Fated Mates

The last few years have brought a wave of romances with magical elements—not really paranormal, not really witches, not really contemporary — books where something is just slightly ✨magic✨. Today, we’re talking about those books, how they work, what they’re saying, and how they w

Once upon a time, Sarah went to Sweden and met a thriller writer who likes talking about the rules of writing in genre as much as we do. We’re so excited that to be able to bring Anders de la Motte’s brilliant thoughts about thrillers and mysteries to Fated Mates in this far-reac

It’s summer, so we’re talking Country House Parties! We’re skulking around, having scandalous meetings in cupboards, getting caught in the rain near the groundskeeper’s cottage, and generally causing chaos during a summer party at an enormous country house where someone is defini

F1! WNBA! NY Nicks! World Cup! We swear we're not turning into a sports podcast, but we did feel like it's a great time to rerun our most recent Sports Romance episode with the brilliant Jessica Luther. But first, Jen talks with Cleveland Soccer Group CMO and Cleveland Astra cofo

We’re filling summer reading lists and making sure that you have plenty of beach reads ready for whatever your plans are! It’s hard to believe it’s July, but we’ve got another quarterly upcoming romance episode here to ease the pain of half the year already passed! Here’s a huge

Is it our birthday? It is not! But who says you need to celebrate a birthday in real life to celebrate birthdays in romance novels? Not us! Today we’re talking about books that focus on birthdays — something that you would think would be more common in romance. We talk about birt

We’re back with a deep dive on one of our favorite recent romances, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams! We talk about yearning in contemporaries, about books that have a powerful sense of place, about dual timelines, about secondary characters, about lines that stick with us year

This week, we’re visiting with Mary Kay Andrews, a longtime writer and certified badass who we adore for her WTAF Wednesdays and her delightful books. We talk about her writing journey, her decision to get publicly, vocally political, and about her new book Road Trip. We had a gr

We’re celebrating the paperback release of These Summer Storms this week, and that means we’re talking about the weather! We talk about rain and snow and wind and tempests and tornadoes and monsoons, and we talk about why we all like weather in books so much (hint, it’s because i

This week, we’re joined by one of the greatest, Veronica Roth, whose new book, Seek the Traitor’s Son, features one of her most beloved of tropes: Sad Boys Who Punch Things. We were delighted when she suggested we do an episode on this very particular, very delicious romance conc

We are thrilled to have two of our favorite people with us today to discuss one of our favorite genres! Ali Hazelwood and Adriana Herrera, the masterminds behind the AH2 Kickstarter of Historical Trailblazers are here to talk about all the ways historical romance is unmatched! We

We’re deep diving into one of our favorite historicals from the 00s today — Jennifer Ashley’s The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie. It’s a great follow up to our Paris episode last week, but we also talk about how Ashley really wrote the heck out of this book. We talk about widows,