At least, that’s how this past week felt. Well, no, not really. That’s how this weekend has felt.
I was driving home from work (we’re mostly back in the office, but working remotely some of the time) when my phone beeped with a text. Not being an idiot, I didn’t check the text until I pulled into the garage.
The text was from my husband, telling me that my Mom had fallen and hurt her arm and needed me.
So I headed up the street (she only lives a few houses away) and a few minutes after that, I’d bundled her into my car and off we went to the ER.
Long story short, she scraped/peeled a chunk of skin off her forearm, but nothing was broken. An hour and a half later, I brought her home and the hubby went to get dinner.
Yesterday, I went up to help her change the dressing, and I just got back from doing the same today.
So much for the quiet, relaxing weekend I had planned. Love your sense of humor, God. Really. (GRIN)
Last week, I mentioned that I’ve been having thoughts about romance and partners and romantic partners, and I’m going to try to be a little bit coherent as I explore those thoughts.
I read genre Romance for a while – mostly paranormal, though my choices were slim, as I don’t generally care for shifters or vampires, both of which have been en vogue for more than twenty years, dating roughly from Christine Feehan’s Dark Prince in 1999. There were also some historical (though please – no more Scotsmen! Kilts are sexy, sure, but a little variety would be nice), contemporary, and even futuristic Romances thrown in the mix.
All that to say that I’m in no way an avid Romance reader, but for a couple of decades there, it made up about a third of my fiction reading. These days, though, maybe 5 percent of the fiction I read is genre Romance.
Why the drop? Because – at least in the books I was reading; others probably are different – a trend emerged that I dislike immensely: the heroines of the books were all in financial straits. They might own a bookshop, for example, or some specialty gift shop … but the shop was struggling. If they had a consulting business, or were a private investigator, they had difficulty finding clients, and most especially they had difficulty finding wealthy clients.
Until the hero came along. Genre Romance prides itself on drool-worthy heroes, and the heroes in the books I was reading were definitely that. They came from a wealthy or powerful background, or had founded spectacularly successful businesses, or otherwise had money and influence. Which the heroines lacked.
Now, I *get* that the Cinderella trope is one of the most popular in Romance, but I couldn’t find many where the heroes and heroines were anywhere close to each other in economic … status, for lack of a better word.
(I’m going to give a shout out here to Jessica Andersen, whose Final Prophecy series is a notable exception. Sadly, the last book in that series came out in 2012, and she’s since moved on to other things. There was another trilogy that was better about it than most, but the name of it escapes me – it, too, was back in the early ’10s.)
So, yes – the Cinderella trope (a poor but good girl is rescued from a hard life by a prince) is big in Romance, and entirely appropriate for historical Romance: However unlikely it was in history that a poor girl with no connections and no dowry would actually attract a wealthy husband, the economic disparity rings true for the time.
But.
This is the 21st century, not the 18th or 19th or even 20th. Is focusing on the example of a poor (okay, “struggling”) heroine being rescued (into marriage) by a wealthy and/or powerful hero the best that genre Romance can do?
If it is, then it’s no wonder I quit reading it. Yes, my husband earns more than I do (he’s a software engineer and I’m a legal assistant), but I earn enough to make my way on my own. I never needed a wealthy man to “rescue” me, and I’d really like to read more about people like me in that regard.
(Some military Romances may have this dynamic; I’ve only read a few, and none stick out in my memory.)
Which brings me to the shifters series I just did the series bible for.
By the end of the first book, our hero and heroine are literal partners – they were both economically struggling at the start, but by the end, they’re partners in a business venture and making it work. If they rescue each other, it’s because of their feelings for each other, not the fact that one is significantly wealthier than the other.
I loved their relationship. Okay, to my taste the relationship was a bit rushed and could’ve been developed a little more deeply, but they were equals! Social equals, and I hadn’t realized I was missing that until I read these books.
So thank you, Sarah, for helping me put into words why I quit reading genre Romance, and for showing me that, yes, books do exist that have better-to-me relationships!
WRITING UPDATE: “Child of Iron, Goblet of Fire” is sitting at about 25,000 words, and those words feel mostly right. Some I drafted before and will probably have to massage a bit, but overall, I think I’m finally(!) on the right track.
