Emmalita

Driving through the Highlands with your estranged dad, one night stand (who hates you now), and a whole lot of emotional baggage

Just a Highland Fling by Naina Kumar

July 16, 2026 by Emmalita Leave a Comment

There was a point in Just a Highland Fling where Neelu is in the car with her estranged father and her one night stand antagonist, and I thought, “no one handles emotional baggage like Naina Kumar.” Highland Fling is a lot of fun. I enjoyed it enormously. It’s a good roadtrip romance with forced proximity, sheep, daddy issues, and a hot Desi bagpiper/poetry professor. What I really loved though was the way Kumar handled big raw feelings and their fallout with delicacy. Neelu is in […]

In the best way, this was not at all what I was expecting.

Book Club Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

July 11, 2026 by Emmalita Leave a Comment

I was expecting to enjoy Jenny Holiday’s Book Club Boyfriend. She has a talent for blending charming characters and easy breezy writing with some deeply emotional topics. In Book Club Boyfriend, she reshapes her typically good writing and pushes the boundaries of genre romance to give us her best book to date. I’ve read a bunch of fantastic books recently, and this one grabbed me and shook me. Blair (most likely inspired by Reese Witherspoon, but this is not veiled real person fanfic) and Jack […]

Silvia Moreno-Garcia does noir as well as you think she would – brilliantly

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno Garcia

July 9, 2026 by Emmalita Leave a Comment

Ulises Linares (not his real name) is a conman who engages in lonely hearts and romance cons. At almost 30, and after the death of his father, he’s feeling a pressure to pull a con that will give him some stability. He decides to pursue Perla Inclan, a woman whose family once owned a reasonably successful coffee company in Puerco Ahogado (which means “drowned pig”), in the mountains of Veracruz. But Perla is no easy mark. And her niece, Inés, clocks him pretty quickly. The […]

CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge Begins

July 1, 2026 by Emmalita 21 Comments

Welcome to the 2026 Book Bingo Reading Challenge! Now is the time to dig through those books you read but didn’t review, or pick up that book you’ve been thinking about. Bingo is about vibes and creative interpretations. Most importantly, it’s about fun. The words (or numbers) in the circles are meant to be inspiration. They can be a word in the title, an image on the cover, or spark an idea. I’ve listed some possibilities below, but if I’ve learned anything from Bingo, it’s […]

Pining, Second Chances, Plots, and Strategies

Just for the Season by Rachel Griffiths

June 26, 2026 by Emmalita Leave a Comment

tl:dr: I am bumbling around trying not to tell you everything about Just for the Season. It works on many levels. I enjoyed Rachel Griffith’s first book, The Trouble with Anna, but I immediately knew that Charlotte and Wolfgang were going to be the couple I wanted to know more about. Charlotte romps her way through Trouble, while Wolfgang has a rather short, but memorable, cameo. Still, I’ve been reading romance long enough to know when characters are meant for each other. A few years […]

Cons, Shenanigans, and Poetic Yearning

Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti

June 23, 2026 by Emmalita Leave a Comment

One of Alexandra Vasti’s frequent archetypes is the very smart woman who doesn’t fit into society. As a woman who frequently looks back in confusion at social interactions gone wrong, I love it. After Miss Ruby Ballimore commits the sin of telling a man he’s wrong in front of other people, she and two friends decide to leave London and hide out at Princess Serafina Di Sangro’s estate in Cornwall. Pomeroy House is already a haven and smuggling headquarters for Captain Malcolm Archer and his […]

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