Harper Bliss Audiobooks

Love Me Like You Shouldn't: a compact, grown-up queer romance

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

247 listener ratings

Who is Harper Bliss?

Short, sharp and unapologetically adult, Love Me Like You Shouldn’t sets out its terrain in the title alone. Harper Bliss writes contemporary queer romance in a register that trusts listeners to be grown-ups, and our shelving spreads the work across fiction, LGBTQ+ and romance without any of the three quite containing it.

The scale is worth noting. At just under six hours this is a concentrated story rather than a sprawling one, keeping a tight focus on two people and resisting the pull to widen out. Forbidden attraction is the engine, as the title concedes, and much of the pleasure lies in watching sensible people make thoroughly defensible bad decisions.

Harper Bliss in audiobooks

Abby Craden performs it, with a low, measured delivery well suited to this register: intimacy carries far better in that voice than brightness would, and the pacing never rushes the quieter scenes.

A few hundred listeners have rated the recording and the average has settled comfortably above four, a reasonable signal for something of this size. If you want the shape of Harper Bliss’s writing inside an evening or two, this is the efficient way to take it. Start there, below.