Book Review: Can't Escape Love by Alyssa Cole

Can't Escape Love

Author: Alyssa Cole
Series: Reluctant Royals, book 3.5
Publisher: Avon Impulse (March 19, 2019)
eBook, 128 pages
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Summary
Regina Hobbs is nerdy by nature, businesswoman by nurture. She's finally taking her pop culture-centered media enterprise, Girls with Glasses, to the next level, but the stress is forcing her to face a familiar supervillain: insomnia. The only thing that helps her sleep when things get this bad is the deep, soothing voice of puzzle-obsessed live streamer Gustave Nguyen. The problem? His archive has been deleted.

Gus has been tasked with creating an escape room themed around a romance anime…except he knows nothing about romance or anime. Then mega-nerd and anime expert Reggie comes calling, and they make a trade: his voice for her knowledge. But when their online friendship has IRL chemistry, will they be able to escape love?

Rating: 5 stars

Review
I. Love. This. Book. 

Seriously, every book in this series is somehow better than the last, and my prediction was that this one would make my brain explode with awesomeness, and it basically did. 

I have to start by just bowing down before Alyssa Cole at the amazing rep in this book. I stan a book about with a leading lady who is black and disabled, a leading man who is Vietnamese-American, and both are neurodivergent. 

Reggie describes herself as a pineapple, and she's had to be - she's a woman operating in a male-dominated space that has some of the nastiest, neck-beardiest gatekeepers on the World Wide Web, and as a disabled black woman she's got seem keen insight into intersectionality and strives to make that space she's carved out at her website, GirlsWithGlasses.com, as safe and awesome a space as possible. 

I love that both Reggie and Gus are so quirky, and they fit together like - well, like two pieces of a puzzle. :) Gus is so sweet, and I really love how direct he is. His honesty and directness reminded me a lot of Stella from Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient (but a lot more in touch with social norms!)

This is book 3.5 in the Reluctant Royals series, but timeline-wise it runs in tandem with book 2, A Duke by Default, and there are spoilers for A Duke by Default in this book. It can still be read as a stand alone if you haven't read any of the rest of the series (including A Duke by Default), and has no spoilers for the rest of the series.