It had been too long since I had found a new favorite romance author. The reliable stand-by authors were feeling … a little too familiar, decades and dozens of books later. And then came Courtney Milan, and things were good. And then I followed a link from Milan’s Twitter to WOC in Romance and whole new vistas opened up.
Black women spying for the Union behind Confederate lines? Thank you, Alyssa Cole.
A Marxist Indian who fears deportation falling in love with a sex worker-turned-nightclub owner who’s organizing for women’s suffrage in Harlem in 1917? Thank you again, Alyssa Cole.
A transgender Latina heroine who writes a blog about end-of-the-world scenarios as a side project while attending the University of California-Berkeley? Thank you, Courtney Milan.
Make no mistake, these are real genre romance novels with a heroine and a hero and a happy ending. But the context and the characters are different enough from Nora Roberts’s bed and breakfast operators and Jayne Ann Krentz’s gallery owners and rare booksellers and the feisty historic heroines of any number of authors—authors I’ve very much enjoyed for years, mind you—to make the genre feel fresh and unexpected again, and in ways that illuminate our politics without intensifying the sucking vortex of Trump-related despair.
But you don’t have to go to a Union spy posing as a slave for differences to register.
Take Shelly Ellis’s MacLaine girls novellas, in which the backdrop is a mother and daughter trying to keep their performance school running in gentrifying Washington, D.C. In Her New Groove, daughter Bina explains that most of the “transplants” moving into the neighborhood don’t have kids, and “honestly, the ones who do have kids don’t wanna bring them here.” How does she know?
“Because we tried reaching out to a few mom groups, posting flyers in the local park. But we got no bites. Finally, one woman outright told us why she and the other parents wouldn’t bring their children here. She said they don’t want their kids mingling with the ‘kind of children we usually cater to … ones from those kind of environments.’
“She was talking about our kids like they were criminals, Peanut! So to hell with her!”
It’s a novella about a fading pop star organizing a benefit concert while falling back in love with her high school sweetheart. Typical enough stuff … but beyond their romance story, the stakes are different than in the romance novels you can get in every airport bookstore in the country, as is the view of the world in which we live and fall in love. (The cultural references are also different.)
It’s worth looking into—especially when you learn that, in 2017, just 6.2 percent of books from the leading romance publishers were by people of color, down from 7.8 in 2016. Half the publishers surveyed by The Ripped Bodice had either not improved or slid backward from their 2016 mark. And, The Ripped Bodice notes, the excuses for this don’t hold up: despite the few authors of color who get picked up by leading publishers, many become top sellers, while the industry is growing and should be able to incorporate more authors of color. From a political standpoint this (and a lot else) is inexcusable, but it’s also terrible from a reader’s standpoint.
So you may have to look around a little bit—again, WOC in Romance is a good place to start—but seriously, go find and read some romances (or whatever your genre of choice may be) by authors of color.