How Romance Novels Center Marginalized Joy

After our GREAT discussion of A Court of Roses and Thorns we realized we wanted to talk a lot more about romance: about the so-called “boom” and what’s fueling it, of course, but also about various tropes (sick bed, forbidden romance, grumpy protagonist), race and cultural specificity, the level of “spice” and how it shows up on the page, and how to manage your own romance reading behavior. Melody heard Nisha Sharma speak at Romance GenreCon last year and knew she was the person to address so many of your questions. Whether you’re new to romance like me, don’t read it but are interested in why other people do, or have immersed yourself in the genre for years, I promise there’s something in this conversation that’s going to stick in your head for days.

Show Notes:

• Nisha Sharma!!!! Follow her on Instagram and TikTok, and here’s links to all her recent books and upcoming events

• You can pre-order The Letters We Keep and Marriage & Masti at Bookshop.org— promo code CULTURE gets you 10% off

• Or for pre-order swag, order from Doylestown Bookshop

• Maya Rodale’s Dangerous Books for Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained

• “Canon building is empire building”

• Janice A. Radway’s Reading the Romance

• Lee & Low Books Diversity Baseline Survey

• MONSTER THEORY

• A very fun round-up of Fabio romance novel covers, by the numbers

• A 2018 piece on cartoon covers “tricking” people into reading romance

AND NOW, A LIST OF EVERY BOOK RECOMMENDED IN THIS EPISODE

• The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory

• For Real by Alexis Hall

• The Candid Life of Meena Dave by Namrata Patel

• You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

• The Roommate by Rosie Danan

• The Partner Plot by Kristina Forest

• Queen Takes Rose by Katee Robert

• Destiny’s Captive by Beverly Jenkins

• Double Exposure by Rien Gray

• Beach Read by Emily Henry

• Bride by Ali Hazelwood

• That Prince is Mine by Jayci Lee

• A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean

• Say You’ll Be Mine by Naina Kumar

• Rock Hard by Nalini Singh

• Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver

• Power Play by B. P. Gilmore

• Collide by Bal Khabra

• Out on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-Young

• Chloe Liese for disability representation

• Kimberly Lemming for cozy monster romance

• Morning Glory Milking Farm by C. M. Nacosta

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• Trad wives, featuring a co-host who used to be one

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORES

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

For today’s discussion: We could’ve kept this podcast going for another three hours. So let’s do more of it here. What other tropes do you want to unpack? What didn’t we talk about — or what did we miss?

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