Welcome to the Love Bytes Reviewers’ Best of 2022
Another year has passed in which books have brought all of us a much needed escape and sense of comfort. Our Love Bytes team reviewed approximately 1,300 LGBTQ+ books in 2022, from contemporary romance to fantasy, paranormal, historical, adventure, mystery, comedy and everything in between. Each day for the next few weeks, we will feature one of our reviewers’ top picks from books and audiobooks published in 2022. These lists highlight how diverse our tastes in reading are, and offer something for everyone. With thousands of fantastic new books each year, written by hundreds of creative and talented authors, it’s so difficult to narrow our lists down. We all have many favorite authors not featured here and wish we could acknowledge them all.
Jay’s 2022 Favorites
The end of 2022 has been a rough year for me, so I’m more favoring books that came out early in the year. In fact, some of these you’ll have forgotten were published this year.
Fluke and the Frontier Farce (The Fantastic Fluke #4) by Sam Burns and Fluke and the Fantastic Finale (The Fantastic Fluke #5) by Sam Burns
This series is just so good, and to have the final two books come out this year was exciting & bittersweet. I always want more from the entire set of characters. All are so rich in their characterizations, and to even get part of the story told by Fluke himself was just delightful. Burns has a good sense of balancing the mystery, slight horror & humor all in one set of stories. If you’ve been holding off until the series is over, go ahead and read them right now.
The Trouble with Trying to Date a Murderer (Murder Sprees and Mute Decrees #1) by Jennifer Cody
I came into this book more by accident. Bought it without really knowing much about the book and came away utterly delighted. It was such a bizarre mix of normal and abnormal, I just didn’t know what to expect during the read. Cody was an unknown author to me, so it was out of left field with her excellent writing. The second book did also come out this year, but my heart belongs to the initial book as it was fun to see the characters develop. I love off the beaten path humor and this has loads of it. There’s more being written in the series and I just can’t wait to fall back into that crazy world.
The Damning Stone (Tales From Verania #5) by TJ Klune
It’s always good to get back to the magical land of Verania. Prince Justin finally gets his story & it’s filled with adventure, humor, and some silliness. Striking a better balance than falling into the absurd of some of the other books in the series, this story is somewhat of an “after the ever after” for the main characters that carried through the original four books (and supplemental stories). Prince Justin gets the spotlight and shines in his snark and disdain. Klune is always talented in his balance of fully rounded-out characters that shouldn’t always work on paper, but somehow do in his books. You’d almost want to hate Justin for his haughtiness but he just grows on you. And you’d never expect him to find his match in someone quite his opposite. Klune has stated that there will be no more Verania books and this was a nice send off that wasn’t as sentimental as the fourth, which really was the end of the larger, epic arc.
How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him to Villainy: The Complete Works by AJ Sherwood
This started as a serial that helped make the last part of 2022 fun as each section slowly got released culminating in the complete works at the end of the year. There’s just no way you can’t fall in love with the two MCs. They are forced into ridiculous situations and just aren’t quite what you think of them initially and through the set. I’ve gravitated more and more these days to books with a comedic flavor and this falls squarely in that category.
I know that there are even more good books released in 2022 but I just didn’t get a chance to read them. Just looking through the rest of the other reviewers “Best of” is making my TBR list grow very quickly – so many good ones I missed. Here’s to another year of great books!