Moxie

Moxie is one of C.M. Stunich’s contemporary or paranormal romance novels, working in the wider catalogue she has built across many books in the independent romance market. Stunich is one of the more prolific writers in independent romance, with a catalogue spanning multiple subgenres including contemporary romance, paranormal romance, urban fantasy with romance elements, and various forms of new adult and college romance fiction.

Stunich’s work is known for the kind of high heat and emotionally intense romance that contemporary independent romance has been delivering across the past decade. Her readers know what they are coming for and the consistency of her output keeps them returning. Her heroines tend to be capable young women whose situations have produced the kind of complicated personal and romantic lives that the genre rewards. Her heroes are often morally complicated in ways that the standard contemporary romance hero might not be, with the central romance having to navigate the kind of difficult emotional territory that the more conventional treatments of the genre often avoid.

What distinguishes Stunich from a lot of her peers in the independent romance corner is the willingness to push the romance toward darker and more morally ambiguous territory. Her novels often involve multiple male love interests, complicated supernatural or paranormal elements, and the kind of extended series structure that lets her develop the wider relationships and the wider world across multiple books rather than trying to resolve everything in a single standalone novel.

Stunich’s prose is brisk and her plots move at the pace her audience expects. Her chapters end with hooks, her heat scenes are explicit and frequent, and her endings often function as setups for the next book in whatever connected series the novel belongs to. This serial structure gives her room to develop her characters and her world across the long arcs that her readers follow her through.

Readers who enjoy authors who write in the new adult, college romance, and paranormal romance corners of contemporary independent romance, including writers like Anna Zaires, Sara Cate, or other writers in similar territory, will find familiar pleasures in C.M. Stunich’s wider catalogue. Her output is large enough that picking a starting point can feel daunting, but most of her connected series can be entered at their first volume and followed through the connected world that the wider series builds out. Moxie is a comfortable entry into her catalogue and a fair sample of what she does. For new readers, the price point and volume of her work make her a low risk experiment for readers curious about contemporary independent romance.