April 24, 2024 at 7:00pm EST

Romance lovers unite! Join us for a fun evening on zoom or Facebook with authors Opal Wei and Robin Lefleur. Kayleigh Platz will lead the discussion as they dish about their latest novels and their writing process. There will be plenty of time for Q&A so bring your questions!

Opal Wei writes warm, witty contemporary romance featuring emotionally complex multicultural characters and their rambunctious families. Her books (written under pen name Ruby Lang) have been featured in NPR, Buzzfeed, and Vulture. She and her family are recent transplants to Toronto, and despite the fact she doesn’t know where anything is, people keep asking her for directions. Find Opal at opalwei.com.

More about Wild Life:

They’re walking on the wild side…

The Plan was simple: find a cure for the cancer that nearly took her sister’s life. But for Zoey Fong, something about The Plan isn’t working anymore. Maybe it’s her unsuccessful research, maybe it’s burnout. But when a crucial tissue sample accidentally winds up in the hands of a very distracting—and disarmingly handsome—visitor, Zoey jumps at the chance to follow him home to retrieve it.

Davy Hsieh’s rugged island estate is no manicured suburban park. His plan is simple: establish a legitimate animal sanctuary and embrace life as a hermit to make up for a sketchy past. Zoey invading his fortress of solitude should not, under any circumstances, be a romantic development.

And yet it’s the single most invigorating week of their lives…when they’re able to set their many differences aside and embrace it. Stranded amid all manner of flora and fauna—including a semidomesticated cougar called Baby—Davy and Zoey first have to survive the island. Then they’ll need to take a leap of faith, maybe even trusting in each other, to save it.

Robin Lefler lives near Toronto with her husband, their two children and an anxious goldendoodle. Over the course of a career in tech, she has travelled the globe but generally prefers to be at home, where she can easily locate coffee, wine and high-quality waffles.

More about Not How I Pictured It:

Twenty years after Turning Tides went off the air, the beloved TV show about teenage romance and angst is back. No one is more surprised than its former star, Agnes “Ness” Larkin, that she’s agreed to step back into the role of Hailey Grant. After her father/manager took off with her earnings, Ness ran away from the spotlight in shame. But maybe it’s time to stare her past, and her castmates, in their discreetly Botoxed faces.

That enthusiasm lasts until the first table read, which, in co-star Coco’s words, is “like a high school reunion without the dim lighting or booze.” Ness assumed her old fling Hayes Beaumont would be too busy doing Big Hollywood Things to take part, but there he is, seated beside her, exuding pheromones and success.

En route to the deluxe Bahamas resort where they’re to start filming, the cast gets stranded by a storm. Stuck on a tiny island with a paltry cache of food and quite possibly the most useless survival group in history, Ness tries to reconcile her youthful dreams with where she’s ended up—figuratively and literally. The producers wanted drama on and off-screen, and they’re going to get it, but where will Ness be when it’s all over?