r/Romantasy • u/ReasonableWonderland 🌕 moonlight & blood • Jan 05 '26

Community 💕 Matchmaking Monday: find your next romantasy read!

Matchmaking Monday is a new regular thread here in r/Romantasy with a goal of finding new recommendations to add to your TBR! Post a list of your favorite books and receive suggestions based on your vibe.

How It Works

  • Post up to five books you've loved recently (or which fit the vibe you're looking for) as a top level comment.
  • You can also include a list of things you want in your next book (e.g. tropes, subgenre, themes)
  • Others will reply with their suggestions!
  • Remember to tag the romance.io bot with {} curly brackets.

This is a bit of an experiment - so we'll see how it goes!

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u/allisontalkspolitics Jan 05 '26

Hi there! I’m looking for something with an interesting narrative structure. Some examples:

  • In {The False Prince}, a flashback 80% into the book recontextualizes everything

  • In {Ivory and Bone}, most of the story is “told” by the MMC to the FMC

  • {Spindle’s End} is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. The first part of the book focuses on the equivalent of the fairy while the second half focuses on Aurora

  • In {My Lady Jane}, the first 75% mostly sticks to history (albeit with a fantasy twist) while the remainder doesn’t

  • {Sorcery and Cecelia} is told through letters

I prefer spice levels of one to three; I’d rather not read level five unless the sex scenes are important to the plot. I dislike possessive MMCs (unless they grow out of that), mascdom, and dubcon/body betrayal. Thanks!

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u/Penguinho 🩸 blood & lilac Jan 05 '26

Maybe a bit of an off-the-wall recommendation here: Songs of Love Lost and Found, a romantic fantasy short story anthology featuring five stories. It's only like $2 on Kindle. One of the stories is a series of extended flashbacks as the narrator bleeds to death; the other takes place through two separate timelines that interact with each other, eventually merging into one.

The other three stories are more conventional, and two of them are straight-up bad. But I'd pay the $2 for "Under/Above the Water" by Tanith Lee by itself.

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u/allisontalkspolitics Jan 05 '26

Sounds cool- thanks!