small town romance

15 Single Dad Romance Recommendations

Happy Father’s day! In honor of the holiday, here are some of my favorite fictional daddies. I am such a sucker for this trope, especially if you throw in a small town setting and a blue collar profession.

Do you have any favorites? I need all the recommendations.

Ignite – Melanie Harlow

Broken French – Tasha Boyd

One Hot Italian Summer – Karina Halle

Single Dad Seeks Juliet – Max Monroe

In A Jam – Kate Canterbary

The Least Amount of Awful – Jennifer Millikin

There With You – Samantha Young

Flirting With Forever – Claire Kingsley

The New Guy– Sarina Bowen

Heartless – Elsie Silver

The Last One You Loved – LJ Evans

Make Me Yours – Melanie Harlow

Until You – K. Bromberg

Wrong For You – Harloe Rae

One Look – Lena Hendrix

Saving the Single Dad

Saving The Single Dad is book three in the Mount Macon series, which is an age gap nanny/single dad romance. 

I was pretty excited for this one (I mean there is a forehead kiss cover and a single dad) but it ended up being my least favorite of the series. The cover is still gorgeous though! 

The series so far has been very soap opera-ish in some ways. I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily, just that the characters are dramatic and the plots can be pretty messy and vice versa. While the first two weren’t exactly new favorites, they were very entertaining and I flew through them and just enjoyed the ride.

This was mostly true for this one as well but I really didn’t like the hero here 😬. He is actively pretty mean to the heroine (though to be fair, the blurb does say he’s bossy and rude, so that’s on me for being surprised when he is). He also made some very questionable parenting decisions and acted less mature than the heroine even though he is a lot older. 

The steam is still great and it was still very entertaining like the other two! The heroine was my favorite of the series and I really enjoyed her relationship with the kids.

Things We Never Got Over

At a very high level, this is a book about Naomi (the good twin), who finds herself stranded in a small town after her sister (the bad twin) steals her car, her money, and leaves her with an 11 year old niece she never knew about. Grumpy and emotionally shut off Knox, the tattooed local business owner who finds out and helps her, can’t stay away from his new neighbor despite his better instincts.

This is a romance of course, but it’s also a story of family (found and blood), a story of finding yourself when life doesn’t turn out as expected, a story of community and letting new people in.

The author has a way of creating these believable characters and realistic settings that it feels like you could really wander into Knockemout and get a coffee at Cafe Rev from Justice. Is Knox the perfect man? No. Of course not, because he’s wonderfully flawed as all humans are and I appreciate that.

I was sucked in from the very beginning and read it in less than 24 hours. This was a read while you’re cooking dinner, stay up too late reading, cancel your Sunday plans ‘cause you’ve got a book to binge kind of read for me. Rock Bottom Girl will always have a very special place in my heart, but objectively I think this is the best book Lucy Score has ever written.

It made me laugh, it made me cry, but most importantly it left me feeling happy and hopeful. I highly, highly recommend this one, I read it nine days into the year and it’s already on track to be my 2022 favorite.