Read & Rated 2026 Romance Releases

A guide to romance novels of all heats and sizes. We’re recommending books we’ve read (we’ve read 1,000s) and telling you what to expect. We’ll help you do your research - your time and money will be happy.

‘Happily Ever After’ - nearly every book you find on The Velvet Pages has an ‘HEA’. It means that the story reached a satisfying conclusion. It might say “To Be Continued” which means there’s probably an HEA in the series, but that particular title didn’t resolve the relationship.

This is how sexual or sexy a book is. There’s a range: Hot, Medium, Mild, and Flour.

• Hot is ‘“holy Hell I’m sweating.”

• Medium is steamy.

• Mild is tender and sweet.

• Flour means there’s nothing romantic here.

We label each book so you know what to expect and you can choose what you’re comfortable reading.

We rate each book out of 5. Cardigan B and Penelope Black can rate a book the same score on occasion, but usually the rating you see is an average of their scores.

The ratings are pretty subjective, but include things like:

• Did the story make sense?

• How did the characters measure up?

• Was the writing literate?

• Was the premise or were the plot points memorable?

• Were the mysteries solved? Did the questions get answered? Did you leave me on ANOTHER CLIFFHANGER, ONYX STORM?

• Did the book make us feel something?

• Was there a cute cat?

We recommend starting with Historical Romance, Fantasy Romance, or Sports Romance. They’re the most popular and you’ll find recognizable tropes.

Start with Mild to Medium heat and definitely choose an HEA.

If you’re still stuck, email us and we can give you some recs!

Heyyyvelvetpages@gmail.com

We’ll read pretty much anything. Each month, Penelope and Cardigan select a list of about 20 books to read together. There’s at least one book from each genre and some popular titles that have been recently released.

We sure do! It’s called ‘The Velvet Edit’. You can sign up at the top or on the ‘Contact Us’ page. We send out a themed list of recommendations each month and a ‘Quickie’ (a single title spotlight) two weeks later. We won’t spam you.

That’s the section of the site where we share what we’re reading this month for our book club. You can check out our other reading lists from the past few months of 2025, too.

Nope, not even close. The books on the site are generally the ones we enjoyed the most. Or hit on different trends we see coming up.

They are! If you buy from a button click on the site, we might earn a commission. You’re not paying more for the product, though. We’re all about ‘pay less for smut’ around here.

We use Storygraph. It has a friendly app interface and has every book we’ve read. It also shows your reading stats, which is unique.

We have separate Goodreads accounts, but they’re connected to our friends and family and…I don’t want them to see that I read the first and second book in a series about a merman with two dicks.

MMC is Male Main Character. FMC is female main character.

There are typically one of each, but there can be multiple in genres like Omegaverse or Reverse Harem.

Or, like in the case of Court of Thorns and Roses, the MMC could be one person in one book and another person in another book.

Don’t come at me about ‘spoilers’ - these books were published in 2015.