Posted by: fshk on: September 8, 2009
I recently read Double Play by Jill Shalvis, which is a baseball romance. I picked it up because I love baseball. The plot wasn’t even relevant when I first saw the title; I saw “baseball” and “romance” and clicked “buy.” It turned out to be a sweet little romance, on the fluffy side, but good [...]
Posted by: fshk on: August 15, 2009
I think this Jezebel headline says it all: Is “New Chick Lit” Just a Different Kind of Obnoxious?: These tales of women overcoming obstacles to live independently of men and their bank accounts certainly sound inspiring — except that the obstacles aren’t really that big. In fact, it seems that divorce and financial devastation usually [...]
Posted by: fshk on: August 6, 2009
There has been some discussion in the romance blogs of late about historical accuracy in romance novels. This is one of those things I always took with a grain of salt. Mostly I read historicals about periods I don’t know much about, so that the details don’t bother me or pull me out of the [...]
Posted by: fshk on: August 6, 2009
I discovered Chick Lit my last year in college, when I read a string of books in a row intended to distract me from my thesis. These were cutesy romances involving flawed heroines living in cities, and most of the ones I read were fluffy nonsense, but I could recognize something there. Before the books [...]
Posted by: fshk on: July 29, 2009
Candy at Smart Bitches has a thought-provoking post up that gets into some interesting questions. I think a lot of romance readers probably have a love/hate relationship with some of the tropes of the genre, especially as pertains to gender roles. Candy certainly does, and she writes: So, in romance novels, acceptable, masculine behavior for [...]
Posted by: fshk on: July 29, 2009
Jane at Dear Author has a post up about first lines that pulled her into good romance novels. She lists a bunch. I bet you can think up some classics on your own, everything from “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want [...]
Posted by: fshk on: July 14, 2009
Hey, wanna hear something crazy? You know how I don’t like rapey romance heroes? It’s because I am a Young Person!. Amanda Hess picks apart a blog post by an old-skool romance writer defending rapey heroes. The writer says: Mind, this definition of “rape” is not a legal one; it’s a highly stylized one in [...]
Posted by: fshk on: June 24, 2009
I recently picked up Beyond Heaving Bosoms, which I think I’m just going to carry around in my purse all the time, so that when people ask me why I read romance novels, I can point to the preface and say, “This! This is why!” In the first chapter, the Smart Bitches define Old Skool [...]
Posted by: fshk on: June 24, 2009
Either I’m ahead of the curve, or the Baltimore City paper is getting to the party late, because they’re writing about the trend of women reading and writing m/m romance. Never mind that women have been writing romances (and, okay, porn) featuring two men since slash fiction was born in the late 60s, this is [...]
Posted by: fshk on: May 21, 2009
This is an unpopular opinion, but I am not a huge Jane Austen fan. I read a lot of Austen when I was in high school, in part because all those movies came out around that time: IMDb tells me that the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma all came out [...]
