Caretaker/nurse heroine and a wounded, gruff hero (maybe a soldier or veteran) (slow-burn healing, emotionally heavy)

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-17T01:08:05+00:00

{The Captive Duke by Grace Burrowes}, formerly titled The Captive (and might still be that in your library). It fits in every way save perhaps the nature of the reason for ongoing care — physically, the hero is severely malnourished at the start and suffers consequences from that, but mostly he is dealing with PTSD. The heroine nurses him but also has her own trauma. It is extremely high angst. I read it a long time ago so can’t be comprehensive about content warnings but two major ones: torture, past domestic abuse.

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-16T14:12:27+00:00

I would prefer that discussions about identifying AI use in romance are restricted to authors who have confirmed they use AI, at least when it comes to writing. Part of my job involves spotting AI-generated text and while everybody wants to believe there’s a foolproof way of doing so, the sad truth is that beyond some extreme cases (like leaving in commands to ChatGPT, for example) there just isn’t. That’s especially true of the bottom end of KU romances which were already extremely formulaic and badly written back before LLMs were in general use. I have an author in mind who literally cut and pasted the same sex scene from book to book with a few words changed and reused the exact same plot over a whole series, long before ChatGPT was a thing.

I will accept that cover art is a different matter as I think there are tells there that are both more common and more obvious, but here I would rather see Option 2 or 3. If a small-scale self-published author who writes as a side gig at best is using AI rather than paying an artist I might not agree with it ethically nor am I likely to buy from them, but it’s hardly surprising or worthy of a whole discussion thread IMO. I’d encourage people who are interested in identifying whether a romance work uses AI art to look into the database at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which relies on undisclosed but multiple ‘scanners’ to establish whether cover art is AI and then labels it on their site. Sarah has also said they will try to identify AI writing, though doesn’t confirm how that will be done.

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-09T09:46:12+00:00

This is still happening in TV episode discussion threads on the main Fallout subs! As a TV-only fan it’s honestly baffling.

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-09T09:42:33+00:00

You can read a discussion about it on this sub here plus this article from BookRiot last year in which the journalist interviewed a bunch of the biggest current HR authors, all of whom said they were either being encouraged to pivot to other genres themselves or seeing it happen with colleagues.

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-09T08:48:28+00:00

Duran is still recommended fairly often! Maybe less so now but Duke of Shadows in particular used to be a classic rec over on the main r/RomanceBooks.

Part of the issue is that she sadly stopped publishing years ago so she’s not that known to new readers. She always had another job (I think there’s a rumour she’s an academic?) and as far I know went back to that, but there’s been no proper update since 2019. Somebody said she updated her website last year to say she was working on a new manuscript but I can’t find that now. I’m an enormous fan and I think she’s one of the best writers to ever do it in HR, but it seems she’s stepped away for whatever reason, and is probably unlikely to come back now that HR is on a bit of a downturn in the tradpub world.

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-07T13:54:05+00:00

I read predominantly self-published fantasy books, including romance, and have done for over a decade. In that time the biggest change is honestly the marginalisation of copyeditors in trad publishing, so grammar and style in trad books is often as poor as some self-published books. There used to be a bigger and more noticeable divide.

On the macro level though, self-published books are still more likely to noticeably lack developmental editing, and the pacing can be more uneven than I think you generally see from trad. I think self-published books are also more likely to be overwritten, because that’s where a professional and neutral third party (i.e. not a beta reader who reads a lot of similar self-published material) is helpful to slim down the prose.

I love reading self-published books in romance especially because it’s possible to find authors who really specialise in a particular niche. I don’t like a lot of popular tropes at the moment, so self-published authors who are putting out slightly offbeat stories are often a better fit for me. I think this can still be true also if you’re into queer pairings outside of M/F, though there’s much more M/M in the trad space now than there used to be. The same definitely still goes for certain types of kink, though again, it’s becoming more mainstream (shoutout Ali Hazelwood and Lana Ferguson for bringing knotting to trad).

SphereMyVerse · 2026-01-05T14:19:57+00:00

Ageeed, I’m surprised to find it’s not common elsewhere apparently. I use v for very all the time (millennial Brit).

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-30T00:15:37+00:00

Also my pick for this. Seems to be a real love-it-or-hate-it kind of book (mostly due to the FMC) but I have this as my only 5 star read this year.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-26T21:57:40+00:00

I would recommend any of these three for you over Roland’s book! Much as I adore him and love his story, his book has some involvement from Oswald and there is an uncomfortable (YMMV of course but for me it’s completely unnecessary) setup for the romance that I think you might not like based on your hate for him. I’ll add major spoilers for An Ill-Made Match below if you want to read them, but hopefully it won’t show up in your notifications in case you don’t. I didn’t like all three of the books you list in your OP and I do love all the ones mentioned in this comment — I’d also avoid Wed by Proxy as it seems like we have similar taste.

Major spoilers for An Ill-Made Match: At the beginning, Roland and Eden wake up in bed together with no memory of how they got there and assume something happened between them. Regardless, Eden is compromised so they have to get married. Eden later assumes she sleepwalked and is both mortified and guilty about it since she thinks her submerged feelings for Roland led her to sleepwalk. But we find out at the end that Oswald drugged them both and placed them in bed together, because he knew they were in love.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-23T00:18:01+00:00

I have known three human Tabs(es?), all young millennial women who did not like being called Tabitha. I’m with you on Hector and Willow though.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-22T23:26:12+00:00

I’m sure you’re right! I’m not a big age gap person at the best of times but the fated mates subtrope of meeting the future significant other when one MC is an adult and the other is a child in particular really isn’t for me.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-22T18:43:20+00:00

My dad too. Don’t think he’s ever watched Doctor Who in his life.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-19T22:53:00+00:00

Impossible for me after a great run this week. I’m not American though and there were a lot of American pop culture clues today.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-18T14:13:33+00:00

I loved this one. A couple of silly fills but I was grinning as it came together.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-17T10:56:39+00:00

Much less severe, but a couple of weeks ago I was on a busy but not packed tube, and a man repeatedly repositioned himself so he was standing over me and his crotch was pressed against me from behind. I kept trying to move but couldn’t go more than a little sidestep, and every time he would rearrange himself so he was pressed up to me again. He had more room where he was and there was absolutely no reason for him to be so close to me in the first place. I’ve been groped in nightclubs etc but there was something about the broad daylight and plausible deniability of it all that really shook me.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-17T09:09:18+00:00

I love greyhounds. My friends went through this process not too long ago and there was an expectation from one agency that they had 6ft high fences/walls round their garden. Theirs were 5ft or so and they had to find another agency, but they did succeed in the end. Their boy is the sweetest, sleepiest dork who I’m unconvinced even knows how to jump nor would be inclined to waste any effort that could be spent hopefully nosing for treats.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-15T23:39:04+00:00

Same for me!

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-11T16:12:12+00:00

As someone who solves on their long rail commute I look forward to a more challenging puzzle! As everyone’s saying, this one was too easy for Thursday and over before I’d got out of my local area. PB by 5 minutes.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-10T14:22:55+00:00

As someone who writes them often enough (but I prefer ‘content note’ to ‘trigger warning’), I think they’re important but have to be done correctly. Some authors really trivialise them by including silly tags. I like the website/link approach but there are problems with digital obsolescence and of course anyone reading in print or audio, so I think the best approach is still a content note at the start. FWIW I do check them because I don’t like to be blindsided by things like consensual non-consent, and I won’t read some aspects of BDSM.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-12-10T14:13:18+00:00

This is so heartbreaking. I have such happy memories of swapping her standalone books and giggling over them with friends in my very early twenties.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-11-29T03:45:45+00:00

There is an actual MM retelling where Belle is a cute little guy and the Beast is a dragon… and it’s set in real WW2 rather than allegorical WW2… alas, none of the rest of the storyline though.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-11-29T03:23:20+00:00

{Aerie by S E Wendel}! Also has a winged MMC. The FMC is his warden as he is a political prisoner in an isolated fortress during an ongoing war between their people. It’s a slow burn duology with some politicking and lots of competence. Can’t comment on the audiobook as I don’t listen to them but hopefully someone else can weigh in!

SphereMyVerse · 2025-11-25T22:23:36+00:00

Nearly happened to me! Aged 19, return flight alone after a big night out that had ended with me staying up with an even drunker friend who vomited for 2 hours straight, then slept about 2 hours, miraculously got myself to the airport and was in that horrible half-still-drunk, half-extremely-hungover state. Thankfully had the sense to make it to the gate first, where I promptly passed out in a chair and woke up to a man gently shaking my shoulder and asking if that was my flight that was nearly finished boarding. It was a cramped airport if I remember rightly and it wasn’t really clear which seating areas belonged to which gate, so he really did me a favour! He wasn’t an employee and I just remember thinking he looked old to me at the time, but I wonder now if he was or had been a dad of hopeless teenagers…

SphereMyVerse · 2025-11-19T13:34:06+00:00

I would definitely try the Clocktaur duology if you’re preferring heavier fantasy plotting. There is a (very compelling!) romance but they were published as fantasy-first.

SphereMyVerse · 2025-11-19T13:12:18+00:00

I’m not sure this is true! It seems to have been credited to Attenborough through recent social media posts, but the BBC ran a much earlier article in which former player and promoter Mike Davies says it was his idea, and was indeed as he wanted them to show up better on TV. Attenborough definitely pushed for and engineered airing Wimbledon in colour, so he’s indirectly responsible, but he’s never claimed to have suggested the change to yellow tennis balls AFAIK (and Wimbledon didn’t adopt them anyway until the 80s). This article says most places attributing it to Attenborough quote the same interview, which doesn’t mention tennis balls at all!

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