“I Want a Book Just Like This One!”

Recently, I found a book I really liked in a genre that’s very unfamiliar to me – a romance novel for adults. I started out in libraries as a children’s librarian, so I feel pretty confident in navigating children’s and teen literature. Even when it comes to adult lit, there are certain genres where I know the appeal factors and major authors pretty well. However, romance novels are totally new to me! When I read and really enjoyed this particular romance novel – The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa – I decided I had to find more books that were just like it.

The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa (2020), 359 pages.

(Audiobook on CD)

(Libby/Overdrive ebook)

(Hoopla ebook)

(Hoopla eAudiobook)

What I turned to was the Readalikes feature in our catalog, powered by NoveList and Baker & Taylor. Whenever you click on a particular title in our catalog, you’ll see “Readalikes” as an option to click on over on the left-hand side. Once you click, the first thing you’ll see is “Similar Titles” and “Similar Authors.” Keep in mind that these may not be titles or authors that our library has! But we can always request them from other libraries, or you can make a suggestion that we purchase them. If you click on one of the similiar titles and then click “Find it,” you can see whether we have it or not.

If you scroll further down, you can see other information, such as story elements, where you can focus on a particular aspect of the book that you really like. I could focus on other romance novels with “culturally diverse” characters or that feature “multiple perspectives” if those are the aspects of the book that most appealed to me. You can also see whether the book has won any awards or appeared on book lists available from NoveList.

Scrolling even further, you can see a larger list of similar books and similar authors. This section might be easier to see than the one above, and it will give you more options.

Finally, the bottom of the page shows you the formats available at our library and some descriptive tags. Knowing what formats we have could be a big help if you generally read audiobooks, ebooks, or another format other than print books. This helps me since I mostly read ebooks on my phone! The descriptive tags could also help narrow down what type of book you’re looking for, similar to the story elements further up.