#chantiverse

Character, book, and author names under the cut

If you want queer pirate comedy that has made people tell me they nearly crashed their car while listening to the audiobook, and it's also about resistance against institutional oppression and a plot-relevant cake competition (not really romance-romance, but there is some relationship stuff in that two of the characters have been divorced for 15 years despite never having been married in the first place) -> RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND (this is probably my top rec if you want to get a sense of the worldbuilding AND my writing voice AND kind of the Philosophies and Politics my work stands for)

If you want maximum worldbuilding vibes and a bitchy storyteller who's been thrown in prison for opening his big mouth and then he accidentally starts a revolution (ZERO romance plot) -> A CONSPIRACY OF TRUTHS (and the sequel A CHOIR OF LIES)

If you want Dapper Theater Lesbians in Fantasy Tudor England but it's like Christianity never arrived, and also the Lesbians Commit Arson (lil squinch of romance for flavor but mostly it's about the arson) -> SOME BY VIRTUE FALL

If you want sort of a romance-*shaped* plot arc but it's about two people meeting on the road and becoming platonic besties while they wander through a weird forest -> THE LIGHTS OF YSTRAC'S WOOD

If you're okay with spoilers for the prequel (which was straight-up romantasy) and you want to read about a Sad Man who Conceals his feelings behind Snark while secretly grieving his dead liege lady and he hasn't ever told anyone how important she was to him and the relationship arc is about Fealty -> TADEK AND THE PRINCESS

Book summaries below:

Alexandra Rowland has a way of systematically tearing me apart and then putting me back together better than I was before. The bar was very high for me going into Yield Under Great Persuasion, as I knew from the first time I read the blurb exactly what this book would do to me, but from the first gloriously unhinged sentence I immediately knew that this book was something special.

Rowland has really outdone themself with this novel. It’s more than just a cozy romantasy. It’s a strangely sexy therapy session. It’s a pot of your favorite tea and a bubble bath on a fall evening. It’s the entire spectrum of human emotion in 300-some pages. It’s a thesis on “bittersweet”, on “yearning”, on hoping for better, on laughing through tears and smiling in spite of everything. It’s a weighted blanket of a book.