I read four romance novels last month and they were all outside my middle ground of romance in ways that I loved. I’m quickly approaching my 200th historical romance novel read and I’m excited that I’m still discovering new nooks and crannies of the genre that has a reputation for being formulaic and repetitive.
I haven’t a perfect month of reading in ages, but rather than shoehorn 3/4 of these books into a thesis together that wouldn’t be fun for anyone—here’s four short little reviews. I wouldn’t call of these blanket recommendations because every book I read this month I imagine has a very specific audience, but here my endorsements, with attempts at caveats for taste.
A Bed of Spices by Barbara Samuel: I found this recommendation on the website Dear Author from their list of the 100 best non-Regency historicals. Most of what I read is Regency--I think it comes out to about half Regency, half every other period in history. The reasons that Regency captivates historical romance are both straightforward and complicated, but it is an incredibly narrow period of history. And there is often not a lot of history wrapped up in these books. Sometimes they’ll be a hook to a specific event (Waterloo is a favorite, particularly of Mary Balogh), a person (Lords Byron or Nelson, Beau Brummel) or a law (the Corn Laws), but Regency of the historical romances can also work like a fairy tale setting, devoid of the mundane politics.
A Bed of Spices is set in 1347 in Strasbourg, the city on the border between France and Germany and features a Christian woman and Jewish man in a cross-cultural romance. Strasbourg was the site of one of the first pogroms in the world in 1349, when the Jewish community of the city was burned and the Jews either burned themselves or exiled. Even a reader who knew very little about what is coming in Strasbourg could guess that something terrible is going to befall Rica and Solomon’s community, if their romance, before the novel is over.
There is also a subplot about Rica’s twin sister, Etta, who has been selectively mute since she was assaulted by a gang of thieves as a child, after she witnessed her mother’s murder. Rica treats Etta with patronizing compassion and there’s a parallel dread surrounding what Rica does not see in Etta’s trauma as their father prepares them for marriage.
Both Etta and the Jewish community in Strasbourg have this inevitable feeling of tragedy surrounding what is coming for them throughout the book, that the reader has access to, but Rica and Solomon are without. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a romance novel that felt more like it restricted my breathing, I was so stressed by what was going to happen.
That feeling is not for everyone--I see readers all the time say what they want is fantasy escapism in their romance novels. But a reason I loved this book so much is the way the cross-cultural romance was written. These are popular in Regency as well, though the typical one is English woman/Scottish Man (sometimes Roma man). And the way they are written can get exhausting and pretty fetishistic of the non-hegemonic community. The Scottish men are always the largest men in the room, they always have chips on their shoulders about how they are treated because they are Scottish, but they also use that anger to become incredibly powerful and wealthy (often landlords). The women they romance always seem to be the smallest and slightest of the heroines.
What I liked about Rica and Solomon is how much Rica fell in love with Solomon’s Solomon-ness, particularly his relationship to his community and his interactions with others and how much of that is shown to the reader. There is firmly a HEA here, but Samuel asks questions that I think often can get elided in Regency romance about evils in the world and what the sacrifice looks like for an all-or-nothing, sweeping love. I haven’t read a romance novel where worse things happen.
The Lord I Left by Scarlett Peckham: I think The Earl I Ruined is still my favorite Scarlett Peckham book (lots of my favorite historicals are takes on “what if Emma Woodhouse experienced one (1) consequence?”) but The Lord I Left is also lovely.
Scarlett Peckham is writing books that feel like they answer romance novel readers’ musings of “why couldn’t this happen in a historical?” Which, I think, upsets some other readers as ahistorical. This series centers on Charlotte Street, a sex club that mostly caters to BDSM clients, but also features more specific or narrow desires. This would be a no-go for some historical readers from the jump.
The premise of this book is that Henry Evesham is a evangelical preacher who has been tasked by the government to investigate these clubs and make a recommendation about the legality of them. Alice Hull is a worker at Charlotte Street, though she has not yet been promoted to her coveted position of “governess,” where she could earn more money than her current, basically secretarial role, though she has done sex work before.
Romances relationship with sex work is often fraught at the best of times. Romance as a genre often sees itself as next to sex work and porn, which is not totally inaccurate, given the policing of materials and experiences connected to sexual experience. But with the adjacency comes a sense of superiority and othering--authors and readers alike will defend romance as serious because it isn’t porn, or point to porn as harmful while romance is restorative to them.
And sex workers are often depicted in romance novels, but usually as secondary characters and often as victims of violence. Heroines will be mistaken for sex workers and there will be some element of the woman’s purity or main-characterness that will distinguish her from a person who would sell sex for money. Heroes often are characterized as “good men” if they have never slept with a “lady” or virgin before the heroine, but they are sexually proficient, stated either implicitly or explicitly, because they have been paying for sex.
Peckham’s dealing with a hero who is sexually anxious and attempting, in a benevolent-in-his-mind way, to shut down sex work where workers are safe and have protection, is certainly one of the most compassionate takes on the relationship between the genre and sex work because so many of Henry’s takes mirror the sort of paternalistic, liberalism that permeates even well-meaning depictions of sex work in romance.
Additionally, with Peckham’s progressive politics on sex work, she writes some of the most interesting sex scenes I have ever read. For all the self-congratulatory about romance depicting women’s pleasure in unique to the genre ways, a lot of big authors tend to write very similar and rote sex scenes! Peckham’s pacing of when sex happens and in what order acts happen and what acts happen is always surprising and convention-bending. She’s one of the only historical authors who is currently publishing that I am unequivocally excited at the thought of her writing new books.
The Devil’s Web by Mary Balogh: Mary Balogh is maybe the romance novelist who comes the closest to Lisa Kleypas for me in how much she fascinates and frustrates me. Like Kleypas, Balogh has a huge bibliography--she’s written dozens of books and has been writing since the mid-80s. A handful of her books are some of my all-time favorites (Someone to Hold, Slightly Dangerous, Slightly Scandalous, Only Enchanting, The Proposal). And some of her books make me so angry that I have wanted to throw them across the room (Simply Love, Someone to Trust) or so bored, I wondered if I had accidentally gotten a copy where all the plot chapters had been removed (The Arrangement).
Balogh’s theory of romance and happily ever afters is often centered on reconciliation and this leads to her most frustrating plots. She loves nothing more than a character, a heroine in particular, making nice with her family of birth. Sometimes this is moving and sometimes! the family really really does not deserve the heroine’s forgiveness. Heroes are also encouraged to make up with their parents, but in my experience of Balogh, the heroes are often given the more complicated reconciliation plots, where reconciliation fails and they have to learn to move past it on their own terms.
The Devil’s Web (1990) is an earlier Balogh than I have read in the past and it is interesting to see her take on bodice rippers being the Moment of historical romances at the time. I would call this a bodice ripper-lite. For plot reasons I won’t spoil, there is the fallout of a rape, without there being an actual rape, based on some miscommunication. Miscommunication is the real theme here. I rarely have the impulse to beg for characters to just “have ONE conversation, please” which is a frequent refrain among romance novel readers that don’t seem to get how internal conflict works. But Madeline and James did almost push me there.
Still, I really enjoyed this book! Balogh doesn’t always do this, but in at least two of her books (this and The Proposal), she will retell scenes from the other perspective in the dual POV. I’m always surprised that more authors don’t attempt this! It seems like a natural progression of a genre that is so invested in the dual POV as a convention. I think this method ups the angst because the reader has so much information about exactly where the miscommunications are happening.
Another Balogh tenet that I love is her writing of petulant and self-possessed women as heroines (Someone to Hold and Slightly Scandalous) and Madeline here is incredibly self-centered and manipulative, but Balogh has great sympathy for her methods of manipulation as a defense to her anxiety about the temporality of her place in the room (beautiful, unmarried flirt). Madeline is unsure how to move past this role that she knows has an expiration date and she acts out for it. I love her. Madeline’s anxiety about choice/being chosen dovetails interestingly when Balogh’s bodice ripper adjacent plot, where both characters have to think about consent in romantic relationships with inherent and intersecting power dynamics.
To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney
I wrote a whole newsletter about this book, so long that two of the parts weren’t even about this book! But I had to mention it again--both for neatness because it is a book that I loved in November and as a reminder, I recommend it.
I haven’t stopped thinking about this book since I read it. It shaped pretty acutely my reactions to the other books I read this month and has become a new tentpole in my mental map of the genre.
I’ll do one more newsletter before the end of the year (the Heartbreak Weather Awards—my year end summary of books I loved this year) and in January, I’ll be starting a new series about depictions of prison and incarceration in romance novels that I think will take a couple months to get through, which will run alongside reviews of romances and romantic non-romances.
"I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a romance novel that felt more like it restricted my breathing, I was so stressed by what was going to happen."
This is one of my favorite types of romance novels! I can't wait to read it.