earlier in the books, I’m left a little unsatisfied with these moments when the lovers finally get their shit together and lay their feelings bare, because they do such in such public, pressurized ways.

There’s one area in which Naima Simone might be an unparalleled talent, however: her sex scenes are maybe the hottest I’ve ever read. Simultaneously sensual and dirty, these scenes range from mirror sex to cunnilingus in the locker room to blowjobs in a parked car, sometimes slow and steamy, sometimes quick and devastating, with plenty of spicy dialogue as the lovers talk around their feelings, lavish praise on each other, and swear that it’s definitely just sex, it doesn’t mean anything more. (Just keep telling yourself yourself that…)

Should you read these books? Well, that’s up to you, but I think they’re pretty much a home run (a touchdown?) in terms of a quick, sexy, entertaining read that still delivers enough of an emotional punch to feel worth it. For my part, I know I’ll be seeking out more Naima Simone in the future … and maybe even more sports romances.

'Tis the Damn Season: Christmas Novellas

This week I read two Christmas novella historicals to get me in the spirit of the season: I Will by Lisa Kleypas and A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant. I have trouble with romance novellas, generally speaking — it’s my opinion that romances are all about pacing and novellas are especially difficult to satisfactorily pace — but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyable, and these two were charming (if imperfect) little stories. At the end of this post, I’ll tell you about a few more Christmas novellas I’ve enjoyed. It’s a staple of the genre, after all!

(Both reviews feature minor spoilers, but nothing that should drastically alter your reading experience.)

Published 2016, I Will by Lisa Kleypas is a sliver of a novella, a tasty crumb that goes down very quickly, and though it won’t fill you up, it probably will make you smile. The premise, reminiscent in part of the set-up of Loretta Chase’s classic Lord of Scoundrels, is as follows: Andrew, Lord Drake has been disinherited by his father for being a dissolute rake, so in order to fool his father into believing he’s not such a scoundrel, he turns to respectable spinster Caroline Hargreaves, whose younger brother he has been slowly but surely leading to ruin. The deal is this: If Caroline lets Andrew pretend to court her, then Andrew will keep her brother out of trouble by preventing him from gambling away his family’s money and paying off his not inconsiderable debts. With no choice but to accept, Caroline agrees to attend an upcoming house party being hosted by Andrew’s half-brother, though she is loath to spend any time with the terribly wicked Lord Drake. As you might imagine, once they are thrown together — with Andrew on his best behavior, no longer drinking to excess or carrying on illicit affairs — they find they actually might like each other.

What follows is an unusually-paced love story, though not an unsatisfying one. The events take place over the course of several months (with some of those months passing in the space of a sentence), while a single day at either end earns multiple chapters. That’s not strange for a full-length novel, but in a novella, I am used to a more intense timeline, with all of the lovers’ interactions occurring on the page (as happens in A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong). The result is slightly off-kilter; on the one hand, the relationship feels more solid, more believable for having time to grow, but on the other, it’s difficult not to feel that we are missing large swaths of the courtship, all the little moments that allowed the love to blossom. Often when reading a novella my reaction is that it needed more space to breathe, and while I think in this case “need” is too strong of a word, I do wonder how this would’ve read if we’d been able to get more small scenes with the hero and heroine in between the big moments.

I also have to point out that, in truth, this isn’t much of a Christmas novella. Oh, certainly Christmas features. In the third act, after the lovers have separated by the usual misunderstanding/treachery that romances excel in, Caroline’s brother goes to some trouble to get her an unusual and memorable Christmas gift. There’s much to be said about how the novel resolves itself (I have mixed feelings, to say the least), but there’s nothing that especially feels like Christmas to me about this book — it just as easily could’ve been Caroline’s birthday, with very few details having to change. I liked reading this but it didn’t put me in the holiday spirit.

One of the key themes of I Will is the leap of faith. At one point, after Andrew has been “reformed” for a few months, Caroline wonders if she can trust that he won’t revert back to his old ways. She loves the man he is now, and fears losing him to the man he once was. This theme resonates strongly with A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, a novella that makes its stance on the leap of faith quite clear. The heroine, Lucy Sharp, is the daughter of a falconer, and midway through the novella she offers up the following bit of wisdom regarding hunting falcons and the danger that they might simply fly away, no matter how well you train them: “You must rely to a degree on hope once you unfasten the tether. Hope, and faith that your efforts will have been enough. And as much peace as you possibly can muster with the possibility that they won’t.” Spoiler alert: she’s not just talking about falcons.

This is a book that advocates openly and ardently for the leap of faith, and in a way, that’s what makes it work so well. Lucy and our hero, the ever-proper Andrew Blackshear, end up alone together over the Christmas holiday due to a series of disasters and questionable decisions: an injured driver, a snowy road, a broken wheel. Lucy, pragmatic but sheltered, doesn’t give a fig about propriety and only wants to enjoy the holiday; Andrew, honorable to a fault, can’t stop panicking about inappropriate his time spent with Lucy is … not to mention the thoughts he keeps having about her. The events of the novella take place over a span of about three days, but the characters’ self-awareness about how fast things are moving, as well as their reasonable trepidation regarding the major differences between them, kept me from reacting like everyone in Frozen after Anna announces she’s engaged to Hans.

Speaking of differences, I was entirely charmed by the dynamic of the lovers in this book. I’ve never been the biggest fan of rake heroes (they’re fine, they’re just overdone), but give me a stodgy prig of a hero any day! Andrew must learn that duty and propriety need not always come first, without entirely compromising the nobleness and sense of responsibility that makes him who he is, and the way that Lucy’s very presence, simply her way of being in the world, pushes him to question himself is handled very well. Lucy was delightful too, because while it can be appealing to pair the prig up with a bold, shocking heroine, Lucy is both more and less complicated than that. Her lack of propriety is shocking to Andrew, but not deliberately so; rather, it speaks to their very different lives and experiences. This makes her moments of earnest vulnerability and provinciality all the more endearing to the reader and Andrew alike.

This was also emphatically a Christmas novella, with Christmas — the hopes and expectations attached to it, the remembrances of what it once was — playing a role nearly as important as that of the hero and heroine. Each character begins with an idea of what their Christmas will entail, and each experiences something altogether different, and harder, and more beautiful than they could’ve imagined. And, in a way, the same is true of love. As the story progresses, they realize with dawning horror — and excitement — and hope — and fear — that this was never how they imagined falling in love … but (of course), as the characters in a romance novel always learn, isn’t it better that way?

A few more Christmas novellas I’ve enjoyed…

A Christmas Bride and A Christmas Beau by Mary Balogh, both of which feel extremely cozy and are practically bursting with all the best Christmas tropes (snowball fights, cocoa, a Christmas pageant, sleds, decorations, small children doing cute things)

• The Duke of Christmas Present by Sarah MacLean, which is a sexy, angsty homage to A Christmas Carol featuring lost love and second chances … also, to be fair, I enjoyed all of the stories in How the Dukes Stole Christmas, which is the anthology this one is found in

• A Vicarage Christmas by Kate Hewitt, which is a contemporary (!) romance that, to be honest, feels somewhat unresolved and suffers from the typical pacing issues of a novella, but which features what I found to be fairly moving meditations on family dynamics, feeling like an outsider, and coping with trauma

• Not Christmas and not a novella, but I did just finish Whiteout by Adriana Anders, and given that it’s set in Antarctica, there’s a lot of reference to snow, ice, cold, and (of course) cuddling for warmth. There’s also mention of penis frostbite. It’s up to you if that’s the sort of thing to put you in the holiday spirit.

I’ve got a few more pulled out from the library, but who knows if I’ll get to them before Christmas Day? If I do and I think any of them are especially good, I’ll update this list!

What are your favorite Christmas romances? Holiday romances? Winter romances?