📕 Title: Bromantasy
✏️ Author: Máire Roche
📖 Genre: Fantasy / Queer Romance
⭐ Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫
📝 3rd Person POV
✅ Standalone Novel
🗓️ Publishing May 26, 2026

While Juniper has always been content with farm life, his best friend and roommate Mo has always dreamed of adventure. When a rambunctious evening gets the two of them recruited for a quest to kill a fearsome monster, Juniper quickly realizes he’s in over his head—and maybe also in love with Mo.

REVIEW

Thank you Putnam for the free book!

Bromantasy is a cozy adventure with a friends to lovers romance, written in third person perspective.

At its core, this story is about two men who have very different communication styles learning to be honest and open with each other. Juniper and Mo begin as friends and roommates, and between all their personal baggage and that one night ten years ago that they won’t talk about, there is a whole lot of tension that they refuse to confront until they are thrown together on this quest.

I wouldn’t describe their situation as miscommunication but rather a refusal to communicate in general. To paraphrase a quote from the book, men would rather go on a dangerous quest than talk about their feelings, and that sums up the situation fairly well. Juniper, forced to step out of his comfort zone, has to overcome his fear of abandonment, while Mo, a man of few words, has to learn to open up about his feelings.

It is sometimes hard to sympathize with Juniper when his decisions often feel selfish, like he is prioritizing his own comfort over everything else. Meanwhile, Mo is a very thoughtful and generous person who has always taken care of Juniper. Juniper was not often reciprocal in the beginning, and it took quite a ways into the story to see some character growth. Their dynamic wasn’t as endearing as I hoped.

I did enjoy the humor and overall vibes. The story subverts romance tropes to humourous effect and pokes fun at corporate jargon and modern slang. The f-word was used liberally throughout the book, which felt a little odd in a cozy novel, and at some point I started to bemoan the lack of originality. With all the jabs at words such as “unaliving” I feel like there could have been more creative swears.

Still, this was a fun read and fit well into the cozy fantasy space.