Musing About Reading Romance
An essay on my reading habits and history with romance
A Black woman got me back into reading romance novels. Namely, Roxane Gay, when she reviewed Jasmine Guillory’s “The Wedding Date”:
What a charming, warm, sexy gem of a novel. I couldn’t put The Wedding Date down. I love a good romance and this delivered from the first page to the last. Alexa Monroe is a great heroine—smart, funny, and full of the anxieties women know intimately. And when she meets the handsome doctor Drew Nichols in an elevator, it’s the beginning of an adventure in falling in like and then lust and then love. It was also nice to read a fun novel about an interracial relationship. One of the best books I’ve read in a while. Oh. One weird thing. The characters ate CONSTANTLY. Like it’s kind of hilarious how much they eat.
I had read “Bad Feminist” in 2014, then “Difficult Women,” “Hunger” and her novel “Ayiti” all in 2017, so I was a big fan.
Since I had finally started reading (and watching!) “The Walking Dead” in 2015, a lot of my reading up till 2018 was graphic novels/comics, sci-fi and fantasy, horror and nonfiction. I read a lot of Young Adult Fiction, but I’d largely stopped reading romance novels, barring the occasional Julia London or Victoria Alexander historical romance novel.
My original gateways to romance were books I pulled off my mom’s (historical) or aunt’s (Harlequins) bookshelves. As an adult, I’d never really read contemporary romances, except for the odd erotic anthology. I didn’t consciously eschew romance, but looking back, I can see now that I was no longer engaged by the mass market paperbacks I had previously read as a teenager - historicals involving kidnapped Scottish brides, white early American ladies kidnapped by Indians/Native Americans (using the terminology of the time) or the Harlequins pretending to be contemporary that had aged into historical status. As I became more educated and more of a feminist, I could no longer stomach the romances of my youth with their weird narratives around consent (or lack thereof) and characters and plots steeped in un-examined white supremacy and colonialism.
In 2015-2016, I was turning to a lot of books on feminism and racial justice. I still remember the day maybe a week after Trump won the presidency in 2015 that a woman rushed up to me in the library and asked in a rushed, desperate voice, “Where are the books on feminism?” I knew exactly where to take her and handed her a stack of books I’d read in the previous few years.
For all of the Trump presidency, I continued to read books about feminism, but I also began to intentionally seek out the work of Black women. I’ve always read pretty diversely, but I realized I could engage with more Black authors by focusing on books I already wanted to read and consciously making time for them. I read “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History,” edited by Rose Fox and Daniel Jose Older (itself recommended by my friend Jamey Hatley) and “discovered” many new-to-me authors, but especially Nnedi Okorafor and Tananarive Due. I continued to read YA books, sci-fi, horror and comics, including by Black authors, but I wasn’t reading romance.
With her review of “The Wedding Date,” Roxane Gay invited me into the realm of contemporary romance written by authors who might not look like me writing about characters who might not look like me, but who I could easily identify with and root for in the course of a book or a series. After reading “The Wedding Date” in 2018, Jasmine Guillory has been on my “author I’ll read everything by” list. I remember using Goodreads’ book lists and recommendation algorithms to find other authors “like” Jasmine Guillory and then authors “like” those authors: Helen Hoang, Christina Lauren, Alyssa Cole, Elle Kennedy, Sally Thorne, Helena Hunting, Tessa Bailey, Abby Jimenez, Kerry Winfrey, Beth O’Leary, Alisha Rai, Jen DeLuca, Sarah (Echavarre) Smith, Talia Hibbert, Lyssa Kay Adams, Mhairi McFarlane, Marie Harte, Andie J. Christopher, Penny Reid, Kwana Jackson, Rosie Danen, Rachel Lynn Solomon, Kate Clayborn, Farah Heron, Olivia Dade, Ali Hazelwood, Mia Sosa, Angelina M. Lopez and Emily Henry. I continue to read everything by these authors I can get my hands on and because not all of these authors are Black, even white authors have gained a reader *because* I found Jasmine Guillory through Roxane Gay, because I started looking for more book recommendations, especially from folks like Katherine, who frequently posts her book displays at Powell’s and has now opened up Grand Gesture Books, a romance-focused bookstore.
Because of Jasmine Guillory and all of the above authors, I even got back into historical romances, finding Evie Dunmore, Vanessa Riley, Martha Waters, Sarah MacLean, Grace Calloway, Joanna Lowell, Elisa Braden, Martha Keyes, Amalie Howard, Amy Barry and Manda Collins. I even re-read Julia Quinn’s "Bridgerton” books after watching the Shondaland/Netflix series, picturing the diverse cast of actors as I re-read.
And, discovering that I can read and enjoy love stories about people who seem to be (at least on the surface) unlike me has opened up queer, trans and other romances for me as well. Who knows if I would’ve read “Something Spectacular” by Alexis Hall (which I just finished) if not for Jasmine Guillory and Roxane Gay bringing me back to romance? I’ve read LGBTIQ+ love stories by Ashley Herring Blake, Casey McQuiston, Cat Sebastian and Travis Baldree.
No one has benefited from diversity in romance more than me, and readers like me. And since I’ve been reading so diversely within the romance category, I’ve been able to recommend books to an enormous array of people, which is one of the greatest pleasures of my life.
In the course of creating all of the links above, I found out most of these authors have new books coming out I haven’t read yet! And I’m always down for more recommendations, so let me know if you didn’t see one of your favorites on my lists.
If you want to buy books by any of the authors above, I encourage you to buy from Grand Gesture Books - you’ll find many of these authors in Katherine’s book lists. Since I originally read a library copy “The Wedding Date,” which is how I read almost everything (most in audio format), I’m going to buy my very own copy to commemorate 5 years since “The Wedding Date” officially got me back into romance!