Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Booking Love
SERIES: Podlington Village Romance #4
AUTHOR: Riza Curtis
PUBLISHER: Independently Published
LENGTH: 106 Pages
RELEASE DATE: October 15th 2021
BLURB:
Excuse me while I curl up and die of embarrassment.
Spencer Heans should be having the time of his life. His latest series hit the bestseller list and he’s headlining the biggest Paranormal Romance Convention held in the UK alongside the amazing Marcus Black. If only his younger, embarrassing, self wasn’t coming back to haunt him.
Trapped in a character of his own creation, Marcus Black is fed up of faking it with a smile. His life is spiralling out of control and the very last thing he wants to deal with on top of a convention full of rabid fans is a fellow author with a crush.
Events conspire, landing the two men at Podlington Guesthouse and offering the opportunity to get to know one another as real people. The beautiful village is the perfect setting for Spencer’s next romance. The only question is whether he gets to be the star…
Welcome to Podlington! The fictional English village where magic happens and dreams come true. This LGBTQ+ Second Chance story is part of the Podlington Village Romance series and can be read as a standalone novella. Booking Love features adorable nerds, terrible flirting, far too much coffee, and a guaranteed happy ending.
The Podlington Village Romance series is written in British English and includes at least one non-binary character. Therefore, they/them is sometimes correctly used as a singular pronoun.
REVIEW:
The fourth installment in the Podlington Village Romance series any of these can be read in any order. That’s both a blessing and a curse. While these books share some relatively minor characters, it’s NOT like any of the main characters re-visit. It very much reminds me of the 70s TV series, Fantasy Island. We have a Roarke character that runs the place, and the front desk clerk is a non-binary Tattoo of sorts (that knits). While that was established early in the first book, we’ve never really learned anything about these characters. We learn only a tiny bit more about the “magical guesthouse” that seems to solve the romantic difficulties of our “guests of the week.”
There’s nothing wrong with this type of series I suppose. However, while reading these I’ve been listening to an M/M romance series along similar lines. Each book shares a locale and a few common characters. However, each book has a different author and different main characters. The thing that works about the other series that seems lacking here is that we know the “full story” behind those inter-book characters. We really enjoy encountering them again when they make an appearance. Since the common characters here have no intricate back story, at least none that we’re ever told, that joy of re-union is pretty much lacking.
Despite all that, each book is enjoyable on its own. In this episode we meet, Marcus Black , a somewhat burnt-out romance writer who’s having to do a Q and A at a convention. He’s dreading a bit. When first starting out, he created a public “persona” that’s very different than his real character in order to be successful at fan events. Here, he meets a newer writer, Spencer Heans. Spencer once gushed about Marcus in a taped interview for his first big seller, and Marcus saw the story.
Marcus is surprised by the younger man. He envies him his enthusiasm and the genuine persona that he uses at public events. When the two discover that they like each other, they begin to orbit each other until the attraction is too strong to deny. I’d say that this is a bit of a slow burn but the temperature isn’t really hot enough to set anything afire. They do end up having sex toward the end of the story. Given that it was two authors though, it’s a shame that it was “nothing to write home about.”
As I said, this book is enjoyable, but it felt a bit self-aware. It’s also a bit odd that these two are the only writers we see from this M/M romance convention (Do they even have such things?) Their “snappy patter” toward the end about being in a romance novel just sort of made this feel a bit too contrived.
RATING: 
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