I love romance novels.
I feel like whenever I announce my love of romance there is someone nearby to tell me it is fluff, silly, trashy, and how dare I?
A quote that resonates with me is from Mindy Kaling’s first book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?:
“I simply regard romantic comedies as a sub-genre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.”
This really encapsulates how I feel about the romance genre. There is an otherworldly quality to it. Even in the most contemporary realistic romance, you find a heightened reality that’s akin to an alternative reality or a whole different world.
The first romance novel I fell for was Nora Roberts witchy novel Dance Upon the Air (2001). I was seventeen and found it in my high school library. I’ve re-read it more times than I can remember, along with the second and third book in the trilogy. Its protagonists are witches who live on an island the Salem-era witches they descend from created.
[Warning some spoilers below for Dance Upon the Air]
Dance Upon the Air is Sleeping with the Enemy meets Practical Magic. The main character Nell is on the run from her abusive husband. But when she meets super witch Mia and reluctant witch Ripley, she finds family and a safe space. Her love interest is the stalwart good-natured town Sheriff. He is the last person she wants to interact with. This gives us some delicious internal conflict.
What resonates with me is how Nell finds HEA (Happily Ever After) through her own self-realization and friendships.
There is joy in reading Romance. I often read them in one sitting. I devour them. Rarely do I take my time. I know it will end with an HEA, so there is a comfort in that. But there is also a pull to know how the author will play within conventions of the genre, sometimes breaking rules or taking tropes to unexpected places.