Romance: Let's See How Far We've Come

(After reading that title, does anyone else have the absolute best Machbox 20 song ever recorded stuck in their head?)

The romance genre and I have had a rocky, on-again-off-again relationship.  There was a time that I passionately adored it.  It was a genre where I found the kind of witty, sarcastic female characters that made me laugh out loud, long before those kinds of women started to populate the pages of the other novels I picked up.  (That's not to say they weren't there, just that they weren't there in the books that I found.)  There were also characters with deep emotional wounds that didn't bury everything under a deep layer of cynicism and call it good.  They (usually) grew and learned and became better people.  It was amazing.

But it also let me down, over and over and over again.  One interesting female character after another started out with such promise, met a man, then gave up everything that made her interesting to devote her every thought and action to the Love Interest of the story.  Almost without fail, I would hit about the two-thirds mark and completely lose interest, because the actual plot would fade into the background as The Relationship became the only important thing.  Resolution of the big outside conflict was often superficial and unsatisfying because, hey, who cares about the bad guy?  The main character has found a man!  Nothing else really matters!

And despite how this may sound, I am in NO WAY attempting to criticize the authors.  Romance is hard-core genre writing.  Readers have specific things they're looking for and expect their authors of choice to provide.  The novels I'm describing were written by women at the top of the Romance game, because they were giving the readers what they were looking for.  It just wasn't what I was looking for.

Fast forward a few (*cough* ten) years to today, when I cautiously began to dip my metaphorical toe back into the Romance world.  Wow.  What a revolution has occurred.  Admittedly, my sampling has been limited so far, but I have found myself delighted and a little amazed at the change I've found in the genre.  These ladies are interesting, and they continue to be interesting until the very last page of the book.  They have their own lives that they don't immediately give up once a man claims them as his own.  Seriously, check out Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey (although you should definitely start with the first book, It Happened One Summer, because it's freaking awesome).  

There are women who are smart and giving the men a run for their money.  I recently read The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, and I am officially that woman's fangirl.  Holy crap, a character who is an emotional mess and making important contributions to science and in a relationship with a brilliant man but doesn't need him to give her the answers because she's smart enough to figure it out on her own.  Plus, I kinda love the fake-dating trope.  

So, yeah.  I'm basically loving this newly discovered world of reading possibilities.  I've looking forward to meeting a lot of new, amazing authors and stories as I explore this rediscovered world of humor, emotion, and guaranteed Happily Ever After.

~Jo