Recent Romantasy and Other Romance Books for Your Book Club

This romantasy is delightfully full of plant witch magic and follows the cursed women of the Flores family. It’s this curse that gives them a sprinkling of magic, magic that Sage Flores has been trying to avoid ever since her sister Sky died eight years ago. Now, as she begrudgingly returns home, she folds back into her old life. She resumes her old job at the Cranberry Rose Company, where her ability to communicate with plants comes in clutch. But, it’s also where she’s reunited with her first love, Tennessee Reyes, who broke her heart back in the day. Thing is, the Tennessee of today is more mature, and — as she contends with the rare plants they have to find and ghost sisters — he may prove to be hard to resist.

Well, one of those things is that Sam Becker didn’t technically come down with a case of amnesia. Even though that’s what he told his surly boss Jonathan Forest when he sensed he was about to get fired from his managerial position at a bed and bath retailer. But now that he has lied, he’s starting to regret it — partially because Jonathan’s guilt surrounding Sam’s fake accident is showing unexpected, softer sides of him. And as they grow closer, telling the truth gets harder.

Yulin Kuang wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation and directed the upcoming Beach Read adaptation. Suffice to say, she’s knee-deep in her contemporary romance bag. Here, she gets a little meta with the story of Helen Zhang, a bestselling author who’s earned the position of writer for an adaptation of a popular YA novel. Everything is going well until she finds out Grant is a screenwriter on the show as well. Now, the two will have to confront the horrible accident that connected them 13 years ago, even as they’re reminded of why they liked each other in the first place.

Okay, so the premise of this latest romance by the bestselling Painter hinges on what has to be the most hater job ever: professional wedding objector. Max is the first objector we meet in the story. He’s the one who Sophie hires to object to her marrying her fiancé, since she’s too scared to break it off. On the one hand, a wedding objector may be helping to stop someone from wasting years of their life being married to the wrong person; but it appears the reason Max does it is that he is cynical when it comes to love — i.e., he is a hater. But when he and Sophie start working together as professional objectors, they grow closer. Then his ex’s current fiancé hires them to object to her wedding, and Max starts to have reservations.