Last night’s Fated Mates Live was so much fun, but now we’re back in your earholes. It’s time again for our annual Sarah MacLean deep dive (with no spoilers!). As per tradition, Jen asks Sarah a bunch of fun questions and forces Sarah to talk about her book. And it all ends with Julia Whalen reading two chapters of These Summer Storms!

It was a delight to see so many of you in St. Louis yesterday, and to everyone else, we’re just as glad you’re here with us today.

• It’s finally time for These Summer Storms! And it might not be too late to see Sarah on book tour! Mary Kay Andrews is very fierce on Instagram, and we love her for it. You can also see her with Renee Adiah, author of the forthcoming Park Avenue, which she mentions at the end of the show.
• When the New York Times published their Best Books of the 21st Century so far, Sarah shared her ballot.
• Rhode Island has a long history of being associated with big money.
• On Inside the Actors Studio, the host James Lipton always ended with the same list of questions, known as the Pivot questions after their originator Bernard Pivot. Similarly, the New York Times column By the Book (Jen called it Get Booked, sorry for any confusion!) has a rotating list of questions, but some are very common. If you are interested in reading some of these columns, check out By The Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life, published in 2015. The books on Sarah’s nightstand were: The Second Coming by Carter Sherman, It’s a Love Story by Annabel Monaghan, Can’t Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan, and Full Bloom by Francesca Serritella.

• Kylie Scott, author of Wildflowers: An End of the World romance, available in print and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Bookshop.org.
• 1001 Dark Nights, publisher of Midnight Myths and Magic, available in print and ebook from Amazon.
• Mina Brower, author of A God of Moonlight and Stardust, available in print, ebook, and with your monthly subscription to

We're thrilled to have audiobook queen and Voice of the Summer (USA Today), Julia Whelan with us today! Aside from being the voice of Emily Henry, Taylor Jenkins Reid, VE Schwab and Kristen Hannah, she's also an author of her own delicious books and the founder of Audiobrary, an audio book company that pays narrators on a royalty structure. She's here to talk about her journey to writing and to narrating, about the way she thinks about her work, her advocacy, and the world of audiobooks. We are so incredibly thrilled to have her!

Julia is also the narrator for Sarah's book, These Summer Storms, available next week wherever books are sold. The audiobook is perfection, and you can read it on Audible, LibroFM or Apple Music...or wherever you get your audiobooks.

There are still tickets to see Sarah on tour in NYC, Chicago, Winston-Salem, NC, Newport, RI, Cambridge, MA, Decatur, GA, or Franklin, IN. There are a handful of tickets still available for Fated Mates Live in St. Louis, MO on July 8th! Join us!

If you can't make the tour, you can preorder These Summer Storms signed with a special romance dust jacket from The Ripped Bodice.

If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com.

• Welcome Julia Whelan, USA Today's voice of the summer, audiobook narrator extraordinaire and the founder of Audiobrary. A Netflix movie of her book

We're taking a second run at second chance romance this week, and while we intended to recommend a million books, we ended up talking about all the ways this trope really works and really doesn't work for us! We're talking about rekindling love, unrequited love, resurrecting old wounds, the unforgivable stuff and of course, pining. It's a long one, and yes, Jen is talking about present tense.

If you love this one, you can listen to our first Second Chance Romance episode with Priscilla Oliveras here.

It's that time of year again--Sarah's next book, These Summer Storms is out in July and she is going on tour! What's more, there is a real deal Fated Mates LIVE planned for July 8th in St. Louis, MO! Get tickets to any of these events (Jen will be at a bunch of them, and other pod friends will be popping up along the way) at sarahmaclean.net/tour! If you can't make the tour, you can preorder These Summer Storms signed with a special romance dust jacket from The Ripped Bodice.

If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com.

• Love’s Encore by Rachel Ryan
• Queen Move by Kennedy Ryan
• Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas
• Day of the Duchess by Sarah MacLean
• Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean
• Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan
• If I Told You, I’d Have to Kiss You by Mae Marvel
• Left of Forever by Tarah DeWitt
• Designing his Duchess by Gabrielle Carr
• A Lot Like Adios by Alexis Daria
• Broken by the Horde King by Zoey Draven

Another deep dive episode, and this one feels like it shouldn't have taken so long! We're reading Run Posy Run, talking about the way Cate C. Wells walks a fine line of mafia romance while keeping the book on the morality chain side of the line from dark romance. We talk about heroines against the wall, heroes who have to suffer, the way violence fits into these romances, and about sex and how it's deployed in these books to enormous effect.

We love this one (as you all know), and we were so excited to go back to it and give it the deep read it deserved. You can find all of our deep dives at the Fated Mates Book Club.

It's that time of year again--Sarah's next book, These Summer Storms (complete with sexy, silent, deeply competent hero) is out in July and she is going on tour! What's more, there is a real deal Fated Mates LIVE planned for July 8th in St. Louis, MO! Get tickets to any of these events (Jen will be at a bunch of them, and other pod friends will be popping up along the way) at sarahmaclean.net/tour! If you can't make the tour, you can preorder These Summer Storms signed with a special romance dust jacket from The Ripped Bodice.

If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com.

Run Posy Run by Cate C. Wells

• A boat, ship whatever, ran into the Brooklyn Bridge, and here’s a video of a woman who is a mariner explaining what might have happened.
• The Chicago River is an engineering marvel. In 1887, they reversed the river and sent it out to the Mississippi rather than having it flow into Lake Michigan. They were moving rivers around in Rhode Island because of Mayor SOMEBODY and his desire to turn Providence into the Venice of the United States. Waterfire is a Providence thing, but it isn’t the same as the water fire[s] in Cleveland. The greatest of the Great Lakes is Lake Superior, to be honest, and it’s not afraid to tell everyone about it. Station Eleven is a great book set in and around the Great Lakes. No one ever talks about Lake Huron except for Jenny Holiday. Great Lakes, Great...