Man Candy

Man Candy is one of Jessica Lemmon's contemporary romance novels in her Real Love series, working in the territory she has built her career around. Lemmon writes with the kind of consistency and pace that her readers reward with steady sales, and her catalogue runs to more than thirty books across her connected series and standalones.

The man candy premise hints at the trope this book leans into. The supposedly shallow surface attraction subgenre, where the heroine assumes the hero is just eye candy and the work of the novel is figuring out who he actually is underneath the obvious appeal. Lemmon handles this kind of setup well because she takes the time to make the heroine's resistance believable. Her female leads have specific reasons for not wanting to take a particular man seriously, and the slow recognition that he is more than the surface suggests is what gives the romance its weight.

The Real Love series shares a connected cast and a Cleveland setting that Lemmon has used across multiple books, with the main characters from each entry making appearances in the others. Longtime readers of the series get the pleasure of catching up with familiar faces while watching new couples find their way to each other. New readers can pick up Man Candy as a standalone without losing too much context.

Lemmon's prose is light and quick. She does not write the longest books in the genre and her chapters end with hooks. The dialogue carries most of the romantic chemistry, and her couples talk to each other like adults rather than miscommunicate their way through three quarters of the book. The heat level stays warm without going extreme. For readers who enjoy Lauren Layne, Christina Lauren, Helena Hunting, or Tessa Bailey, Lemmon is squarely in the same neighborhood. Man Candy is a comfortable, well crafted entry into her Real Love series and a fair sample of what she does best.