Starting a new blog is a weird thing and it can be hard to know where to start, but I figured it was a good idea to give a little context to my reading history. It wasn't until I was about 11 that I really got into reading and I ended up spending months devouring every book in the Girl Talk book series like those 4 girls were MY best friends, and my favorite parts were the sweet puppy love middle grade romance parts. After that, I moved on to devouring everything in the Sweet Dreams series - of which there were MANY in my junior high school library. I dipped a little bit into R.L. Stine (pre-Goosebumps) and Christopher Pike, I played a little bit in the Sweet Valley High arena, and I had a little bit of a daliance with Lurlene McDaniel, but I always came back to romance. As you can tell, my formative reading years were FIRMLY in the 90s, and what brought me into adult romance was, you guessed it, Harlequins.
Somehow my mom, who wasn't a particularly big reader, had ended up with a subscription to Harlequin Temptation books, so she got a package of about 4 every month and at about 13 I started devouring them all - blushing pretty furiously as I experienced the first GASP sex scenes that I'd ever read. From there, my auntie started lending me books from her years long collection of romance novels and I fell in love with Nora Roberts and devoured pretty much everything she'd written up until that point.
Through my adult life, I've gone through phases of being into all different subgenres, pretty much obsessed with devouring them before I fizzle out. I've spent months at a time burying myself in historical settings or losing myself in supernatural canon. I've played a little bit with romantic thrillers, though I'm pretty picky about those, and I've dabbled a teensy bit in chicklit, although I've decided these days that's not really my thing. The point is, I've loved this genre, bought and read hundreds of books over the years, and continue to default to books where people fall in love when I want to get lost in a story.
Honestly, I've always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder that the genre that I love so much gets as much hate and dismissal as it does. I can't even count the number of times someone has hit a nerve by reducing it to "lady porn" or saying that "anyone can write a romance novel." I've argued pretty heavily against those things and they really bug me - for a lot of reasons, honestly, but the two biggest are that I don't agree at all, and also that I'm kind of sick of things that women like being reduced to fluff. Sure, there's a formula and a happy ending and a whole bunch of feelings in between, but writing a really good romance novel isn't something that just anyone can pull off.
In the past few years, I've had a little bit of a shift in my thinking on this. As a reader, and a genuine lover of the genre, I've found myself starting to really, really hate a lot of what I try to read. Now, I've considered that it could just be a subjective thing and that my tastes are shifting, but then I read a book that hits all of the right notes and it renews my love for romance novels all over again.
This got me thinking... What is it that makes ME love the genre, and more specifically love a book? What are the things that get lost in the books that I don't love? I've thought about starting a blog about reading for a while - I've been blogging otherwise for almost 6 years now - but I never pulled the trigger until now. It wasn't until I realized exactly what I wanted my blog to be that I decided to pull the trigger and go for it.
So... What is Critically Romantic? I don't want to review books softly. When I look for reviews of books I'm thinking about reading, I don't want to just hear that you loved it or it was alright or you absolutely loathed it. I want to know why. The truth is, I've trusted a high Goodreads rating too many times, and I found myself wishing more people would give the WHYs, the in depth WHYs, to what makes them love or hate a book so that I didn't have to rely on a whole lot of gushing and a handful of stars to make my reading decisions. And then I thought... I could do that. There's no doubt that I've got a LOT of opinions, some of which you might agree with and some of which you might vehemently disagree with, but I think that delving deeper into those things will have value - at the very least to me.
I definitely have every intention of getting into some of the things that drive me CRAZY in this genre, because over the past couple of years those things have really come into sharp focus for me, but I also want to delve deeper into the things that make me really love a book - because a good premise and storyline is really only the beginning.
And I'll admit, I've shifted my thinking a little bit (particularly with the rise of self publishing) when it comes to people asserting that "anyone can write a romance novel". It's sort of true... but I've really learned that not just anyone can write a really good romance novel. SO... I'm a critical bitch and this is my romance blog!
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