I don’t usually pick up books of the romance genre, but since it’s so common as a subgenre in other books, I feel like I can speak to it. I’m writing this after finishing Paradoxem; it’s a science fiction that has a huge romantic subplot, and that romance was very, well, BookTok-like. The prose was not bad overall, but all the romance scenes felt reaaally samey and I find this to be true for nearly all romances nowadays. The girl is smart and stubborn, the guy is hot and annoyingly flirtatious, and you can probably write the book in your head without me saying anything else. There’s one scene when the characters have to sleep inside a spacecraft hidden in a lab and, you guessed it, “there’s only one bed!”. Most of their interactions are based on him throwing witty flirtatious jokes at her and her getting annoyed/blushing. He says the word “fuck” a lot. They think about each other’s bodies constantly in a very “I hate that he’s so hot” style. He “let’s out a breath he didn’t know he was holding”. You get the idea.
I don’t know, it feels like the same book and the same writing style over and over again. The same way you can almost always tell when a book started as fanfiction, you can tell when it was written after a hefty diet of TikTok and Instagram. These kinds of books feel like they were written around very specific indulgent scenes and lines (e.g “only one bed” or “who hurt you” tropes) with very little effort to develop the characters or their relationship beyond that, like a kid playing out their fantasies and smashing their Barbies together. Feels like connective tissue with no vital organs.
To me, this whole thing is a repeat scenario of the romantic comedies of the 90’s and 00’s, but for books – everything has the same plot, the same characters and the same ending. I guess it’s fine if you just want to appeal to that niche of BookTok and Bookstagram readers, but it feels so uncreative. It definitely doesn’t work for people outside of that niche.
by Leticia_the_bookworm