Despite romance’s reputation as light comfort reading, the genre has a bass line of chaos pulsing through it — the distinction being that romance presents chaos as survivable, even if your entire world is upended.
Chaos
by Constance Fay
CHAOS (Bramble, 352 pp., paperback, $19.99) is even the name of Fay’s third sci-fi romance adventure, and if you haven’t heard about this series yet then you have three books of nonstop thrills and pew-pew space lasers waiting for you. Our heroine is Caro Ogunyemi, a renegade engineer with a past she’s determined to keep secret. When a chance to repay some of her moral debt sends her on a solo mission to a high-tech prison planet, she recklessly jumps at it. There she finds Leviathan, a murderous super soldier controlled by an implanted chip that inexplicably fails the instant Caro touches him.
From there it’s a race to the finish, as prison riots, malfunctioning tech and inconvenient but irresistible attraction add twists and turns to this roller coaster of a plot.
When the Tides Held the Moon
by Venessa Vida Kelley
Roller coasters feature much more literally in WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON (Erewhon Books, 464 pp., $29), a lushly illustrated historical romance about a sideshow found family, a Puerto Rican blacksmith and a captured merman meant to be the next big attraction at Coney Island’s Luna Park carnival.
