If you’re looking for your next great romance read, look no further than Queen Move by Kennedy Ryan. I regularly buy books without knowing much about them, especially if they come recommended by the right person (What can I say? I like surprises.). But I cannot remember why I bought this book. I didn’t even really remember what it was about when I started reading it.
What made it even better was the mixed-race, interfaith hero. As someone who grew up a “Protestant-Jew”, I related deeply to the hero’s search for who he was and how he fit into his religions. I also adored the fact that he had a mixed-race children of his own, because this is the world we live in and Ms. Ryan presents it with vibrancy.
Ms. Ryan also managed to pull off a neat trick by jumping around in time seamlessly. The story moves from two years ago, to twenty or so years ago where we get to see childhood friends blossom into something more, only to be torn apart. Then, she brings us back to the present and puts those two friends back together, only now with all the baggage of adulthood.
Along the way, the author weaves in bits of Atlanta’s political and social history that added tremendous depth to the character’s backstories and the setting. With terrific writing, and a smart, successful, independent woman with a high-profile political career who knows what she likes in bed, this book has everything going for it and then some.
My only, very minor, quibbles are: the story moved a tad slow in one section and I almost put it down (which would have been a shame), and a small handful of sentence structure choices jarred be out of my reading trance.
All in all, I highly recommend you buy this book right here, right now. You won’t regret it.
The boy who always felt like mine is now the man I can’t have…
Dig a little and you’ll find photos of me in the bathtub with Ezra Stern.
Get your mind out of the gutter. We were six months old.
Pry and one of us might confess we saved our first kiss for each other. The most clumsy, wet, sloppy . . . spectacular thirty seconds of my adolescence.
Get into our business and you’ll see two families, closer than blood, torn apart in an instant.
Twenty years later, my “awkward duckling” best friend from childhood, the boy no one noticed, is a man no one can ignore.
Finer. Fiercer. Smarter.
Taken.
Tell me it’s wrong.
Tell me the boy who always felt like mine is now the man I can’t have.
When we find each other again, everything stands in our way–secrets, lies, promises.
But we didn’t come this far to give up now.
And I know just the move to make if I want to make him mine.