Falling in Love: A Guest Post from Ali Hazelwood
From one of our favorite romance authors comes a new tale, teeming with fated desires and monstrous appetites. With Valentine’s Day only a few days away, here’s a fresh twist on romance to sink your teeth into.
Paperback
$17.10
$19.00
Bride (B&N Exclusive Edition)
Bride (B&N Exclusive Edition)
In Stock Online
Paperback
$17.10
$19.00
From the leader of the romance pack comes a paranormal love story marking Hazelwood’s first. With plenty of laughs, spicy romantic tension and characters you’ll want to spend time with, it’s sure to resonate with fans and newcomers alike.
From the leader of the romance pack comes a paranormal love story marking Hazelwood’s first. With plenty of laughs, spicy romantic tension and characters you’ll want to spend time with, it’s sure to resonate with fans and newcomers alike.
Bride is unhinged, and weird, and the book I always wanted to write.
I feel almost guilty whenever I say this, because I’m afraid that people will think that I didn’t enjoy writing The Love Hypothesis, Love on The Brain, or Love, Theoretically. I promise that’s not the case: I wasn’t lying in wait, eager to exploit my publisher’s moment of weakness and to blindside them with three hundred pages of a vampire and a werewolf going at it. Or maybe I was, just a tiny bit, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t having the time of my life writing about science. Setting my stories in STEM academia has given me, and continues to give me, a lot of joy. And yet, by the second half of 2022, when the time came for me to write my fifth full-length novel, I was beginning to crave something different—something in which the stakes are life-or-death, the sex scenes are outlandish, and the mates are fated.
Paranormal romance was my first love. Nalini Singh, JR Ward, Kresley Cole, Christine Feehan, Patricia Briggs… I’ve never met any of these authors in person, and they might not know who I am, but they raised me. I started reading some of their work when I was a teenager, and they introduced me to larger-than-life, centuries-long tales full of warring factions, unique worlds, and undying love stories that develops between members of different species who should really be mortal enemies. Above all, I always admired the way all these authors managed to take the established lore of vampires and werewolves and make it their own. I always wanted to write something that might fit in this tradition, and Bride is my attempt at that.
Misery and Lowe are an interspecies couple dealing with assassination attempts, missing family members, civil unrest, and biological incompatibilities. But in a way, their journey to falling in love isn’t too different from the one of Olive and Adam in The Love Hypothesis: just a girl (vampire), standing in front of a boy (werewolf), asking him to love him. This is one of my favorite things about the Romance genre: the way it can straddle so many settings, time periods, and premises, while remaining universal at heart.
Bride may be a bit of a change of pace for me, but if readers choose to pick it up, I hope that my love and gratitude for the paranormal authors who came before me will shine through the pages—and that it’ll be as much fun to read as it was to write.