Recs if you like Waking Up With the Duke...

This book is full of tropes romance loves, and we take them topic by topic, recommending read alikes for everything from grumpy/sunshine, to academic romance, to STEM heroines, to that spicy sex scene that was a delightfully unexpected surprise!

🦸‍♂️Pining Main Characters (8 titles, MANAGED through WAKING UP WITH THE DUKE).

🧑‍🏫Professors (4 titles, PLAYING WITH TROUBE through THE UNREQUITED).

👩‍🔬Stem Heroines (8 titles, THE KISS QUOTIENT through MY FAKE RAKE).

🗣️Great Banter (4 titles, THE VISCOUNT WHO LOVED ME through PLAYING FOR KEEPS).

🔬Microtropes (4 titles, THE POOL BOY through THE WALL OF WINNIPEG AND ME).

Every New Years Eve we tackle some of the more headphones-in stuff in the romance pool. Two years ago, that stuff was breeding kink. Mila Finelli AKA Joanna Shupe joined us to recommend some books.

In the episode, we start out giggling and then get serious as we try to get to the bottom of this very specific thing that seems to have had a recent resurgence in romance. We do patriarchy, body autonomy and heteronormativity, then get into the provenance of this particular romance trope.

These books do a phenomenal job of going on the journey of falling completely and truly in love with someone. Not obsessed or comfortably intimate with, but the kind of love where you want the absolute best for the other person, even when it means letting them go.

These books showcase the kind of love that changes both people in the best ways, especially when they are “dummies” about it, as Sarah and Jen say on Fated Mates. I love when this kind of mutual character development is done well!