Rating: 3.5 stars
CBR17 Pie Challenge: Inclusion
CBR17 Bingo: Borrow (read through Libby, since I don't actually own the book)
Regina "Reggie" Hobbs is working hard to make her nerdy website, Girls with Glasses, a success, and prove to her over-protective parents that she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself, even if she's in a wheelchair. She loves the work, she loves her very capable team, but lately, she's been struggling with insomnia, and the only thing that seems to soothe her to sleep is the voice of a puzzle podcaster, Gustave Nguyen, she used to follow, but he no longer podcasts, and the archive of his episodes has been deleted. So Reggie goes to the unusual step of contacting him, asking if he could make some recordings for her, to help her sleep.
Gustave "Gus" Nguyen is autistic and often has trouble with social interactions, especially with women. He remembers Reggie from chats they used to have on his live streams, but doesn't want to give a virtual stranger voice recordings that he would no longer have any control over. He sympathises with her plight, however, and offers to call her if she has trouble sleeping, to talk to her until she falls asleep. Thus begins their friendship, and soon it becomes clear that while Gus can help Reggie with her insomnia, Reggie can help Gus succeed in completing an escape room he's working on. He's been contracted to design an escape room based on a very popular romance anime for Anime Con, and he knows absolutely nothing about the anime, nor does he see what is so fascinating to others about it.
Reggie, on the other hand, is a superfan and offers to help him understand the show and the characters in return for his nighttime phone calls. Once they discover that they both live fairly close to each other in Queens, they can meet up in person, and it doesn't take long for their friendship to develop into something more.
Both Reggie and Gus have some personal issues to resolve before they can fully commit to a relationship, but since both feel more comfortable with each other than apart, and help complement each other's skills beautifully, there is never any doubt that they will find a HEA, without too much conflict.
While I've read all the full novels in the Reluctant Royals series, I have yet to complete all the novellas, and with this fitting into a number of my reading challenges this summer, it felt like a good quick read to choose. There are several mentions of Reggie's twin sister Portia in this, the heroine of A Duke by Default, a book that still makes me annoyed every time I think of it. Naledi, the heroine of A Princess in Theory also has a cameo. Even though it's part of an ongoing series, this novella would mostly work fine on its own. There are some issues with Reggie's parents and her sister that are not entirely resolved (that happens in Portia's book). But it's not anything that would ruin anyone's reading experience if this was the first book of Cole's they picked up.
The inclusion of neurodiverse characters has become quite common in romance now, but back in 2019, when this book came out, I think it was more unusual. Considering this also has a heroine who is mostly wheelchair-bound (she can stand for short periods of time, but lost the use of her legs after viral meningitis when she was younger), this book crosses off a lot of squares on a diversity bingo board. It therefore felt like a good choice for the "Inclusion" pie slice of the CBR Pie Challenge. It also works as "borrowed" as I got it through my library app Libby, and don't actually own the book.
Judging a book by its cover: Cole usually has really good covers for her books, with cover models that actually look close to how they're described in the story. It's not often you see people in wheelchairs on romance covers.
Crossposted by Cannonball Read
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