Melanie Sweeney – Where You’re Planted

Steve Thomas: Melanie, welcome to the podcast.

Melanie Sweeney: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

Steve Thomas: Before we dive into the book I did wanna ask first about what your experiences have been with libraries in your life, either as you were growing up, you have kids, so with your kids, and then how has that relationship changed now that you’re a published author?

Melanie Sweeney: I was just thinking about this actually the other day because I’ve realized that my experiences with libraries have shifted a lot over my life, so I definitely used libraries as a kid. I have memories of my parents taking me to the library and checking out books and how excited I was to have my own library card. Like, it was the only thing in my wallet for quite a while when I was in elementary school. And then, I kind of stopped using the library for a little while as I was in middle school and high school.

And it wasn’t until, I think I came home on a college break for the summer and had no money and I didn’t have a job ’cause I was only there for the summer and I was like, “What can I really do for fun?” And I realized, “Oh, libraries are free!” And so I just spent the whole summer reading. I got a library card and I just checked out a bunch of books all summer and it was amazing.

And then, in college, obviously I used my university library system, which was wonderful. And then I sort of got away from it again until I had kids. It wasn’t until my first baby was born, at about six months after he was born, I took him to a story time at my local library and that really was my return to using the library as an adult. I had two kids after that, and it was sort of part of our regular routine. We would go to story times a couple of times a week. We would go to check out books. They had great programming for our families and we just spent a lot of time there. And ever since then, it’s been kind of more of my family retreat with my kids until, as we’ll probably discuss, it was damaged by Hurricane Harvey, which was a huge change for us.

And my relationship to libraries since I’ve become an author, I would say hasn’t changed that much, but I just really appreciate libraries so much and I love it when people find my book in a library and share that with me. I think that’s just one of the most exciting things to know that my book is in libraries and the audio book, people can access that as well, and the ebook, so it’s just pretty exciting.

Steve Thomas: So you have one published book now, and you have this new one coming out soon. Do you go to the library and find your book and get delighted by seeing it on the shelf?

Melanie Sweeney: So I wish I did. My library just reopened this year. it was closed since Hurricane Harvey. It was in a much, much smaller location, so they didn’t really have a lot of circulation materials. They’ve just reopened it in the fall. And it does have a lot of materials now, but it’s still quite small, so I have not yet walked into my own library to see my book on the shelf. It’s not there, but I do have access to the whole library system and I can see that it’s in other libraries and that’s pretty exciting.

Steve Thomas: Well, like we said your new book, Where You’re Planted, does have a library tie-in there . Can you tell listeners just the basic story of what Where You’re Planted is?

Melanie Sweeney: Yes. So Tansy is one of the main characters, and she runs the children’s programming at her library branch. It gets damaged really badly in a hurricane, and it’s initially shut down, but she sort of is a bit of a plucky character. She gets it to reopen, but not in the way she hoped. It’s a temporary reopening inside of a very small shed in the county botanic gardens that are right next door to the library, so they have to move all of their programming and everything into this outdoor space. They don’t have a lot of materials to lend to their patrons, but they kind of just figure out how to make it work by using the outdoor space and then they begin to incorporate more of the environment into their programming.

And then the other side of the story, it is a romance. So Jack is the director of this botanic gardens and he is already feeling quite stressed about his own park’s recovery, doesn’t have the resources he needs, so he’s not very excited to have to share those resources with the library and have to accommodate them.

So there’s a little bit of an enemies to lovers situation. They initially butt heads and don’t work very well together but they find common ground with similar goals. They start working on a spring festival together, which kind of brings them together and then they, of course, fall in love because it’s a romance.

Steve Thomas: Yes, and you also definitely have that grumpy sunshine thing to it, ’cause there’s, I remember there’s some early parts where he’s being all grumpy, and she thinks, like, they’re talking about one of like the non-binary characters and she thinks he’s being prejudiced toward them and he’s like, “No, I’m just annoyed by all of you just in general. Doesn’t have anything to do with that!” But of course he’s a deeper character than that. He has his reasons he’s a little grumpy and not in the best of moods all the time, and you get into that later into the book. But you talked about your local branch being somewhat in that same kind of situation. Could you talk about what the inspiration was to place a romance in a library and then in one in a hurricane damaged area?

Melanie Sweeney: Sure. Yeah, I’d love to. So I really always wanted to tell this story of our library being shut down because of this hurricane. This was actually before I was even writing romance, I had been writing other kinds of things. And I always thought, “Oh, I really would love to write a story about a hurricane and the aftermath of it, the recovery of it.” But I never had an entry point into it. I had the setting and the situation, but I didn’t have the characters, and I usually start from character when I’m writing a book.

So it was just kind of sitting in the back of my mind and what happened to our library was that it closed and then it was sort of unclear whether it would reopen and the community, I have to say, we really rallied, like, we really were pretty vocal about not wanting to lose this library, so it was in limbo for a while and then they struck this kind of negotiation to move it into the gardens, which we were just grateful to still have it and to have access to like inter-library loans and some of the programming that they were still able to offer. And then of course during the pandemic as well, they were so flexible and were able to respond really easily during the pandemic too, which was very nice.

But it wasn’t until I was at a story time with my kids. They started doing story times again in the gardens, so we were outside in this beautiful location listening to a story and I saw a gardens employee, he brought a pallet of flowers over to offer to the families, which was not something that they had ever done when I had been there before. He spoke to the librarian who was running our program, and they just seemed, there was just like a vibe, just a little bit of an energy between them, and for whatever reason it just completely sparked something in my brain and I thought, “Oh my gosh, is he flirting with her?” It was just like a very cute little interaction and it probably was nothing. They’re probably just friends. But I’m sitting here at this story time, and my mind just kind of very quickly developed an entire sort of romantic storyline between a gardens employee and a library employee that were in a similar situation.

So I immediately just went home and worked out the whole plot and the conflict between them and of course fictionalized everything. But yeah, so that was really the spark and then as soon as I knew that it was a romance, I understood how to use the themes of recovery and some of the traumatic elements of enduring an event like this and used it to sort of inform why they would appreciate each other, why would they be attracted to each other and all of that.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Well, and it sort of mirrors the recovery that they need to make in their lives to, like, even if they’re right for each other, they have to work through some issues first to get to that.

Melanie Sweeney: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I also really wanted to write a story where you had two people coming from opposing viewpoints but for a common goal. And that they had to kind of learn how to compromise and work together. And so that was an important part of it for me.

Steve Thomas: There is definitely a message in the book about, both libraries and gardens and lots of other places, being community centers and how important that is to have those public institutions. Is that a part of the book that you really wanted to have come out ?

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah. You know, I try not to write books too much from an idea or a message, but I was so moved by what I witnessed, not only with our library adapting to that very challenging situation and still managing to provide something that our community really needed, but I also saw the destruction in the neighborhoods around mine, and I saw the people who just immediately drove in to help tear out carpet and and just deal with it. The Cajun Navy came from Louisiana to help rescue people and I just was so struck by the immediate support that everybody gave each other and how it just cut through anything else, this need to be responsible for each other.

I really love Rebecca Solnit who writes about this as well. She writes a lot about how disasters and emergencies can actually unlock something in us that, like, we don’t have to wait for people to come save us. We can save each other. There’s that idea, and so even though most of the book is not set during the emergency, I still wanted to capture that idea a little bit.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. You’re in the area, so you went through Hurricane Harvey. Did you have to do any research into that of how recovery works, especially within the library and botanic garden settings, like how the actual places recovered?

Melanie Sweeney: Yes. I sort of naturally did a lot of research more about the bureaucratic side of it. It didn’t happen the way that I told it in the book, but I did look a lot into FEMA and how that money gets allocated and various little loopholes that meant that people didn’t get the resources that they needed. So that was something that I just was interested in and how development has sort of affected flooding in our area and all of that.

But for more direct research, yes, I did speak with our children’s librarian who I had a relationship with because we had been going to her story times for so many years, and she told me a lot. And then I attended a couple of tours of the botanic gardens and they’re extremely informative and they did talk a little bit about some of the details of the immediate recovery after the hurricane. Some of it I just found so fascinating, like plants got ripped out of the ground and washed into the woods and they literally went into the woods and found them and like brought them back. And they also talked about people from other nurseries and greenhouses from other states coming and just helping them do the cleanup and helping them assess what they could save and dealing with the soil and all of the very like scientific side of it.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I mean you must have looked into plants and everything too ’cause Jack, he’s very much a horticulture nerd, but you have lots of stuff, especially he’s got his own personal greenhouse where he is got things growing there.

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah, so the greenhouse manager gave one of the tours that I was on and he just shared so many fascinating details and I just scooped them up and used a lot of them, but I myself know very little about horticulture or gardening. I would love to garden, but I don’t know the first thing about it. So I did have to look up and ask a lot of questions about that side of it.

Steve Thomas: And then another one of the other main characters is Tansy’s daughter Briar. Was it important to you when you were building the story that she’s a mother? Was that something you definitely wanted to have part of the story?

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah, I really did, in part because I just always imagined, she’s a children’s librarian, so she is already associated with kids in that way, but I did want her to be a mother. That is something that I’m able to bring to her character personally. And because the hurricane that we experienced, the impact, I think, I felt it mostly with my children, with my family, because this was such a part of our weekly routine that was immediately altered in such a big way, so I think I always imagined that there was that element that she was a mother.

And I knew fairly early on that because she’s a children’s librarian, that what Jack would struggle with was going to have to be children in some way, that he didn’t want loud kids in the gardens, that he doesn’t view himself, at least initially, as a person who can, like, tolerate kids.

And so the rest of their conflict and his character kind of developed out of that. But I always knew that she was going to be a children’s librarian and that kids were gonna be central to the story in some way.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and then she even has more responsibility put on her because the branch manager of the library decides not to go to the garden with them, and so she becomes sort of the temporary branch manager for a while, so she’s got this extra responsibility on her too, and makes it hard and makes her have to be the person that has to talk to Jack to be the library liaison, I guess.

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah. And Tansy, it’s funny, I really admire her in some ways. I think I made her sort of like a version of myself that I aspire to be in some ways because I think she’s fairly insecure though she doesn’t really show it, but she has a lot of things put on her plate and she just kind of tackles ’em one at a time. And I think that’s something that I don’t always feel that I’m able to do, but I admire that about her and wanted to show her as a heroine who’s a little bit down on her luck and kind of pushed into a corner and just the way that she responds to fight for everything.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. A lot of it is that she’s pushed into corners a lot of times and she feels at least like she has to do it on her own, and so that’s kind of her shell, her shield, I guess, against it. Like, “Well, I’ll just do it all myself and then I can’t be hurt!” Because she’s had to be a single mother, raising her child and all this stuff at the library. That’s part of what Jack and their love has to get through.

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah. They have to learn how to depend on other people, and I think it’s really beautiful the way that that becomes clear. It’s something that I know a lot of people feel of like, “I’ll just do it myself. I’ll just take care of this myself.” But there’s something really beautiful about, I think, the exchange of partnership with people, letting somebody see you in vulnerable moments and stepping up to help people when they need you. I think that’s just a really lovely human thing.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and it really, resonated well with me with the library parts of it because I think libraries do try to partner with other people in the community, so I could very well see that if you’re put in with the botanic garden, the first thing you’re gonna do is, “Oh, we could do story times with the garden and…!” start looking at ways to partner and that just fits the whole thing again, of needing each other and working with each other.

So when you get to the spicy parts of the book, how do you go about writing those? And I’m thinking more in terms of, you’re writing a mainstream contemporary romance book, so you’re not writing erotica, so you don’t want to go over the edge. But do you have anything in your mind of how you decide how much detail you put into that kind of thing? Or is it just kind of a gut thing?

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah. So when I think about scenes, I tend to think of them somewhat cinematically, so in part I’m just imagining a movie a little bit. So part of it is just strictly like, “Is this interesting? Is there action? Is there movement?”

But the other part of it is that I want there to be emotion, and I think that those steamier scenes, they still need to be moving the plot in some way. They still need to be revealing character. And so obviously physical intimacy or other types of intimacy are going to move a relationship forward, or they can at least, so I’m usually thinking of that, like, “How is this changing their relationship?”

And of course in this particular book, well usually in everything I write, the man falls a little bit harder and a little bit sooner. So I knew that I wanted to be in his point of view, for example, in some of those scenes because I felt that he was having a bigger change by being intimate with Tansy.

So that’s kind of how I think about, I think about which character is gonna change the most, and I think about who’s having the strongest emotional response to that moment. But I often will cut in the middle of a scene so I can get both points of view because I find it more enriching to know where they’re both coming from, especially in those extremely vulnerable and intimate moments, whereas in other situations, I feel more comfortable to sticking with one character and letting you sort of glean what the other one is experiencing.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s actually a follow up question I had on here to ask you about. I did notice that you did that quite a bit of when, like, the intimacy would start and then you’d get to a point and be end of chapter, next chapter. Personally, like, “Oh no, are we skipping away from this now?” But no, ’cause your chapters go back and forth between their viewpoints. You’re just shifting to the other person’s viewpoint, and that was an interesting way I thought to approach it, coming at it from both directions. So you see how they’re both feeling about it.

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah. I think that’s the benefit really in a romance of having dual POV, is that you do get to know what the other character is thinking and feeling. And not every romance does that, but personally I like it when I feel like both characters really are the main character in a romance and that they’re both changing over the course of the story and that they’re both struggling with something or overcoming something. So it just feels very natural to me that we would need to see both of them in those moments.

A lot of romances now, many contemporary romances, I think mine is a slower burn than some. So it does take them a little while before they kiss for the first time, and then it kind of escalates fairly quickly after that, but I have heard from some early readers like, “Oh, this is a really slow burn!” It takes a long time to get going, but then it does.

I think I naturally do write a bit of a slower burn. I love the anticipation, I love all of the stuff that builds up to those moments quite a bit, and in this case they are truer enemies at the beginning, so it really did require more time before they could come around emotionally. And I think that for me, just as a writer, I tend to need to see an emotional connection before I give a physical connection to my characters. Not everyone approaches it that way, but I think that’s why I tend to write a slower burn.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but it works, and, I think I think anticipation can, not be better than the thing itself, but can be his own thing that’s just as powerful of waiting for it ’cause even there, they kiss for a little bit and then it’s not like a full thing and then they have to wait a little bit longer. And there’s a couple of those when they’re doing some work in the house, they have to hold off and wait for a little bit longer. That part of it can be its own interesting part and a way, again, of building their relationship of how they talk to each other and tease each other and just its own thing.

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Thomas: We’ve talked about this a little bit that romance sometimes is a underestimated or mocked or whatever for being what it is, but is there anything that you wish people understood better about the genre?

Melanie Sweeney: Yes. I think there’s a lot that’s misunderstood about the genre. And I just wanna say to start that, I think that all kinds of romance have a place. I think that not every romance needs to be necessarily tackling some bigger story or have a lot of other things going on. In my case, this book does have a strong subplot going on around the romance. And I just wanna say I think that both are valid. But I do think that a lot of people don’t realize that there are a lot of romances that are really tackling some pretty big themes and some really important stories.

And there is obviously formula to romance. There are tropes, and we know that it’s gonna end happily ever after and so I think some people discount it for that thinking like, “Oh, it’s just sort of paint my numbers, you’re not really creating something new.” But I would say that romance really depends so much on character work. Even though people think of it as plot driven, and it can be, it can also be extremely character driven. That’s certainly the way that I approach writing books, whether it’s a romance or something else so I think just that idea that there’s not a lot of depth to it, I would say that there are so many examples that disprove that.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I think a lot of people still just think they’re all the Fabio cover, really cheesy kind of thing. And if that’s your thing, cool. That is a part of romance, but it’s like that’s not the entire genre, and it may have been 30 years ago that that was most of what the genre was, but it definitely has matured a lot.

Melanie Sweeney: Yeah. Romance is very timely and romance writers tend to respond to the moment fairly quickly to the cultural zeitgeist, and so there is an element of that responsiveness in a lot of romances today. So some of the social issues that are happening around us in the world, we can see them fairly soon in a romance. Whereas it may take longer before another genre gets to it.

And I also think like, not that only women read and write romance, but it is a sort of female centered genre. So for that reason, there’s a lot of other work that that romance can be doing, that it is doing, in many cases of tackling questions of patriarchy and race and working with disabilities, I think there’s just a lot of representation that is in the genre, that people are drawn to it for, that a lot of people do wanna find in a book and in a way that feels hopeful because that is ultimately what romance is. It’s a hopeful genre, and so I think seeing positive representations of those things is really important.

Steve Thomas: So I know you balance your writing life with lots of stuff. You have a husband, kids, you’ve got cats, and I saw on Instagram recently that you’re an ice skater as well.

Melanie Sweeney: Yes, that’s a new thing. My daughters and I started figure skating about three years ago, and it’s become this very important thing in our family. I go skating with my daughters a few times a week and we do ice shows and they do competitions and things.

Steve Thomas: Check out your Instagram to see a video of you doing a show.

Melanie Sweeney: Yes, exactly!

Steve Thomas: Very impressive.

Melanie Sweeney: Thanks.

Steve Thomas: So how do you balance all that stuff and where do you fit writing into all of that?

Melanie Sweeney: I was the kind of person, when I was in college and then I did an MFA, I was always a very diligent writer. I was very much like, I write every day. It was sort of like the most important thing of my day was being able to write. When I had my first child, that obviously changed. I did a lot of writing on my phone, actually, which I thought I would never do, but he was a very needy baby, and so he was on me all the time. He would sleep on me. I was like, never more than an arm’s length away from this child, and so I found that I just had this very strong drive to continue writing and so I wrote an entire book on my phone and I was like, “Well, if I can do that, then I guess I can kind of make anything work!” Sort of a similar idea to the book that you have to be flexible sometimes with difficult circumstances.

Then my next two children were twins and so that was kind of a whole upheaval as well. Over the years I’ve just sort of learned to let my environment sort of dictate what I’m able to do to some extent, but to not let it dissuade me from just making it happen.

I think I’m a little bit less, I would say a little less diligent. I don’t have a strict schedule anymore. My children are also at a hybrid school, so we partially homeschool them, so they are here a lot. My husband works from home as well. And so I don’t have a lot of alone time, but luckily my kids are old enough now that they can mostly occupy themselves and I can shut myself away in a room for a couple of hours and get it done.

But I guess I’m less worried if I can’t get a certain word count or write for a certain number of hours. I just have learned to like, let it go. It’ll happen when it needs to happen. And then when I’m really on a deadline, then it really has to happen and we kind of just make it work.

Steve Thomas: When you were going to the library as a kid, is there any book that you remember being, like, the first book that you fell in love with or that made you want to be a reader or a writer?

Melanie Sweeney: Beverly Cleary, the Ramona Quimby series, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 is always the one that I remember the most. I just loved those books. I loved that character so much, and I was around that age when I found them. I was the kind of kid that would read under the covers with a flashlight past my bedtime or sneak into a closet so I could read without my parents realizing, and now that I’m a parent, I’m sure my parents didn’t really mind that much that I did that because I think it’s so lovely when kids love to read. But I did really enjoy those books and I started kind of writing my own little stories when I was in elementary. And it was very much in the vein of those Ramona Quimby books.

Steve Thomas: Melanie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where You’re Planted will be available on July 8th, wherever books are sold, and of course at your local public library, if you wanna just go check it out. If they don’t have it, make sure you request it so they purchase it. Melanie, thank you for coming on and letting listeners know about your book.

Melanie Sweeney: Thank you so much.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Hello, and welcome back to the Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk the Executive Director of Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabbat, a librarian who works at NoveList. And I do wanna let you know to make sure you stay tuned for a special offer for listeners of this podcast after the Circ Desk.

Rebecca Vnuk: All right, so let’s jump right in on some read alikes for Where You’re Planted by Melanie Sweeney. So everybody just listened to the interview with Melanie, got to hear about the book, and here are the things that stood out to me when I was looking for read alikes. So we’ve got a librarian. Yay! Everybody likes the books about librarians, right? I like to laugh about the Library Reads list, that basically if you have a character who is a librarian or works in a bookstore and have something like that prominently displayed on your cover, it is almost guaranteed to hit the Library Reads list.

Yaika Sabat: You are not wrong.

Rebecca Vnuk: And I think that that’s charming and I like it. I often wonder, I’m like, “Do architects like to read books about other architects or is this just a book person kind of thing? I think it’s just a book thing.

Yaika Sabat: An “us” thing, yeah.

Rebecca Vnuk: So definitely when I was searching through our list to find read alikes, I definitely had that bookish thing in my brain. So I thought, okay, librarian, we of course have a contemporary romance here. I felt this was very much, we cover a lot of the tropes in romance. You’ve got some grumpy sunshine, little bit of enemies to lovers, that sort of thing, So I had a plethora of things to pick from because the library reads list does go heavily towards romance, especially contemporary romance, which is lots of fun. But the very first book that came to my mind immediately was What You Wish For by Katherine Center.

And that was because I am a big fan of Katherine Center. So I have read all of her books and I think we’ve actually had her on a panel twice now for ALA author panels. So I’ve had the pleasure of talking to her about this very book as a matter of fact. So let me read the annotation for you and you’ll see why it is a nice match for Where You’re Planted. What You Wish For: a Novel, by Katherine Center, as I said, it came out in July of 2020 from St. Martin’s Press, so it was on the July 2020 Library Reads list, and our annotation for it is: “Sam thought the dynamic Duncan Carpenter was out of her life forever until he returns to the school at which she’s a librarian and makes her think she might just get her happily ever after. For fans of Jojo Moye and Rebecca Serle” and that’s from Tracy Babiasz from Chapel Hill Public Library.

I remember when I read this, I was just like, oh yeah, we’ve got all the good stuff here. You have this librarian who is dedicated to her school, dedicated to her users, dedicated to what’s going on. Then you get this grumpy dude who comes in and wants to make all these changes. And I was like, this is a classic read alike situation, right? Like, you could take these two books and be like, yes, if these are the things you liked about that storyline, boom, here you go. So I thought, that was lovely, that was perfect, works out really well and I really thought it was good.

So then my second choice is actually a very recent one. I usually try and go further back and I’ll take this as a chance to tell everybody, remind everyone I guess once again that we do have all of the books we’ve ever covered on Library Reads in our archive. This one I’m gonna talk about next comes from the June 2025 list, which I just entered into the archive, putting us over 1,800 books now that we’ve recommended over the last like, 12 years. So it’s very exciting. I was very happy about that, and I picked this one also, like I said, I usually try and go a little bit further back ’cause I love the backlist, but in this case I couldn’t resist picking a newer one ’cause it also, it matched really well and yet dives off in a different direction.

So this one is Battle of the Bookstores by Ali Brady, from Berkeley, is coming out June, 2025 and hit our list. And this one is fun. So the annotation is: “When their boss decides to merge their beloved bookstores, romance reader Ryan and literary “Ice Queen” Josie vie for the title of bookstore manager. Readers will enjoy the witty banter, lovable cast of characters, spicy scenes, literary references, and the representation of the romance genre and bookstores as being inclusive stories and places for anyone and everyone to find themselves.” And that comes from Dana Treichler from the Princeton Public Library in New Jersey. Boy, is that just like a perfect. Yeah. Like, doesn’t that make you wanna read it right now? And I think the most fun part about that one is it’s the guy who runs the romance bookstore. Yes. You’re not expecting that, right? And also thinking of the grumpy sunshine, it’s the guy who’s the sunshine and it’s the literary chick who’s the grumpy. And so I liked that it sort of turned that trope over on its head, and I thought that was a lot of fun while still being bookish. So those were the elements that I was looking for when I chose my read alikes How about you Yaika?

Yaika Sabat: Well, first I have to say, when you told me that it was the guy who owned the romance bookstore, I was like, yes, we love to see it.

Rebecca Vnuk: It was something a little unexpected.

Yaika Sabat: When I was looking for read likes, there are a few things that struck me about Where You’re Planted. One is that it deals with a very, like, realistic challenge, librarians deal with which is something has happened. Now you have to like shift the entire plan, so like a hurricane happens, you have to move the whole library over somewhere temporarily. So that clicked with me, but it’s also starring basically a single mom and then a divorced man. So these are people who have a bit more lived experience so it kind of has a second chance at love feeling. It has the grumpy sunshine, opposites attract vibe. I just thought it was interesting. You don’t always get characters that are divorced or have kids in romance, especially like romcoms, contemporary, it’s just not the most frequent feature.

So I did want to center on that sort of parent angle. And so scandalously, neither of my books has a librarian or bookstore person.

Rebecca Vnuk: And that’s okay because mine do.

Yaika Sabat: Yeah. I knew yours, I knew yours would, and I was like, “I think we’re gonna be covered on that.”

Rebecca Vnuk: I love it. I love it.

Yaika Sabat: And so my first read alike is Pick-Up by Nora Dalia. This came out in 2024 and it centers on a two parents, single parents, divorced parents, Sasha and Ethan, whose kids go to the same school, and so they encounter each other there and then the school pickup line. They have a lot of interactions that Sasha, the mom, finds annoying. She finds Ethan to be annoying, so when they end up having to work together at the school fair, they discover there might be some attraction and then they end up on a private island, sort of forced together for a job opportunity, a video shoot.

And obviously things start off a little snippy, but as we know, because this is also a enemies to lovers story, it’s gonna evolve into something else. So it has that same element. It’s witty. It’s got well-crafted dialogue. One thing I love about trying to find read alikes in NoveList especially for romance, are the themes because romance is a genre of themes of tropes, and I can search by that in NoveList

Rebecca Vnuk: So much fun, isn’t it?

Yaika Sabat: So useful and so fun. So it was a lot easier for me to find the themes, the enemies to lovers grumpy, sunshine opposites attract, and then had to narrow down, do some subject searching for things like single parents, that kind of stuff. I also love the idea of a school pick-up line drama because my friends who are parents have told me all about it.

My second read alike is a little bit older. It’s a Dash of Salt and Pepper by Kosoko Jackson. This is a funny steamy upbeat contemporary romance, romantic comedy, and it is also sort of grumpy sunshine, opposites attract. This is pretty much about two chefs who end up having to work together and one of them is a single father, and when they first start, it does feel like they are not going to mesh. There is a difference of personality and work styles, but as they get to know each other, it becomes sort of an unexpected romance and an appreciation for each other, but this one, again, I was drawn to ’cause it was two people being forced to work together as we have in Where You’re Planted, a single parent and that sort of opposite personalities or unexpected love that you don’t think you’re gonna get along with the person and suddenly you’re deeply in love with them, as you do in a romance,

Rebecca Vnuk: Right? I was gonna say, I hate it when that happens.

Yaika Sabat: That’s how it goes.

Rebecca Vnuk: That is a great pick. That also was on the Library Reads list. That was a December 22 Library Reads pick, so yay. We always love that too. Yeah. Alright, well, great. So there’s four books that you can take away from your library that match up with this one. Again, I think what we try and do is figure out as reader’s advisor library folks, we try and figure out what is gonna appeal to folks about this story and how can we match that up with other things? And I love these choices here. They’re all really good fits, even though they’re all very different books and that’s the whole fun about all of this.

Yaika Sabat: I love that they show also that romance is not just one story or one type of couple or one experience. There’s a lot of different types of people represented.

Rebecca Vnuk: Contemporary romance has changed, I guess, whatever point in time you’re calling it contemporary. It follows those times. And I love that what we’re calling contemporary right now is really wide. I love that.

Yaika Sabat: It’s amazing.

Rebecca Vnuk: It’s fun to pick books that match that. So that is us from the Circ Desk, and we will check you out next time.