There is definitely a joke to be made about sexy firefighters, romance novels, and Hanukkah – a holiday in which Jewish people light open flames in their homes for eight nights in a row. However, I’m not going to make it because somehow Rebecca Crowley has managed to provide us with Shine A Light, a straight romance featuring a Jewish firefighter and an actress who has recently burned down her apartment, and it is ridiculously sweet.
Our heroine, Ellie, is an aspiring actress who spends her days working as an executive assistant, a job she hates, because it afforded stability and much needed cash while her mother was ill. She remained in the cubicle even after her mothers passing in order to save up enough funds to move to Los Angeles. She generally avoids her home town of Orchard Hill due to painful memories. But all that changes when she is forced to move in with her sister as her apartment is severely damaged by the fire. And lo and behold, her sisters next door neighbor is none other than sexy firefighter Jonah, who offered her words of comfort after the fire.
Ellie and Jonah each have their own family issues to work through, but no matter what is going on, they meet each night at their respective windows to light menorahs together. The book is low heat, the physical romance only extends to kissing, but the tension is definitely there. Ellie and Jonah are attracted to each other but they must each first figure out what they actually want in life before starting a romance.
Crowley has managed to give us a very Jewish sexy firefighter. Jonah is a former rabbinical student, so he is equally capable of waxing philosophical and carrying people out of burning buildings. And in a pivotal scene Ellie remarks on this in a hilarious way. Hanukkah is a holiday of Jewish warriors who defeated a much larger army. They fought not because they couldn’t assimilate into the Greek culture that often prioritized physical prowess, but because they didn’t want to. In a world that sometimes stereotypes us as weak and overly intellectual it is an important reminder that Jewish people can be anything they want to be. On their own terms.
Note: BookishlyJewish received an e-copy of the book after we reached out and requested one.
Everybody has that special book, the one they curl up with when the world is too much and they just need a break. The one that tells them everything will be OK. The one that makes the impossible possible while simultaneously giving the reader a hug. For me, that book is the Friendship and Festivals Romance Series by Stacey Agdern which begins with Miracles and Menorahs.
Protagonist Sarah loves Hanukkah so much, her friends have taken to calling her the Hanukkah Fairy. When the books begins she has recently been named Vice Chair of the Hanukkah festival in the small of Hollowville where she lives. Sounds perfect right? It would be, except a new town trustee has decided the Hanukkah festival would be much better off if it more closely resembled what other small towns do for the winter holidays, namely a Christmas tree and carols. Basically, like every Hallmark movie that refuses to acknowledge the existence of people who do not celebrate Christmas as anything more than tokens, this trustee is determined to bulldoze over the Hanukkah festival unless Sarah can convince the town that Hanukkah is worth fighting for.
She assembles a helpful crew – including a publicist who gets the festival some great press and lots of interested vendors who help her diversify the food offerings to showcase many cultures, but one thing is missing. Nobody can find a sculptor willing to craft a centerpiece menorah, and without it the new trustee will plunk a giant Christmas tree in the center of the festival (taking a moment here to shout out to the tree vendor for exceedingly ethical behavior – you’ll know what I mean when you get there and you will applaud him too). There is one sculptor that comes to mind – Isaac who just so happens to be the grandson of a Hollowville community member, as well as attracted to Sarah, but he is unwilling to participate in an activity he feels might commercialize the holiday. The fall out is a delicate dance for his budding relationship with Sarah.
Plot and characters aside, this book makes me happy because it allows for a universe in which an American town would have a Hanukkah festival at all. A festival in which people of varying backgrounds get together to celebrate something other than the culturally dominant Christian holiday. That’s a beautiful thing. It also includes such fun things as a cavalcade of latkes and an entire fair of fried foods from around the world. It allows readers to think that maybe, just maybe, there might be a place larger than their community center that might be willing to celebrate their holiday with them, whatever that holiday may be.
This is a sweet romance, the highest heat level is a kiss, but it includes a lot of relationship building. It’s a comfort book, pure and simple, about love and yes- miracles. Because that’s what the festival represents to me. A miracle of inclusion. Hopefully it comes true in our lifetime!
Although I am reviewing The Dreidel Do-Over second out of the two currently available Matzo Baller romance books, it is by no means secondary. This book, written by Amanda Usen, is full of food, flirtation, and heat. Plus many interesting games of Dreidel (yes strip dreidel is included). Plus, when read together with its counterpart, The Hanukkah Hook-Up, it is a stunning testament to the power of creative collaboration.
The main character, Talia, is no stranger to collaboration herself. A professional chef who owns a catering company called The Jewish Grandma, Talia is busy ensuring everybody is fed when the Matzo Baller casts off for its yearly Hanukkah cruise. However, that doesn’t stop her from participating in a flirtation via missives and foodstuffs shuttled by servers to and from the hot bartender who is all too happy to reciprocate. When supplies run low, the two end up collaborating on several cocktail and food solutions and Talia discovery that Mr. Sexy Bartender is in fact her long lost friend Asher from Jewish summer camp.
I don’t know what is more quintessentially Jewish – the fact that his name is Asher, the fact that they both went to summer camp, or the fact that Talia has decided to deep fry sweet noodle kuggel in ravioli dough. Either way, it’s delightful and the mixologists’ among us may also find it intriguing to try and mimic the Hanukkah cocktails which come with such names as “Gelt-y Pleasure” and “Halla-Day hangover”. Ingredients are provided, but proportions are not, so this could result in a very fun, very tipsy, book club event for anyone feeling ambitious.
As I read Talia and Asher each sharing their unique strengths and talents, I could not help but notice that the book was set up to focus on the authors unique strengths and talents. This book is much higher heat than its counterpart, with two explicit sex scenes that are hotter than latkes straight out of the fryer, and delves deep into the culinary side of Jewish culture. Hanukkah Hook-Up was more fade to blank with heavy banter/humor. The two books contain no spoilers and can be read in either order, but I do recommend reading them together for the full experience. This will allow you to pick out just how different the styles of the two authors are while also grinning at how the puzzle pieces of the two books fit together. I’m actually really excited to see how they continue the series.
I would also be remiss if I did not mention that this book focused on practicing Judaism your own way, without being judged for “not being Jewish enough”. On a holiday that celebrates our refusal to give up our particular identity and assimilate into the larger Greek culture, it’s particularly apt. It doesn’t matter how you Jew, just do so proudly and without apology for being true to yourself, like Talia the Jewish Grandmother.
Note: BookishlyJewish received an e-copy of the book from the author after she filled out our Suggest A Book form.
Christmas romance is flooding the shelves this time of year, including every variation from small town romance to some very salacious Santa’s, but I’m happy to report that Hanukkah romance is also thriving and creating its own niche in both trad and self pub. A prime example is the Matzo Ballers series, about a set of of friends who gather together every Hanukkah on a Manhattan cruise boat called the Matzoh Baller. The first two books of the series have released in time for Hanukkah and feature the parallel adventures of two of the eight friends.
You can read these books in either order, they don’t contain spoilers, but I started with Jessica Topper’s The Hanukkah Hook-Up because I received it first. On page one, we meet a very stylish but very bogged-down-at-work Nora, who is forced to miss the yearly Matzo Baller cruise in order to greet the team from the Midwest that is planning to buy out her company. Instead of partying it up on the boat with her friends and a who’s who of NY Jewry she’s stuck drinking eggnog and dodging mistletoe at the company “holiday” party which is largely Christmas themed.
Nora is thrown together with the only other Jew present, Alex Beckman, by her obnoxious boss who seems to think it is hilarious there are two Jews at the party. When the aforementioned heinous boss cancels the expected holiday bonuses, Nora decides that enough is enough and flees the party for the boat, taking Alex with her. The two are obviously attracted to each other and Nora proposes a Hanukkah hook up in which they do not discuss work. Turns out this arrangement won’t work though, because new comer Alex is actually the head of the buy out team and everything in the office is not exactly kosher, which is why Norah has been so stressed about work lately.
The office shenanigans are actually solved relatively simply, the book is only 172 pages after all, but my favorite part of the book wasn’t the drama. It was the rapid fire banter and Jewish humor. Never have I felt so fully immersed in Jewish jokes and puns. This book prioritizes the a Jewish gaze and it shows. The writer does not pause every few sentences to explain for the wider audience. Instead she revels in the niche market.
The Hanukkah Hook-Up is an adult romance and the characters are physically intimate several times, but there’s always a fade to black and nothing is explicit on the page. I’d call it medium heat.
From the chapter, when Nora talks about her Hanukkah blue dress clashing with all the red and green on display at the office party, one gets the sense that this is a book written for Jews by Jews. There is enough here in context clues for a person who is not Jewish to understand what is happening, but the book does not beleaguer the point or write to the lowest common denominator. The inside jokes are fast and furious and I smiled so many times. Because this was a book written for me, just in time for my holiday, and I cherish it as such.
Note: BookishlyJewish received a free e copy of this book from the author after she filled out our Suggest A Book form
You’d think that living in a densely populated Jewish state would ensure that I was never the sole representative for my religion in any given group. You would be wrong. A Jewish person, even in the most Jewish of areas, often finds themselves in some isolating situations. Missing commencement dinner on Friday night, unable to eat the food at the office “holiday party,” or my personal favorite – the only writer in the critique group whose characters don’t use the same cultural touchstones as everyone else’s. With supportive peers, it can be a beautiful thing to represent Judaism to colleagues and have them share their own traditions in turn. It can also be exhausting.
Which is all to say that when I met Noah, the love interest of Betsy Aldredge’s YA Hanukkah romance, Eight Dates and Nights, I really felt for the guy and what he was trying to do. The book is told from the perspective of Hannah, a New Yorker who comes out to Texas to visit her grandmother and ends up stuck there for the entire Hanukkah to weather issues. Hannah is feeling alone and sad when she stumbles into the Jewish deli run by Noah and his grandfather. She’s surprised to learn that this small Texas town was once home to a vibrant Jewish community, but now Noah and the deli are almost all that’s left of Jewish culture there.
Does this get Noah down? No it does not. In fact, he’s a one man Hanukkah machine, spreading joy and Judaism so that the history of the towns Jewish community will not be forgotten. He’s so into his Hanukkah mission that he bets he can spread the holiday spirit to grouchy Hannah too. She agrees to help him out at the deli, which is in dire need of saving, and he shows her the Hanukkah magic with a new experience every night.
This is grumpy sunshine relationship goals. Noah’s joy is infectious and Hannah learns that maybe life outside a large Jewish community is still worthwhile, albeit different from what she is used to. But what I loved most of all was Noah’s devotion to representing Judaism, and the towns history. It can be exhausting, and Hannah leaned to appreciate that, but Noah is determined to keep the spark of Judaism – and the deli – alive.
Hanukkah is about making things last, about spreading light to the world, and sharing our miracle with others. Noah was a really great example of that. Sure, sometimes it may feel like the millionth time you have to explain something, but each person and each positive encounter is another small light to the world. May all our torches shine as bright as Noah’s this holiday and spread light and joy to the world.
Note: BookishlyJewish received a copy of the book from the author after she filled out our Suggest a Book Form
September 5, 2023 Atheneum Books for Yound Readers
256 pages
Review by: E Broderick
I am a sucker for Jewish monsters and demons. I devoured the Golem of Prague books as a kid, and while I avoided most horror novels, I delighted in the late night stories about Sheidim we kids would tell each other in the bungalow colony when no adults were watching. Still, my menagerie of Jewish monsters remained fairly small – a tiny flock in comparison to the hordes of mythical beasts and creatures I read about in non-Jewish books and stories. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that Jewish tradition is actually steeped in monster lore and many of the small traditions we practiced – like never fully boarding up a window – were rooted in demonology. Kids today have better reading options and far more access to these stories.
In her debut, Naomi Teitelbaum Ends the World, Samara Shanker gave us a nice picture of golems and one or two other creatures. In the sequel, Rebecca Reznik Reboots the Universe, she dives right back into the well, displaying the fact that according to some passages in the Talmud, everything from stubbing your toe to wearing a hole in your sweater, can be attributed to magical beings up to no good.
The main characters are the same trio of friends we have already come to know and love, but this time Rebecca takes center stage as the viewpoint character. This narrative choice results in two interesting developments for the reader. First, by seeing the former viewpoint character of Naomi through Becca’s eyes, we get a more nuanced feel for her than when we were inside her head in book one. Rebecca is keenly observant and the adage that nobody knows us better than our friends is very true in this case. It was fascinating to see the characters through this new pair of eyes.
The second difference, which is more pivotal to the plot, is that Naomi and Becca’s heads work very differently. Naomi is presented a neurotypical, whereas Becca is neurodivergent. A label is never affixed to her in the text but we are given enough context clues to figure it out and experience Becca’s world her way. This is especially important when it comes to how she views the magical creatures vs. how Naomi does. There is nothing magical about Becca, the book does not fall into the common trap of romanticizing or mythologizing neurodivergence, but rather Becca’s unique viewpoint proves crucial to the plot and resolution.
The creatures that appear in Becca’s home over the eight nights of Hanukkah are some of my favorites, and I guarantee they will be favorites of MG readers too. The shirika panda even appears! (Do not worry if you don’t know what that is. It’s one of the more obscure, but delightful or terrifying depending on who you are, creatures mentioned in Jewish demonology. The trio approaches things with their usual charming optimism and friendship, and some old their allies from the last book make cameo appearances, as do Naomi’s moms who are indeed very different when viewed through Becca’s eyes.
Another major difference between the two books, is that now that the friends are older topics like dating (none of them are interested), and bras now come up. Becca is also struggling to reconcile maturing emotionally with her neurodivergence. She describes feeling sometimes left behind by her friends, despite their reassurances, and a crucial part of the books conclusion is her realization that different is not necessarily a bad thing and that she too is maturing right along with her peers.
I don’t know if we will get a third book from Eitan’s point of view. I’d certainly be interested to see how that shifts the dynamic, and there are plenty of magical creatures left. But in the interim, I’d recommend this one as a great Hanukkah gift to help young readers learn about some of our more entertaining creatures as well as seeing the world from different perspectives. And if that’s not enough, there’s a tiny creature-that-is-definitely-not-a-Hanukkah-goblin holding a dreidel on the cover. What more could you ask for?
Coming of age in the 1960s, anti-Semitism is very personal to me. Corporate recruiters studiously avoided college placement day at Brooklyn College, even though it was one of the best colleges in the nation. Only a handful of companies controlled by Jews — like Macy’s and Gimbel’s were represented.
Two decades later, University Press of America published my first book, The Einstein Syndrome: Corporate Antisemitism in America Today. In it, I mentioned how one of our nation’s largest banks, Morgan Guaranty often held its officers’ picnic on Yom Kippur. The Jewish officers were welcome: they just couldn’t eat anything. Of course, there weren’t any Jewish officers — and even today, there are just a handful.
Back in the 1960s, three quarters of the lawyers in New York City were Jewish, but none of the huge “white-shoe” law firms had even one Jewish partner. Since, then, things have gotten much better on the employment scene, but violent attacks on American Jews are on the rise.
Jacqueline Seewald’s new book, Heart of Wisdom, provides a window on Jewish life during the two decades between the world wars, when conditions for Jews — especially recent immigrants — was considerably worse than it’s been in recent years. Indeed, some of the most successful Jews were gangsters. Newark had the second highest concentration after New York City. You’ll get to meet some of them in this wonderful page-turner.
Like immigrant groups before them, the Jews in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, were not just harshly discriminated against, but they, quite literally, had to be twice as good to get half as much. They were forced to take low-paying jobs, or else earn livings as criminals.
And yet, against heavy odds, the Jewish immigrants of Newark — and other Eastern seaboard cities — climbed the economic ladder, eventually gaining almost full American acceptance. Aside from its being a griping story, Heart of Wisdom provides a window through which to view American immigrant life almost a century ago.
A recovering economics professor, Steve Slavin earns a living writing math and economics books. The proceeds finance his writing short stories. Over the last eight years, Fat Dog Books has published four volumes of “To the City with Love.” He still hopes to write the great American short story.
There were several flavors of science major in undergrad – the small few that were planning on academic research careers, those hoping to go into pharma and industry, and a large contingent of premed and nursing students. Each of these groups had their own little fiefdoms, but cross talk was common, especially when it came to dating. It was not uncommon for a premed to be in a serious relationship with a chemistry PhD hopeful and for the geologists to swap notes with the biotech bros. It was a happy little mash up of nerds. And then there were the dental students. For some reason, I could pick them out of a crowd easily and they never seemed to fully mesh in with the other groups. So when I heard that Mazey Edding’s debut adult romance, A Brush With Love, featured a Jewish dental student hoping to be an oral maxillofacial surgeon, I was game to dive in and get an in depth look at one of these mysterious creatures.
The dental student in question, Harper, is top of her class, has a crew of friends in the health sciences, and also suffers from rip roaring anxiety. As a senior, she is poised to match into her choice of oral maxillofacial residency programs, the result of years of hard work. All of this careful planning is turned upside when she meets freshman dental student Dan, who is what graduate programs refer to as a “non traditional” student, because he took several years off to work in finance before returning to complete his dental education. It rapidly becomes clear that Dan is way more interested in Harper than he is in dentistry. In fact, he has only enrolled in dental school because after the passing of his famous, but verbally abusive, dentist father his mother needs his help in running the family dental practice.
Harper and Dan flirt in the most unlikely of places – including the dental lab while making plaster molds of teeth. It is clear that this book is written by someone who, like Harper, has a passion for dentistry. It is therefore impressive that Dan’s misgivings are given equal weight and the reader is allowed to feel Dan’s ambivalence towards being bullied into a dental career just as much as we experience Harper’s anxiety that this relationship is throwing off the career trajectory that she has dreamed about since she was young. We witness a full blown anxiety/panic attack from Harper as well as some of the harsher memories that Dan has of his father. These subjects are handled delicately and they provide much nuance to the characters.
The banter in this book is fast and furious, however it relied on a little too many double entendres and crass humor for my taste. This is not because the jokes and wit are poorly done. In fact, they all land exactly as they are meant to and this obviously took a significant amount of skill. It will be appreciated by the right reader. I just happen to prefer a different style for humor (which is ironic in the extreme since I prefer high heat in terms of the physical aspects of the relationship). Which brings to my only other quibble with the book. There is a scene that involves a fight that gets physical between Dan and some of the other dental students that harass Harper. I was so very desirous of seeing Dan as a knight in shining armor, and I adored his willingness to step up for Harper, but I wish this hadn’t descended into unnecessary physical violence and that Dan hadn’t been the one to escalate it to that level. I just don’t find that sexy, although I know many people do and will love this scene.
Speaking of reader preferences – this seems a good place to insert my usual description of the books heat level. There are 1-2 explicit m/f sex scenes that are not safe for work.
By the end of the book, I felt like I did learn something about those mysterious dental students, but I also learned something about anxiety disorders, as well as how someone like Harper – who is proud of being Jewish but is not particularly desirous of a daily religious practice – expresses her identity. It was fun to spend some time in her world but also at times scary and even inspiring. She’s a wonderful character and I thought her well-roundness was the strength of this romance.
A Round Up of Funny, Soviet-Jewish Books to Read While The World is on Fire
by: Alina Adams
The world is on fire. And what do Jews do when the world is on fire? Jews pray. Jews raise money. Jews march. Jews fight back. And Jews… laugh.
At least, that’s what I grew up believing. I was born in the former Soviet Union. In Odessa, USSR, in point of fact. Odessa Jews pride themselves on laughing. Especially when there is little to laugh about. (Did you hear the one about Abramovich…)
My family arrived in the United States in 1977. Growing up in San Francisco, CA, I read a lot of books where the protagonists were Jewish immigrants to the US from pre-revolutionary Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, etc… There was nothing from those who managed to escape afterwards.
But now my generation, the one that left the Soviet Union, not the Pale of Settlement, is finally old enough to tell our stories. And many of us are choosing to do it the quintessential Jewish way: With laughter through tears.
While there is no question that Gary Shteyngart, starting with The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and moving through Absurdistan and the autobiographical Little Failure, kicked off the genre, I have to admit: I never quite got him. To me, it felt like those early books of his (I never read any of the subsequent ones) were a list of weird things Soviet Jews did, so that readers could laugh at them. I prefer stories where you laugh with the characters. Especially about those weird things that Soviet Jews do. Maybe it was because his narrators were men, and our experiences were markedly different. Maybe it was because the stories included a deep strain of self-pity, which I’ve never enjoyed. I like tales of people who rise above their unfortunate circumstances, not wallow in them. Maybe that’s a female thing.
Which is why my list of Soviet-Jewish books to read during troubled times include the following, all by women:
Oksana, Behave! by Maria Kuznetsova. There is a tendency, in both fiction and non-fiction, to infantilize immigrants, as well as to turn them into saints. As if the process of becoming an immigrant keeps you from being a well-rounded human being, with noble impulses alongside selfish ones. Now, while it is true that trying to make oneself understood in a foreign language does tend to produce child-like sentences, it does not mean that the people behind those sentences are as innocent or simple as children. In Oksana, Behave! neither the immigrant in question, Oksana, nor any of her relatives are innocent, pure, or sexless. Which makes reading the book a much more entertaining experience.
Mother Country by Irina Reyn. In Oksana, Behave!, we follow the heroine as she grows up, from the USSR to the US. In Mother Country, the heroine Nadia is already a “woman of a certain age.” One who has lived and suffered through the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and is now trying to piece together a life in the United States at the same time as she fights to reunite with her grown daughter. And yet Nadia is also a well-rounded person. She gets angry. She gets frustrated. She gets horny. And she gets sarcastic. Which makes spending time with her worth the effort.
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield by Anna Fishbeyn. There is a certain path immigrant children are supposed to follow. First, you move into a community where everyone is exactly like you. You work hard at school. You go to college. You get certified in a lucrative, yet respectable profession. You marry someone from a community exactly like yours, who is also in a lucrative, respectable profession. You move into a community exactly like yours. You have children whom you raise in a community exactly like yours to follow a path exactly like yours. Being born in America doesn’t mean you’re allowed to plan your own life, like one of those uncouth, disrespectful Americans. This book is what happens when the heroine tries.
Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapnyar. I was one of those immigrant children who dared plan my own life, just like an uncouth, disrespectful American. Chief among my sins was my disinterest in math, followed by my utter inability to understand math. (I suspect a strong correlation.) I married someone who could do math. Alas, he was not from a community exactly like mine. However, he did come in handy when I was reading Divide Me By Zero, so he could explain all the ways in which math was used in this story to express lasting, passionate, and all-encompassing love. I did not know I needed the math equations of love in my life. I was wrong. And this book was what I needed to prove that.
Honorable Mention: Non-Fiction Titles by Soviet Jewish Women
Parenting with an Accent by Masha Rumer. That man I married who could do math but wasn’t from a community exactly like mine also had the audacity not to speak Russian. So when it came to teaching our three children the language, we ended up with a hodge-podge of half-hearted attempts, compromise, resistance, and an older son who spent a year in Moldova to learn what I had failed to effectively teach him. Rumer’s book chronicles families like mine, as well as dozens of other examples, where simply teaching a heritage language proves to be not at all simple, when tradition, culture, and trauma are all added to the mix. And yet, you’re going to laugh!
The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays by Irena Smith. So remember the work hard at school, go to college, get certified in a lucrative, yet respectable profession edict from a few paragraphs ago? What happens when you go ahead and diligently do that? And it doesn’t work out? What happens then? Well, you pivot and start telling other people how to make their children successful. While struggling to do the same with your own. That’s pretty funny. And so is this book.
These are my favorite Soviet-Jewish fiction and non-fiction titles? What do you have to add to this list? Tell us in the Comments!
Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap-opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her first historical fiction, “The Nesting Dolls,” followed three generations of a Soviet-Jewish family from Odessa, USSR to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, while her follow up, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region” shines a light on a little known aspect of Soviet history. She and her American-born teen-age daughter have a YouTube channel where they review post-Soviet books. Visit AlinaAdams.com to learn more.
A few years ago I wrote a YA novel about consent. Now don’t get me wrong, it was an exciting book with plenty of plot- epic fantasy love story, romantasy before romantasy became a thing, high heat, villains you love to hate, even twisty battle scenes. But at its beating heart was a discussion of consent in its various forms. Which is probably why nobody knew what to make of that particular story. It’s still one of my favorite pieces of writing, and I think about it often. Which is why I was delighted to find a very thorough treatment of consent as a plot topic (in a book that does NOT involve any non consensual sex) in Tori Anne Amos’s romance This Spells Disaster.
Martin’s book is a spunky adult f/f romance, which could be equally comfortable on a new adult shelf had that genre ever really taken off. It takes place in a contemporary setting with one slight twist – magic is real and witches are integrated into regular society. The viewpoint character is a potion witch named Morgan who has a tremendous crush on fellow witch Rory, a competitive spell caster who has retired from competition for undisclosed reasons despite being an international sensation. Rory has moved to Morgan’s small New England town and poor Morgan can’t get out two words edgewise when they are together.
Like all good romances, tropes are involved. In this case – to help Rory get her family off her back about returning to competition, Morgan offers to be her fake girlfriend. The idea being that if Rory’s family sees she is happy with her life choices and settling down they might agree to respect her decision to leave the competition circuit. Except Morgan really, really wants this relationship to be real. And so does the reader. Badly. The yearning is palpable and I was helpless to resist it.
In the midst of all the fun “is that real flirting or fake flirting?” shenanigans an accidental love potion gets thrown into the mix and there enters the question of consent and what one should and shouldn’t do with a person under the influence of mind altering substances both magical and not (did I mention Rory works as a bartender?). It adds a layer of emotional sensitivity to what would otherwise feel like fluffy flirting and banter (although it really skilled fun flirting and banter. I was grinning like a two year old with an ice cream cone). The book takes on depth and insight is given into the characters ethical and moral backgrounds.
Rory is clearly a badass. I developed just as much of a whopping crush on her as a Morgan did. I dearly want to know how she lights her Hanukah menorah with magic. However, she is also unfailingly kind and patient. Similarly, Morgan makes some mistakes but she is always ethical. They were a couple I could root for easily. Especially when their relationship also took on an aspect of protecting those around you from the unrealistic expectations of others.
That book about consent I wrote? I don’t know what will ever happen to it. Maybe YA isn’t ready for that kind of thing. Maybe it will jump into the romantasy trend and be a bestseller. Maybe nobody will ever read it. Those things are outside my hands. But as Rory teaches Morgan, it is the act of creation, of doing something I love, that is what matters. Not national acclaim or meeting the goals and expectations of other. Consent is about respecting the autonomy of your partner, which only comes when you recognize them as a person independent of yourself with their own thoughts and desires. They are worthy as they are without any modifications needed. Rory and Morgan both need to experience that in order to become whole. The reader experiences it right along with them. Which is why I think it is worthy as it is too.
Heat level – the book has a lot of flirting and fantasizing with one explicit f/f sex scene.
