The suspense market is so glutted right now that is easy to find amazing books to fill your shelves. It is equally easy to find books which sound intriguing but wind up being deeply disappointing. To help you separate the gold from the dross, Shannon and I have compiled a Best Of List sure to be of use to even the most finicky of readers.
Maggie: 
And, here it is, the AAR staff’s picks for the very best books of 2018. We ask each reviewer to pick her favorite book of the year and then we share the compiled list with you. This list isn’t one we all agree on nor is it one that we’d argue is definitive. Our Best Lists is idiosyncratic. Each pick is a reflection of a reviewer’s druthers, experiences and expectations, and is limited by what she personally read in the past year. These are, quite simply, books we individually loved.
We’d like to know what you loved too and hope you’ll share your picks with us in the comments.
Here’s to us all reading well in 2019!
As I’m sure other people have said, pretty much any book on my Best Of list could qualify […]
2018 was not my favorite year. The world, including Romancelandia, was full of anger and sadness, and most of the time I felt as if I had no idea how to do my job well. I’d pick up a romance, try to read it, and, again and again, be resistant to its draw. By midyear, I despaired of finding books I loved enough to want readers to experience their magic. But I underestimated the strength of our world, and by the end of December, I found myself with a list of books I genuinely loved, all of which brought me joy. Here, in no particular order, is my list of the best of 2018.
Caz and others on staff who read primarily historical romance are on record as saying that 2018 was a […]
I’ve read some terrific books and some dire books this year – which is par for the course when you review as many of them as I do – but my genre of choice, historical romance, was, in the main, fairly disappointing in 2018. Even some of the authors I can usually rely on to deliver absorbing stories with emotional depth featuring appealing, multi-faceted characters haven’t delivered to their usual standard, and I’ve found myself looking to other sub-genres more than ever before to supply the steady diet of strong and compelling reads I need in my life! […]
I think I’ll be just shy of my reading goal for 2018, but maybe that’s a good thing because it was a really tough job to narrow down my favorites for the year from the ones I did manage to read! In my preferred category of contemporary romance there are many that exceeded my expectations and I’m taking this as a promising sign for the genre in 2019. Here’s a glimpse at the books that caught my eye and heart this year.
Is there a ‘best of’ list that doesn’t have this contemporary romance on it? For all the reasons you’ve probably heard, it’s made my list too. An #OwnVoices novel with a personal look at autism and Vietnamese family dynamics, it’s a delight from start to finish (and super […]
Since I’ve been discovering series I missed the first time around, a lot of my happy 2018 reading experiences have been of the backlist variety. However, this was a good book year for me in current releases as well. One book I had long been anticipating turned out to be a DNF bust, but I found plenty of other treasures. I’ve listed my favorite first, but otherwise my picks are in no particular order.
I’d been looking forward to this book for over a year, and it was probably my favorite 2018 read. It’s romantic, and there is so much meat to the story that I find myself thinking about it months after having read it. This tale of a French prisoner of war assigned to board with a family in New York can […]
I read a lot of romance in 2018. My list of favorites is shorter than in years past, but I liked my favorites so much, I read most of them more than once – and I thoroughly enjoyed each of them all over again!
Happy reading!
Friends, I hate that cover too. But look beyond it! Salt Magic Skin Magic is magical. Romantic. Suspenseful. Mysterious. Sexy. It’s all those things and a tremendously engaging story. Featuring a pair of opposites – Soren, Lord Thornby, magically entrapped on his family’s rural estate, and John Blake, a magician who specializes in inanimate magic – this enemies to lovers romance is compelling and engrossing from start to finish. The principal characters are terrific, the story is wildly imaginative and clever, the writing is excellent… and […]
2018 was an unusual year for me in that I made a very aggressive effort to read books published this year. I deluded myself into thinking that with this hard work, by the time I got to making this list, I’d actually have read everything good from 2018 and would be able to make a list that was totally comprehensive. […]
Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when I have to distil all sorts of pleasurable reading into a list of the books I enjoyed the most. Such a difficult task! I started out thinking there were only a few, then I would talk to someone or look back through my ebook library and notice something else, and next thing I knew I had enough favorites to fill two blog posts. After much debating, here is my pared down list.
As I looked over my favorites, a bit of a common theme popped out at me. For whatever reason, many of the books this year involved main characters who had some sort of history together. As friends, lovers, or enemies, these first five books all have that in common.
This […]
Humans learn through stories – the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we’re told, the ones we tell about others. This year, Netflix gifted us all with Hannah Gadsby’s brilliant Nanette (which you must watch if you haven’t!) that makes that point achingly well. After watching it, I spent a lot of time thinking about the stories romance tells – especially the ones I needed to hear this year. Hence, my list. The following – in no particular order – are the ten books released this year that brought me joy, immersed me in another story, celebrated love, and centered women.
I have bought approximately five copies of this book to give to friends, sent with a post-it that they must read this. Count this as my post-it to you: this is making appearances […]
