Mate

Explaining why we chose Mate feels almost redundant. I mean, it’s Ali Hazelwood, queen of romance! But there’s more to it: Hazelwood is hilarious, first of all, infusing her signature warm humor into everything she writes. And when it comes to paranormal romance, she’s the real deal—did you know she began her career writing smutty fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (and that The Love Hypothesis was originally a Rey x Kylo Ren fanfic!)? All of which is to say, there’s no one we’d trust more to write a rompy, spicy romance series about Weres, Vampyres, and Humans getting messy and falling in love.

With Bride (the first installation in the series, marking Hazelwood’s departure from her more traditional STEMinist romances), readers got a classic vampire x werewolf love story—an enemies-to-lovers where the “enemies” part runs so deep it’s literally biological. With Mate, we shift (excuse our pun) to a full-on Were romance—except that Serena is a Human-Were hybrid, which makes things a whole lot more complicated.

Spoiler alert—Mate absolutely lives up to the hype. It’s a grumpy-sunshine romance on steroids, with Serena as the tireless, radiant sweetheart and Koen as the kind of grumpy who’s more likely to rip someone’s head off than have a reasonable conversation. And not to make you blush, but this book is HOT. We’re talking Alpha energy + celibacy covenant + going onto heat hot. I mean, these characters are basically dogs—and we’re very much here for it!

4/5 explicit open door.