10 of My Favorite Books about FALLing in Love

I tend to focus more on the speculative fiction side of my reading on this blog, but I’m also an avid Romance reader! I decided to be a little cheeky today and go for a pun instead of something properly Autumn themed. I decided that I’d like to share some of my favorite genre-romances. It was surprisingly tough to narrow down my list, and I erred on excluding a few of my favorites that felt too close to some of the others here. For those new to my blog, the vast majority of these are going to be gay (all except the first, in fact). I do read Romance outside m/m, but it’s a lot fewer and tend to have less of an impact on me.

I have excluded hybrid stories that also focus on other A-Plots in addition to Romance, such as Captive Prince (Military Fantasy), The Darkness Outside Us (Existential Thriller), or How To Survive this Fairytale (The Messy Process of Healing from Trauma). Also, happy endings are guaranteed! Most of these I don’t have longform reviews for, but the covers will take you to their goodreads pages!

1. Hana-Kimi: For you in Full Blossom by Hisaya Nakajo: The fact that my first thought for this post was a straight romance should say a lot, especially because I immediately broke my rule about hybrid stories (there’s a lot of slice of life elements here). This manga is … stupid and absurd and delightful. It follows a half-Japanese girl who falls in love with a high jumper from watching him from across the world on her TV (because I guess she watches middle school Japanese track competitions from California for some reason). She moves to Japan to meet him and ends up enrolled at his all-boys boarding school, is roommates with him, and has to hide her identity. The premise is INSANE. It is stupid. It should not work. And yet it does. This is a slowwww burn. It’s probably around 4,000 pages long, and the two don’t get romantically involved until two-thirds of the way through, although they’ve been in love for far longer.
   
   There’s a lot of over the top moments that make me laugh out loud. There’s heartbreak that I still have bookmarks in because I’ll tear up looking at them. The supporting cast is well-developed, with even minor ones getting time to shine. There’s absurdity. There’s also MULTIPLE earnest, irreverent, and fleshed out gay characters that … well they are played for laughs, but in a way that feels very respectful. Plus the straight characters get played for laughs too, so it’s equal opportunity mockery. Even the school doctor, who immediately learns her secret, is a sarcastic asshole who cracks gay jokes to make homophobes uncomfortable, and I aspire to be more like him every day. This series helped me process my own internalized homophobia and love myself before I felt comfortable sharing with others. I am a healthier person for having illegally pirated it as a child on dial-up internet. I cannot thank my 10 year old self enough for the gift of having read this.
   
   I think I have now committed to a reread soon and do a full review. Holy shit this nostalgia train is hitting hard. I promise the other write-ups won’t be multiple paragraphs. These are supposed to be blurbs!
   
2. Looking for Group by Alexis Hall: I am not a World of Warcraft player, but my partner is (he refuses to read this book), and this romance following two high level gamers with very different play philosophies was far more grounded than I thought it would be. When you have to put down a book and walk away because the third-act breakup feels too real, you know the book is a good one.
   
3. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz: the love story here snuck up on me, and this is a very earnest friends-to-lovers romance that is also a great coming-of-age novel. Good use of a historical setting (1980s Texas) and grappling with what it means to be Mexican-American. It’s also got a higher quality of writing than most Romance books, and is the type of YA that appeals to a wider audience than just teens and young adults.
   
4. The God Eaters by Jesse Hajicek: this is a psychologically intense romance with a fantasy/western setting. It’s a contender for my favorite book of the year, and is probably the entry here that takes character-development the most seriously. It opens with the main characters as cell-mates in a prison meant to house mages who have broken the tyrannical laws of the theocracy that runs the country.
   
5. Role Model by Rachel Reid: yes I jumped on the Heated Rivalry bandwagon, but this is probably my favorite of the series. Reid does a much better job than average in the M/M Romance space of engaging with queer identity seriously, probably because she’s queer herself.
   
6. Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston: one of the big names in the m/m romance space, and I loved it. This is one of my favorite books for witty banter, and I was cackling. It follows the son of the US President (Hillary Clinton coded, but Texan and had a kid with a Latino man), and is a great secret dating book. The movie was a disappointment, but not because it made changes to the source material. It just was underwhelming in general.
   
7. Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas: this is probably my favorite human x ghost romance, and a YA romance that felt very different from its competition. Thoughtfully written, sweet with being over the top, and just generally an excellent full package. There is a murder mystery plot, but I felt like that was mostly a vessel for the characters to fall in love. The sequel dropped earlier this month and I’m hesitant to pick it up. I don’t know that this book needs a sequel, and I’ve generally found Romance sequels released years after the original to be disappointing (Aristotle and Dante is a notable example of this. Read the original, but pass on the sequel unless you’re chomping at the bit to read more). If anyone has read Espiritu, please let me know!
   
8. Heart of Stone by Johannes T Evans: the vampire romance that killed all others! Full of quiet yearning, melancholy, and friendly silences, this book succeeds because it doesn’t lean into the same tropes and plot beats that so many vampire romances do. I’ve tried several since, but none of them hit the same.
   
9. The Geek who Saved Christmas by Annabeth Albert: I should hate this. It’s saccharine, too tropey, and is stupid as a Golden Retriever. I also listen to it every Christmas season because nobody else checks out the audiobook from my library. It’s a personal tradition, and thus has a place on this list.
   
10. Yield Under Great Persuasion by Alexandra Rowland: this is a small town rivals-to-lovers story (though the rivalry is very one sided), featuring plenty of meddling gods and villagers! The main character is a bit of a train wreck, but I’m okay with that. Rowland is one of my favorite authors, one of the few I’ll insta-buy. I like their other Romances, but this is the only one I love. Their non-Genre Romance work is universally superb, however.

What romances am I missing that go above and beyond? I’m especially interested in m/m Romances by Black and Indigenous authors (ideally male or queer), which are notably absent from this list. I’ve read several I enjoyed, but none that slammed into me like a freight train.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.