✈️ Romance Cruise Stop #1: Paris
Summer in the City of Love
Ready to spiral into another book binge? This list was built to match your current mood or maybe tempt you into a new one.
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Romance Cruise: Paris, France 🇫🇷
If I could bottle up a feeling, it might just be that first moment stepping onto Paris cobblestone with a suitcase full of books and absolutely no plans. You know the one, when the air smells like butter and espresso, and every corner looks like a scene from a movie you once watched while daydreaming about falling in love abroad.
This week, we’re docking the Romance Cruise in Paris. Not the polished tourist version, but the version that lives in paperbacks and dog-eared spines. Paris through the eyes of lovers, rivals, fated mates, and chocolate thieves.
My first stop? A small boarding school tucked into a quiet arrondissement, where a girl named Anna finds herself tangled up in friendship, longing, and the kind of love that sneaks up on you when you’re too busy missing home. Anna and the French Kiss may be YA, but it’s pure comfort reading, like a croissant wrapped in nostalgia. Read our review here.
From there, we dip into the shadows with Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost. Cat and Bones are technically on vacation, but chaos has a way of following them, this time through Paris’s underworld. There’s something irresistible about watching danger and devotion dance against such a romantic backdrop.
By the way, you can listen to our old discussion about Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost on our old The Fangover Podcast.
Of course, you can’t be in Paris and not think of chocolate. The Chocolate Thief by Laura Florand gives us stolen recipes, stubborn pastry chefs, and a love story rich with flavor (and a lot of sexual tension). I don’t even like sweets, and I wanted to eat this book.
But the real magic of Paris might just lie in its secrets, and its spells. In Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin, magic hides in the gutters and steeples of the city of Cesarine, where witches like Lou are hunted, feared, and burned. Forced into a marriage with a church-trained witch hunter, Lou walks the fine line between rebellion and survival. Paris becomes something new here: not just romantic, but dangerous. And when love blooms in impossible places, it feels even more potent.
You can check out my review of the book but also tune in to The Fangover Podcast for our Serpent & Dove discussion.
And then there’s the Paris that welcomes the dead.
Die for Me drops us into the lives of sisters who move to Paris after a tragedy, only for one of them to meet a boy who quite literally cannot stay dead. The twist? He’s part of a secret brotherhood of revenants, souls cursed to repeatedly sacrifice themselves to save others. The romance is slow and aching, shadowed by the weight of loss and destiny, but Paris makes it feel poetic. You can read my full review here.
Just when you think things are soft and sweet again, Curio by Cara McKenna throws a curveball. Intimate, surprising, and a little unorthodox, it’s the kind of erotic romance that lingers, and it makes the city feel even more alive somehow. Check out the book review here.
We’ll end the day with scandal, because no cruise is complete without it. The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie sweeps us into a Paris that’s all dimly lit ballrooms, whispered rumors, and one of the most unforgettable heroes I’ve ever read. Watching Ian fall in love feels like watching a guarded heart learn to beat out loud, and Paris is the perfect backdrop for that transformation. Check out our review for this title here.
Paris in fiction has always felt like a slightly alternate universe—one where the air crackles a bit more, the stakes are higher, and love is always just around the corner. If you’re in the mood to escape, these are the stories that will take you there.
🗺️ Want even more armchair travel?
You can also explore the full Read Around the World collection if you’re feeling extra wanderlust-y.
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Sharing our love for books as Under the Covers Book Blog since 2011, running the Romanceopoly yearly reading challenge since 2019 and hosting the Reading Under the Covers podcast since 2020. Launched Mysterylandia in 2025.