Stephanie Beaver is a librarian who has worked in the fiction department at the Hoover Public Library for the past 10 years. While her specific collection responsibilities have earned her the title of “romance librarian” from her colleagues, she has a wide range of reading interests from historical fiction, mystery, fantasy, memoirs and narrative nonfiction. Here are five of her favorite romantic reads.
Meet Me in the Margins
By Melissa Ferguson | Romance
Savannah Cade has a secret. By day, she works as an editor for a publishing house that looks down on popular fiction. In her spare time, she is also an aspiring romance author. After a mishap at a staff meeting leads to her stash her manuscript in a hidden reading room, she returns, horrified, to find edits in the margins. What we know and she doesn’t is that the romance-hating CEO’s son and the company’s newest dreamboat editor is the one exchanging notes that might just lead to a happily-ever-after on and off the page.
Thank You for Listening
By Julia Whelen | Romance
Despite a successful career narrating romance audiobooks, Sewanee Chester doesn’t believe in happily-ever-after, especially not for herself. A disfiguring accident ruined both her film career and her self-confidence, and apart from an uncharacteristic one-night-stand at a book convention, love is a dream long dead. Enter pseudonymous Brock McKnight, the reclusive fellow voice actor set to co-narrate her next job. As the professional relationship they build through texts turns personal, will they be willing to shed their anonymity and risk something real?
Seven Days in June
By Tia Williams | Romance
Fifteen years after a brief but intense love affair, authors Eva Mercy and Shane Hall find themselves face-to-face on a panel at a literary festival, and everyone can sense the sparks flying between them. Alternating between past and present, we see their adult lives unfold as they are forever changed by the one dramatic week they spent together in their teens that ended in Shane abandoning Eva without warning or explanation. More than just a love story, the novel tackles weighty topics like addiction, abuse, single-motherhood and chronic illness that is not for the faint of heart.
Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks
By Shauna Robinson | Romance
Agreeing to a temporary gig running her friend’s bookstore, Maggie Banks is unprepared for the store’s one quirky rule: Only sell books written during the lifetime of the town’s literary star, Edward Bell. Unsurprisingly, the store is on shaky financial ground, and Maggie decides to ignore the rules and sell modern books through an underground book club. Hijinks ensue as she tries to keep her activities secret from the town’s austere literary society, especially Malcolm, who might not be the judgmental literary snob she originally suspected. Rounded out with a cast of lovable small-town characters, you, too, will want to visit Bell River and stay a while.
Possession
By AS Byatt | Romance
Academics studying the famously reclusive Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christobel LaMotte, discover a trove of letters that suggest a heretofore unknown love affair. A parallel romance unfolds between the fictitious poets and their modern researchers that is rivaled only by the more lofty romance that exists between readers and the written word. Winner of the Booker Prize, this intensely readable, engrossing novel is one you will want to read again and again.
