Power Player

Lauren Roberts wraps up her Powerless trilogy with Fearless. The YA romantasy tops our children’s fiction list and is the #1 book in the country.

TikTok Boom

By the time Barbara “Brunch with Babs” Costello debuted with the 2022 recipe collection Celebrate with Babs, she had amassed 1.7 million TikTok followers. Her follow-up, Every Day with Babs, lands at #2 on our hardcover nonfiction list with more than twice as many print copies sold in its first week; she’s now at 4.2 million followers. Registered dietician Kylie Sakaida’s first cookbook, So Easy So Good, is #3 on our list; 2.8 million fans follow Nutrition by Kylie.

Never? Have I Ever!

Jade Presley debuts at #6 on our hardcover fiction list with what our starred review called “the sumptuous first book in the Never List series,” which “combines deliciously smutty romance with a surprisingly strong fantasy foundation.” Titled The Never List, the romantasy centers on four princes who “must find one woman strong enough to be the fated mate of all four of them,” and said woman, Rylee—a thief and secretly goddess-blessed member of the kingdom’s oppressed underclass. “The polyamorous love story packs some serious heat,” per our review, which deemed the novel “BookTok catnip.”

Mirror, Mirror

Kaylie Smith’s Enchantra, #1 on our trade paperback list, is a spicy standalone romantasy in which “seven immortal siblings are trapped in a deadly game of hide and seek,” according to the book’s publisher, “until one mortal woman changes the rules.” One notch below, K.A. Knight’s Den of Vipers is a work of romantic suspense; per the publisher, “Caught between four dangerous men, one woman indulges her hidden desires, in this deliciously dark reverse-harem romance.” Though the plots are different (we think),  the covers have us seeing double: each features a human skull wreathed by botanica of unknown provenance and adorned with rose blooms. Both are set against black backgrounds with a dominant secondary color (purple for Enchantra, red for Den of Vipers) and where the Vipers cover features a poisonous snake, Enchantra’s distinguishing totem appears to be an old-fashioned high school ring.