aroaceknowstropes

[aroaceknowstropes]

Why am I Doing this?

So, lets start with the very basics, why am I reviewing romance novels? I, like many children who were voracious readers when they were young have now become an adult who only manages to read fanfiction at most. Certainly, there is always a place for fanfiction, but I read it in middle school and high school too and still managed to read real books.

Then I thought about what connects fanfiction that I love to read and the point in my life where I read the most books. The answer? Supernatural Romances.

See, I was a voracious reader my entire childhood. My mom had to set hard limits on how many books she could buy me each month, and our local library wasn't particularly large.

At the same time, as my parents were divorced, my mom often hesitated to let me take library books to my dad's house, because she worried that I would forget them there and then we'd be paying the fines for it. So, my options for books at my dad's house were even more limited.

Then, around freshman year of high school, my grandfather on my dad's side thought he had a stroke of genius. There was a lady at the local flea market who would sell you an entire grocery bag of books for just five dollars. The only catch? You can't open the bag until you buy it.

Of course he did the decent thing of throwing away any of the novels with bare chested men on the covers, but he never read any of the book descriptions. So from freshman year of high school until I graduated senior year, almost every other weekend I was getting a pile of supernatural romance books, mystery romance books, supernatural mystery romance books and the like.

And I read them, I read them all because I needed something to read. And you can't tell me that the worlds these stories lived in weren't interesting. The focus may have been two people falling in love, but there was certainly a good adventure around it.

Most of the fanfiction that I read also falls into the supernatural romance or mystery romance categories, just because the nature of fanfic is that it's mostly romantic. Do I enjoy the gen-fics I find? Yes, but we all know those are few and far between, so I have to get over it and embrace the fact that 90% of the best stories about my favorite characters are going to decide that they should really have been hooking up the whole time, clearly that's the fix to their tragic fates. (Joking, mostly. I like the stories, and I can recognize some characters have chemistry the show never bothered to explore, but there are just as many times where I see pairs that I think of as very platonic and the only stories with those two characters together are romantic.)

I can't remember the names of most of the works that I read back then, mom was right that anything that I brought over to dad's I'd probably lose. He moved every two or three months and was certainly no housekeeper when he had a house to keep. But I do remember the names of a few authors. We're going to start by reading Christine Feehan, because I can remember her name from several different books and also because I can get quite a few of her books really cheap. Not quite grocery bag cheap, but still, we're working on a budget to see if maybe I can like reading again.

Expect a review for Dark Prince in like a week.

Once the book arrives, but before I've read it, I'll leave a basic post of some romance tropes that I especially hate or especially love. That post is kind of going to continue to expand and be updated as I read. Use it as a measuring stick for how you should judge my reviews. Something that might be a big no from me may be your absolute favorite thing.