May old friends be forgot? We don't think so! We're celebrating our favorite reads with five days of the Best of 2012. We asked our bloggers for their favorite recommendations of 2012, with one stipulation, they had to be new to them and not necessarily new to 2012. We know we got a few recommendations to add to our to be read piles and it's a great way to feed those readers!

Don't miss out on the shopping list for these great recommendations once you finish reading, and check out the recommendations from Day One, Day Two, Day Three, and Day Five! Click here to view the Day Four shopping list.

Heather Waters:

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
Rowell’s young adult debut impressed me so much, I immediately purchased her adult novel, Attachments (another enjoyable read). Teenage outsiders Eleanor and Park, each dealing with wholly relatable problems, quickly win you over individually and only become more compelling together.Their story is funny, sweet, sad, and heart-melting—sometimes all at once.

[The best combination possible!]

Find your future faves with this delightfully convenient shopping list of romance novels coming out in October. We’ve divided them up by subgenre to make it easier for those who’ve got a very specific obsession. Don’t forget to take this printable version with you when it’s time to shop!

Heroes and Heartbreakers October Shopping List!

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy/SfR

[Check out the complete list!...]

“I am Eloise. I am six. I am a city child. I live at the Plaza.”

Using a hotel as a plot point is not new to fiction; Eloise, the star-studded movie from 1932 Grand Hotel, The Shining, “Hotel California,” etc. But when it’s used in romantic fiction, the hotel becomes almost another character, a catalyst for the growth and change of the characters.

When a hotel is a character, it primarily serves as one of two purposes: Either the hotel is some place that is an escape from some event, or a chance for a character to channel the rebuilding of their razed lives in a literal way.

In the first example, the hotel is usually glamorous, an ’escape from it all’ kind of place where the sand is sparkling and the drinks are plentiful. Usually, there’s also a hot guy to accompany the hot weather and the cool beverages.

One of the most well-known of this hotel example is Terry Macmillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, where the eponymous heroine takes off for a spur-of-the-moment Jamaican vacation and meets a guy who’s half her age. Stella gets her HEA back at the end of the book, too.

[As she should...]

It’s called crossing genre lines when mainstay adult authors start writing youth adult stories. Some like it, but some feel that these authors are doing nothing more then jumping on the bandwagon, hoping to cash in on this lucrative genre.

I love YA myself. I love that some of my favorite adult authors writing YA. It’s twice the goodness.

I grew up reading John Grisham’s dark legal suspense novels that address realistic world problems. Imagine my surprise when my daughter brought home Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer. Released in May 2010, Grisham brings his legal fortitude to the youth adult playground with a thirteen-year-old protagonist who dreams of grand courtroom adventures. It’s not just Grisham expanding his reading audience, however; below you will find a list of well known adult authors who are penning young adult fiction in hopes of enchanting a different but just as important demographic: Young readers.

[Think you may recognize a few names...]

Find your future faves with this delightfully convenient shopping list of romance novels coming out in May. This time around, we’ve divided them up by subgenre to make it easier for those who’ve got a very specific obsession. Don’t forget to take this printable version with you when it’s time to shop!

Heroes and Heartbreakers’s May Shopping List
Paranormal/Urban Fantasy/SFR

[What’s on your must-buy list this month?...]

Roxanne St. Claire
Barefoot in the Sand (Barefoot Bay #1)
Grand Central Publishing / April 24, 2012 / $5.99

When a hurricane roars through Lacey Armstrong’s home on the coast of Barefoot Bay, she decides all that remains in the rubble is opportunity. A new hotel is just what Mimosa Key needs, and Lacey and her teenage daughter are due for a fresh start. And nothing, especially not a hot,younger architect, is going to distract Lacey from finally making her dreams a reality. 

Love has already cost Clay Walker everything. And if he’s going to have any chance of picking up the pieces of his life, he needs the job as Lacey Armstrong’s architect. What’s not in the plans is falling for the headstrong beauty. Her vision of the future is more appealing than anything he could have ever drafted for himself. Will Clay’s designs on Lacey’s heart be more than she can handle, or will she trust him to build something that will last forever?

Barefoot in the Sand is the first book in Roxanne St. Claire’s Barefoot Bay series. Lacey is a single mom who has lost everything in a hurricane. Seeing the devastation to her home as an opportunity to pursue her dream, she decides that instead of rebuilding her home, she’s going to build a B&B. In walks Clay Walker, architect extraordinaire—or so Lacey thinks. But instead of getting the Clayton Walker, his son shows up instead. Clay is trying to get his career off the ground and thinks that building Lacey’s B&B is the perfect opportunity.

[If you build it, success—and love—will come...]

Many of J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series readers joke that the books are like crack (or “crahck,” if you’re  spelling BDB style), so we went to Twitter and asked what other series are equally crack-like?

Most of the responses were, unsurprisingly, paranormal or urban fantasy, but there were some series offered that did not involve preternatural creatures. Here they are:

• Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series
• Roxanne St. Claire’s Bullet Catchers series
• Erin McCarthy’s Fast Track series
• Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series
• Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series
• Lara Adrian’s Breeds series
• Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark series
• Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series
• Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series
• Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter series
• Christine Feehan’s Carpathians series
• J.D. Robb’s In Death series

What would you add to the list?

Romantic suspense author Roxanne St. Claire has posted an excerpt of her November 30 release, Space in His Heart, which features an astronaut hero (ooh la la!).

From the cover:
When PR superstar Jessica Marlowe arrives at Kennedy Space Center with the mission to make NASA sexy and exciting, she knows exactly how to generate hot publicity.  But the Navy fighter pilot-turned astronaut who gets assigned to be “the poster boy” for the space program isn’t interested in making news...but he’s plenty interested in making trouble.  Sparks fly from the minute Deke Stockard and Jessica Marlow meet and things just get hotter each time they’re together...

From the excerpt:
“Jessica rubbed her temples to ward away the first beat of a headache and decided to thank Stuart and Wendy and say good night. Tugging the door open, her breath caught in her throat as Deke blocked her way....”

To read the rest, get on over Roxanne St. Claire’s website or her Facebook page!

So as you know, the East Coast suffered an earthquake yesterday afternoon. And that led us to thinking about natural disasters, and how they can be used to fling an otherwise reluctant hero and heroine together so they can (of course!) fall in love.

For example, a quick search of “romance hurricane” reveals Roxanne St. Claire’s Like A Hurricane, where a resort owner and a speculator encounter each other post-hurricane. There’s Mary Balogh’s The Notorious Rake, where the heroine’s fear of thunderstorms causes her to crawl into the hero’s lap, and more, in the first chapter. Perhaps not a true natural disaster, but she certainly thought so. Kristin Hannah’s When Lightning Strikes is a time-travel romance where the heroine is flung back in time from a lightning bolt. And Josie Litton’s Fountain of Secrets has its hero and heroine meet when a once-dormant volcano is becoming active again.

Maybe there’s a romance playing out now in real life between an insurance adjuster and a small business owner whose shop suffered damage. Can you think of more natural disaster romance novels?

So what’s bringing people down to New York City’s Posman books in the midst of this crazy August heat? Plenty of cool things to read:

Miranda Neville’s Amorous Education of Celia Seton and new-to-us author Jennifer Haymore’s Confessions of an Improper Bride are making historical readers across the board very happy. Liz Carlyle’s newest, The Bride Wore Scarlet, is fueling sales of Carlyle’s backlist titles, including No True Gentleman, Two Little Lies and the first in this new series, One Touch of Scandal.

Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Retribution and Thea Harrison’s Storm’s Heart are topping paranormal readers’ lists. Readers are also looking to catch up with Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series and titles they’d missed by Jessa Slade and Molly Harper.

[But wait, there are more!...]

I don’t really like motorcycles. For starters, they’re noisy, obnoxiously so if they have those big pipes that amplify the sound. They can be smelly too, especially when the exhaust fumes get sucked into your air vents. I know I can’t be the only one who gets irritated when motorcyclists weave in between all of us cars stopped on the freeway while they’re zooming towards freedom.

But. . .

Pair a motorcycle with a sexy romance hero, and all my grievances are forgotten, because I am instantly smitten, with the man and the machine. I’ve discovered a few heroines who also succumbed to motorcycle men, for a variety of completely justifiable reasons.

[Aren’t they all justifiable?...]

They got Romance in my Suspense! Or is it Suspense in my Romance? 

With one foot in romance and the other in suspense, romantic suspense is a strange beast.  And for the reader who knows how much romance they want in their suspense, and conversely how much suspense they want in their romance, it can be difficult to tell from the label on the spine what to expect from a new author. If only there were an FDA label on the back listing the percentages of romance and suspense in each book. 

Since it doesn’t look like the FDA will start checking the percentages any time soon, we readers are forced to rely on each other to learn which books to try and which to avoid. To that end, I’ve performed my own Goldilocks routine and found three bears romantic suspense authors whose titles are “just right” at 50% romance / 50% suspense.

For the full article on three authors who’ve found the perfect mix of romantic suspense, visit our sister crime fiction and mystery blog, CriminalElement.com.

Songs that tell stories appeal to me, both as a reader and writer of romance fiction. Tropes that populate the romance genre can also be found lurking within the lyrics of popular story songs. Here are a few depicting our favorite heroes:

1. The Reformed Rake

I’ve got a couple of favorite musical depictions of the reformed rake. But the one I come back to again and again is classic ’80s southern rock band 38 Special’s “Caught Up in You.”

Our hero, the speaker in the song, begins his song by expressing his disbelief that he is the one begging his woman not to let their love “slip away.” After all, he’s a rake. We know this because he tells us so—“Don’t you know the kind of man I am?”

[We do now!...]

Ahh, the noble hero. How can you not love a man who is selfless, stoic, and self-sacrificing...well, at least until he tells the heroine The Big Lie, the one that starts out, “You’re better off without me.”

The hero decides, on his own, without consulting the heroine, that it’s best for her to move on with her life, leaving him behind. While he doesn’t do this lightly, and he genuinely wants to ensure she has a better future, his noble actions usually end up breaking the heroine’s heart (not to mention the reader’s).

Let me show you what I mean:

Shattered by Joann Ross—Shane Garrett is an Army Night Stalker pilot, cocky and confident, and completely in lust with Army doctor Kirby Campbell. They spend many hours in bed before he leaves on another mission, and they don’t meet up again until he is brought, severely wounded, to the field hospital where she works. She does her best to patch him up so he can make it out alive to a military hospital. When she goes to visit him there, after his leg has been amputated, he does everything possible to send her away, insisting whatever feelings they’d had for each other were merely a result of the wartime environment. She tries several times to change his mind, but to no avail:

[What does she say? What does he say?...]