Slow burn romance, great characters, and a lot of chemistry

I have yet to not love a full length Neve Wilder romance, and I have a hard time envisioning a book of hers that I don't enjoy.

Resonance is a slow burn romance between an employer and an employee with an age-gap, but despite having two tropes that I don't really care for, usually, it managed to be so sweet and organic that it didn't bother me. The power imbalance was addressed and resolved, and the age difference wasn't overly underlined or made creepy.

The character were already familiar from Dedicated, and they really grew on me in this story. Both Owen and Dan were fully fleshed out characters that felt like real people. Often romance authors fall into the trap of writing caricatures of people for the sake of having the tools for hot sex scenes, but here the hot sex was just an added bonus.

While the romance is slow burn, the physical attraction isn't. And that's another thing I appreciate - authors not mixing up physical attraction for love. Also the fact that not all sex has to be penetrative. Seems obvious, but anyone who reads romance can attest to the fact that to some authors it isn't.

The pacing of this book was also on the slower side, and the conflicts were on the real life scale. When reading romance, you get the feeling that a character needs to have some huge trauma to be interesting or relatable, but to me the most interesting are the ones I could actually imagine knowing in real life.

This wasn't my favorite of Neve's, but it still one of my favorite romances of the year. ( )