Kennedy Dawes has done everything right. Every matchmaking site. Speed dating. Well-meaning friends setting her up with candidates of varying degrees of suitability. She even applied for a reality TV show called Fairytale Love on the advice of people who apparently believed that was a reasonable path to a healthy relationship. On her therapist’s advice, she has written down in excruciating detail everything she is looking for in a partner—the full manifesto of Mr. Right—as a manifestation exercise. 💛
There is only one problem: she cannot get Mr. Wrong out of her head. The third installment of the Savage Brothers series delivers the specific romantic comedy pleasure of watching a person’s very thorough, very logical plan for finding love collide with the complete inability of feelings to follow a rubric. Kennedy’s list is real and well-considered and entirely beside the point, which is the premise operating at full efficiency. The man she cannot stop thinking about is not on the list. He is, in fact, more or less the opposite of the list. 😅
Melanie Shawn brings the same warmth and comic timing to the third Savage Brothers installment that has made the Whisper Lake series a consistent pleasure across its run. The ongoing community she has built across the series gives each new romance its grounding—characters who feel like people with histories rather than archetypes dropped into a plot—while the specific setup for Kennedy and her Mr. Wrong delivers the fresh-feeling conflict that keeps readers returning installment after installment. The manifested ideal versus the unavoidable reality is one of romantic comedy’s oldest engines, and Shawn runs it with genuine skill. 🌟
What makes this irresistible: Melanie Shawn delivers the third Savage Brothers romance with her signature warmth—a woman who has tried every possible route to Mr. Right, a detailed written manifesto of exactly what she wants, and a Mr. Wrong she cannot get out of her head no matter how many boxes he fails to check. 🌟
Frankie arrived on the Greek island of Kathos to lick her wounds and figure out her next steps—not to become another notch on anyone’s bedpost. Nik Kontarinis is infuriating, arrogant, demanding, and a volunteer firefighter, which is the kind of combination that makes him disturbingly attractive while she is trying to maintain a principled distance from exactly that type. Her first thoughts about him are not encouraging regarding her ability to stay unentangled. 🌊
A villa restoration project presents the opportunity Frankie has been looking for: a chance to reboot her business and her life on her own terms. There is only one problem. The project needs a business partner, and the most obvious candidate is Nik—who offers her terms that are too good professionally to decline and who has definitely attached strings to the arrangement that she will need to navigate. The structure of the deal is a workplace romance wrapped in a destination setting, with the Greek island providing the specific atmospheric pressure that makes maintaining professional distance a project requiring constant active effort. 💛
Joanne Walsh writes contemporary romance with the sun-drenched Mediterranean setting and heat that gives the Greek Island Millionaires series its particular appeal—a world of gorgeous landscapes, wealthy heroes, and heroines who arrive with their defenses up and find the location working against them. The bargain premise gives the novel its momentum: an arrangement where both parties know what the terms are and both parties are pretending the subtext is not happening, which is the specific romantic comedy situation where the subtext always wins eventually. 🌅
What makes this irresistible: Joanne Walsh launches the Greek Island Millionaires series with a sun-soaked destination romance—a woman on Kathos to lick her wounds, an infuriating volunteer firefighter millionaire with a villa restoration project, and a business arrangement with strings she absolutely intends to manage. 🌟
Beatrice has grown up under the shadow of a family curse—one that promises misfortune upon her family’s future unless she marries before her twentieth birthday. It was easy enough to ignore while the deadline was distant, but time has a way of arriving faster than expected, and her twentieth birthday is suddenly very close. She is utterly conflicted: she has not found true love, she would genuinely prefer spinsterhood to a loveless marriage, and yet her family’s fear and her sense of responsibility for their safety press her toward a decision she does not want to make. 👑
Anthony notices Beatrice before he has any context for who she is—her striking presence catches his attention, and a moment later he saves her life by pulling her out of the path of an approaching carriage. It is the most luck he has had in some time. His own family name carries rumors that are, if anything, worse than hers: society has condemned him based on whispers he knows to be false, but knowing the truth and convincing anyone else of it are entirely different problems. He is, by the world’s assessment, already disgraced. 💛
Aria Norton builds the Noble Hearts and Hidden Desires Regency romance on the specific pleasures of two damaged reputations finding each other—a heroine racing a supernatural deadline and a hero fighting a social condemnation he cannot disprove through conventional means. The curse gives the novel its urgency and its emotional stakes without overwhelming the romance, and the question of whether Anthony’s genuine feelings can overcome the concerns that wrap his tainted name gives the resolution its weight. 🌹
What makes this captivating: Aria Norton delivers a Regency romance of genuine emotional stakes—a lady racing a family curse toward her twentieth birthday, a hero condemned by rumors he cannot disprove, and the question of whether sincerity of feeling is enough to overcome what society has already decided about both of them. 🌟
Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life
The dominant cultural image of religious seriousness is a solemn one—faith as gravity, devotion as the suppression of levity. Father James Martin, SJ, one of America’s most beloved Jesuit writers and the New York Times bestselling author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, has spent his career arguing that this image is wrong, and Between Heaven and Mirth makes that argument with both theological rigor and genuine humor. Joy, he contends, is not incidental to the spiritual life. It is the inevitable result of a healthy faith. 😂
The evidence he marshals is rich and varied: scriptural passages that have been systematically under-read for their comedy and warmth, the lives of the saints rendered as the hilarious and touching stories they actually are when you get close enough, the spiritual teachings of multiple traditions that consistently associate genuine holiness with genuine lightness. His own experience as a Jesuit priest—a life organized around community, contemplation, and a tradition with its own very specific comic sensibility—supplies the personal dimension that keeps the argument grounded in actual life rather than abstract theology. 🕊️
Martin writes accessible religious nonfiction with the wit and warmth that has made him a trusted guide for readers who want their spiritual reading to challenge them without exhausting them. Between Heaven and Mirth is not a light treatment of a serious subject—it is a serious treatment of what the tradition actually says about joy, delivered with enough humor to demonstrate its own thesis. The invitation at the center of the book is a revolutionary one: that changing your life and saving your spirit might happen not through seriousness and gloom but through laughter. 💛
What makes this essential: Father James Martin delivers a joyful challenge to Christianity’s solemn self-image—drawing on Scripture, the saints, and multiple spiritual traditions to argue that joy is not incidental to faith but its inevitable result, written with enough humor to prove every point it makes. 🌟
Julia Crawford has endured a lifetime of subtle ridicule as the plump, silly daughter of a prominent Boston family—the kind of dismissal that accumulates quietly and shapes a person’s understanding of what they are worth. She strikes out on her own, traveling to the Midwest to marry an aging shopkeeper and care for his mother. The independence is real even if the circumstances are unconventional, and Julia arrives in her new home with the determination of someone who has finally stopped waiting for the world she was born into to see her clearly. 💛
Jake Shelling has been practical his entire adult life—because he had to be. His parents died of influenza when he was sixteen, leaving him with a half-cleared South Dakota farm and two young sisters. He spent the next two decades getting them raised and the farm viable and himself to a point where he could think about his own needs for the first time. At thirty-five, he has decided sons and a mail-order bride will suit him fine. No expectations of love. Just a helpmate from sturdy stock, ready for the work of farm life. 🌾
Holly Bush writes American frontier historical romance with the period authenticity and emotional warmth that the genre demands—characters whose circumstances are shaped by the specific realities of Midwest prairie life in the late nineteenth century, whose practical arrangements discover unexpectedly that practicality and feeling are not as separable as either party assumed. The Boston sophisticate and the South Dakota farmer are, on paper, a mismatch that will require adjustment from both sides. The secrets that threaten Julia’s chance at love give the novel the tension that keeps the romance from resolving too easily. 🌅
What makes this heartwarming: Holly Bush launches the Crawford Family series with a prairie mail-order bride romance of genuine warmth—a Boston debutante striking out for independence, a South Dakota farmer with no expectations of love, and the slow discovery that what both of them needed was something neither had planned for. 🌟
Jane Hunter is sixty years old and has just been pushed into early retirement from her career as a university librarian. She is seeking a new challenge—something to supplement a meager pension and keep her mind working at the level it has always operated. The job she finds is unusual: Cameron Clewe, an eccentric thirty-three-year-old collector, needs an archivist to inventory his ever-expanding compendium of rare books and artifacts. Jane is thrilled. The collection includes a trove of items related to classic mystery and detective authors, which is exactly the kind of professional paradise a librarian with her sensibility would design for herself. 🔍
Then a body turns up in Cam’s library. The victim is the heir to a pharmaceutical fortune—and, it emerges, the last in a line of Cam’s failed romantic relationships. He is immediately suspect number one. Cam’s response is to vow to use his intelligence and deductive abilities to clear his name, which would be more reassuring if he did not also have a slight case of agoraphobia, rampant anxiety, and limited social skills. The investigation that he plans to conduct from inside his own collection is going to require help. Jane is the help. 💀
Victoria Gilbert builds the Hunter and Clewe partnership on the specific pleasure of mismatched detectives whose complementary limitations make them effective together—the sixty-year-old librarian’s social intelligence and institutional knowledge paired with the young eccentric collector’s deductive reasoning and magnificent collection. The rare books and classic mystery artifacts setting gives the series its particular cozy appeal. 📚
What makes this charming: Victoria Gilbert launches the Hunter and Clewe Mysteries with a traditional detective series of genuine warmth—a retired librarian, an eccentric collector with anxiety and a body in his library, and a partnership formed because one of them cannot go outside and the other one can. 🌟
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3