Leaning Into Love

Leaning Into Love is one of the entries in Lane Hayes’s Leaning Into series, the contemporary queer romance project that has been one of her most consistent ongoing efforts. The series follows interconnected friend groups in Manhattan and surrounding areas, with each book focusing on a different couple while keeping the wider cast as recurring presences. Hayes has been writing in this corner of the romance genre for over a decade, and the Leaning Into series shows her at her most comfortable.

The pattern of the series gives Hayes room to play with different romance tropes book by book while keeping the larger world consistent. Friends to lovers. Opposites attract. Second chance. Brother’s best friend. Bisexual awakening. Each book picks one or two of these as its starting point and builds from there. The leaning into love framing suggests the kind of slow, deliberate moving toward feeling that Hayes does well, where the resistance of the central characters has specific roots and the slow opening to each other carries actual emotional information.

What distinguishes Hayes from a lot of her peers is the warmth of her supporting casts and the patience of her plotting. Her books are not the longest in the genre and they do not lean on extended dark themes, but they take the time to make the central romance feel earned. Her dialogue carries most of the emotional work, her couples talk to each other like adults, and her sex scenes serve the relationship rather than substitute for it. The Manhattan setting gives her room to write the city as a real place rather than a backdrop, with specific bars, restaurants, and neighborhoods recurring across the books in ways that fans appreciate.

For readers who enjoy Riley Hart, N.R. Walker, Garrett Leigh, or Sloane Kennedy, Hayes is squarely in the same neighborhood. Her standalones can be read in any order and most of her series allow new readers to start anywhere without feeling lost. Leaning Into Love is a comfortable entry into the series and a fair sample of what Hayes does best.