Romance Books To Read if You Love These K-Dramas

Much like Yoon Hye-jin, the dentist who loses her job after accusing her clinic of overcharging their clients for treatments, the characters in Evvie Drake Starts Over both find new beginnings in a small seaside village. Evvie Drake has just lost her husband and is having trouble getting back out into the world. Her friend convinces her to rent out the apartment at the back of her house, and she lets Dean Tenney, a Major League pitcher who has lost his game stay with her. And soon their unexpected friendship turns into something more.

Both of these rom-coms show how love comes in many forms, and is often unpredictable. In Because This Is My First Life, two roommates unlucky in love but trying to appease their families, decide to pretend to be married. The Bride Test follows Khai Diep, an autistic man who believes that he will never be able to fall in love. His mother takes matters into her own hands and goes to Vietnam to find him the perfect bride. When Esme Tran returns with his mother, she becomes smitten with Khai and over time he begins to learn that there’s more than one way to love.

Boys Over Flowers and Bringing Down the Duke both have a strong-willed female lead that readers are going to love. Each girl comes from a humble beginning but is then given the opportunity to get an education at an elite institution. Their rich classmates are not as welcoming, but each lady refuses to back down from what they know is right. The only thing that could get in their way, is they both start to develop feelings for the people they have sworn to hate…

In these sweet coming-of-age love stories, each character’s idea of their identity is challenged. For Na Hee-do in Twenty-Five Twenty-One her whole life was fencing. But when the school fencing team is shut down, she must rely on her friends to help her move forward. Similarly, in Frankly in Love, Frank Li is a young teenage boy who has finally found the girl of his dreams. The only problem is that she is white, and Frank knows his Korean family would never approve. When he enlists his family friend to become his fake girlfriend, Frank thinks all of his problems are solved, but he ends up wondering if he really knew anything about love–or himself–at all.

When the Camellia Blooms and Fumbled feature two single mothers who are looking to start over after a terrible breakup, and who are surprised when love finds them again. But will their “once bitten, twice shy” mentality prevent them from finding the happiness they deserve?

If you loved the magical, witchy setting of Mystic Pop-up Bar you are going to love this story by Jessica Clare. Reggie Johnson has just landed her dream job. She is going to be working as an assistant for an actual witch. The one drawback is that her boss is a bit of an eccentric, and her employer’s nephew, Ben Magnus, is the most infuriating warlock around. But when dark magic begins to target the household, Reggie and Ben will need to work together to break the deadly curse.

These stories both feature a gumiho, a nine-tailed fox that is prominent in ancient Korean folklore. In Wicked Fox, the gumiho is a young girl named Miyoung. In order to survive, she is tasked with devouring the energy of men, but she chooses to only hunt off the most evil men in Seoul. While she is in the forest, she comes across a young boy who is in danger, and she goes against her better judgment to save him. Now her life is forever in his hands and they will need to join forces if they both want to survive.

Coffee Prince is a great example of a will-they-won’t-they romance. The entire time you watch waiting to see if Han-kyul and Eun-chan will ever get together. If you love the drama, you are going to fall for The Cheat Sheet. Bree is hopelessly in love with her best friend and NFL legend, Nathan Donelson, but Bree is so far in the friend zone, there is no hope of Nathan ever seeing her as anything more. But when Bree drunkenly confesses her love to a TMZ reporter, things go from bad to worse.

Just like in Start-Up, Sharon C. Cooper’s Business Not As Usual follows a young woman who has high ambitious and will stop at nothing to get the success she deserves. Dreamy Daniels works as a secretary during the day, and struggles to finish her bachelor’s degree at night, but when she catches the attention of a potential investor, her life could change in more ways than she could have ever imagined.

In The Noh Family, for as long as Chloe Chang can remember, it has always just been her and her mom. But when she takes a DNA test on a whim, she learns that she has an entire extended family living in Seoul. Not only that, they are one of the most powerful families in Korea. But the more she learns about them, she realizes that joining the Noh family could be worse than having no family at all. These family dynamics parallel those of Seon-Gyeom in Run On, who works to overcome these toxic dynamics in order to grow and mature.

Hotel Del Luna and The Night Circus are supremely entertaining adventures that take place all within a very mysterious location. In Hotel Del Luna that location is a hotel whose clientele are all ghosts with unfinished business. In The Night Circus, a magical circus that appears at night unannounced, two young magicians are forced into a duel where only one will survive. But when the two fall unexpectedly in love, it causes a ripple effect that will forever change those around them.