Setting Smackdown – Coffee Shop vs. Bakery!

By |2022-11-25T22:36:27-05:00November 23rd, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Romance reading|Tags: |

It’s a weekend morning, and you have time to take it slow. Get yourself a treat. And maybe… meet someone special?

But where do you think you might find your sweet-as-candy sugar pie? In the land of milk and honey, where we go nuts for donuts and are, uh, cross for croissants, because we like big bundts and we cannot lie, cake it until you make it at… A BAKERY!!!!

We may expect bakers to bake love, not war, but remember, if they couldn’t take the heat, they wouldn’t be in the kitchen! In Lucy Parker’s Battle Royal, owners of rival bakeries got off to a bad start on a reality show and are now co-judges competing to make a royal wedding cake. Reality-TV vet Jada, of Jamie Wesley’s Fake It Till You Bake It, and NFL-player-turned-baker […]

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Setting Smackdown: Georgian Vs. Victorian

By |2022-08-15T17:49:21-04:00August 15th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Historicals, Polls, Romance reading|Tags: , , , |

If you’ve been in Romancelandia for longer than twenty minutes, you have probably noticed that the Regency reigns supreme when it comes to historicals. (Yes, for the purposes of romance settings, we’ll consider “long Regency” books to be Regency – that is, books set from around 1795 to the coronation of Victoria in 1837, despite the actual Regency-regency only lasting from 1811-1820). It’s the go-to era for a historical setting, giving us the Ton, Almack’s, the empire waisted gown, the Napoleonic wars, Gunter’s frozen ices licked in slow motion by Regé-Jean Page in Bridgerton…

Bridgerton Rege Jean Page GIF

Where was I, again?

Right. The Regency rules. But what is our SECOND favorite UK historical setting?

Time for a SETTING SMACKDOWN!

Don’t let the pastels fool you – these Neoclassical legends are gladiators through and through! IN THE BLUE CORNER, wearing powdered wigs and panniers, weighing […]

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AAR Loves… Comfort Reads

By |2022-07-27T12:45:50-04:00July 27th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR|Tags: , |

As I’ve been developing our “comfort read” tag, I’ve had time to reflect on the comfort read. Interestingly, while we at AAR label our top grades as “keepers,” I know I personally keep many books which didn’t get a DIK rating. Sometimes, these are books which excel at just one thing (I keep Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Match Me If You Can entirely to reread the secondary romance). But most often, my keepers which aren’t Keepers (if that makes sense!) are the books I turn to when I need comfort.

Books are often in DIK territory because they’re doing something unexpected. While that’s exciting and valuable for the genre, it doesn’t make me feel cozy or soothed. A comfort read does exactly what you think it’s going to do, and usually just when you think it’s going to do […]

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DIKs around the USA

By |2022-07-11T12:15:16-04:00July 4th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Romance reading|

It’s the Fourth of July – Independence Day in the United States! Let’s celebrate with the best romance novels set in all fifty states! 

When I started tagging, I had this really stupid idea to tag by U.S. states. As with cities, I tried to limit myself to books where the state is an important part of the setting, and I’ve stopped tagging books below a B or so. This is still a ludicrous project and I’m not sure I’ll keep up with it (let me know in the comments if you have an opinion!) 

THAT BEING SAID – let’s get something fun out of my mad scheme. For the Fourth, here are DIKs set in all fifty states! I’ve tried to collect a range of genres and mix iconic DIKs which exemplify the state with surprise DIKs you may not have heard about in a while – or ever!  

And if you would like […]

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AAR Loves… Fantasy Romance

By |2022-06-26T08:56:35-04:00June 27th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Reading, Romance, Romance reading, Special Titles Lists|Tags: , |

I originally came to romance through fantasy novels with what AAR would now describe as “strong romantic elements.” (Ok, yes, and X-Files fanfiction. It’s a strong overlap). 

Back before YA got its own major marketing classification, a lot of us teens who were good readers but cognitively still kids found that speculative fiction was a good landing pad between kids’ books and Literature For Adults. My pivotal book was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight, which I read in sixth grade and which will be on my keeper shelf until I die. There was action! There was romance! There was psychic-bonded dragon sex! 

There was no going back.

At the risk of dating myself, other of the “greatest hits” of this era in my life included:

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

Black Trillium by Andre Norton, […]

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Celebrating Emma Holly

By |2022-06-19T20:20:42-04:00June 19th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Romance reading|Tags: , |

AAR was saddened to hear of the recent passing of Emma Holly, who was a trailblazer of erotic romance. For writers and readers alike, her books expanded the definition of what was possible and permissible to publish. Many people remember her books as their first encounters with menages, and her heroes were among the first to be explicitly and openly bisexual.

Readers here voted Holly the winner of Top Erotic Romance of the year twice (in 2006 for All U Can Eat and in 2007 for Fairyville). Our reviewers have given her three DIKs, to her 2001 book Menage in addition to All U Can Eat and Fairyville.

In 2000, Holly joined AAR’s founder Laurie for a conversation about sex and sexuality. The thoughtfulness with which Holly approached her work is evident throughout the conversation, and the whole post is worth a read. I pulled a few of my […]

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Happy Pride!

By |2022-06-19T21:23:54-04:00June 7th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Queer romance, Romance reading|Tags: |

This Pride, AAR wanted to share some of our favorite reads starring less-represented members of the Rainbow Family: the BTQ+ part of LGBTQ+! Read on for our favorite romances starring bisexual, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, transgender, and asexual protagonists, 

Bisexual protagonists: 

Tags: bisexual, bisexual hero, bisexual heroine 

We have LOTS of DIKs of books featuring bisexual characters. Some of the most recent ones are: 
REVIEW HERE
REVIEW HERE


REVIEW HERE […]

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Celebrating AAPI Month 2022 – Great reads by Asian and Pacific Islander heritage authors

By |2022-06-19T21:24:13-04:00May 24th, 2022|Categories: Best of List, Caroline AAR, Romance reading|Tags: , , |

May is celebrated as AAPI Heritage Month in the United States. Here, we uplift and celebrate books by authors of Asian descent and Pacific descent which we have loved since we made our last AAPI Heritage Month list in 2021!
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Shiver me Timbers–I love Our Flag Means Death!

By |2022-05-15T16:19:31-04:00May 16th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Queer romance, Romance reading, Television|

The buzziest romance show streaming this spring turned out not to be season 2 of Bridgerton, but HBO Max’s pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death (you can watch the trailer on HBO’s site here). OFMD stars Rhys Darby as the foppish and massively unqualified “Gentleman Pirate” Stede Bonnet  and Taika Waititi as the legendary Blackbeard (Edward Teach, or ‘Ed’ to Stede). Along with a crew of generally incompetent misfits, the two men misadventure their way across the 1700s Caribbean, and find themselves in the most unlikely of opposites-attract romances.

The show has been praised for its inclusivity. It rejects the common TV practice of queerbaiting, and actually allows Stede and Ed to explicitly fall in love. I watched with my husband, and when we hit the episode where Ed kisses Stede – well, I’d never heard a grown man squee before. (I told […]

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How to use tags instead of our Special Title Listings

By |2022-05-12T21:12:07-04:00May 9th, 2022|Categories: Caroline AAR, Romance reading|

We haven’t updated our Special Title Listings since 2016, but that doesn’t mean we’re not committed to making AAR the best place to find the kinds of stories you want. It’s more searchable and more up-to-date to put this function into our new tags. Many of the tags correspond to the old Special Title Listings categories. Sometimes it’s a tidy exact match; sometimes there are multiple tags for one former Special Title Listing, and sometimes, well, there isn’t a tag that matches up. We’re all volunteers and we can’t get to everything!

If you liked the old STLs, here is a list of tags most likely to help you find the romance novel you’re looking for. The best way to search for these is to go to our new Power Search 2.0 and just type the tag into the search bar! You can also scroll down on the left where you see list of tags and check […]

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