Not So Guilty Pleasure Anymore

Hi, my name is... and I'm a closet romance reader...

There! I'm finally admitting it, I love romance novels! *shrieks* 

I haven't really read romance novels since my early teens. I used to devour them like crazy, starting from the teenybopper Sweet Dreams right up to the steamier ones like Mills & Boon, Harlequin and Loveswept (hey, what can I say, I'm a Gen X-er after all). That is, until I reached a point (a year or so later) when I just got tired of the formulaic stories, the weak female heroines and the same alpha heroes with more money than god. I turned my back on them and moved on to other books that I thought will feed my brain better.

But a certain book got on my radar last year (it that shall not be named HAH!) and next thing I knew, my fascination with romance novels has been re-kindled. The funny part is that particular book was not even really the best written one out there and will probably not win any literary awards but one thing it did do is it hooked me right back in. *sigh* (whodathunk!)

As a result, what I did discover as well is that the new romance novels have now developed a new formula, so to speak. The better written ones have the right amount of angst to evoke enough emotion, the characters have more texture to them, the heroines have finally developed some spine and the alpha heroes, although some of them still with more money than god, have become, let's just say, more varied in their occupation. And boy have they gotten a whole lot steamier too, oh my! (as in NSFW... or young 'uns for that matter... you've been warned!)

And these days, one of my fave, if not THE most fave, in this genre has got to be Sylvia Day.

The Crossfire series follows the emotional and romantic journey taken by Gideon Cross and Eva Tramell

Sylvia Day, as far as I'm concerned, has got this corner covered. Not sure how she does it, but dang, she does! Here's a series with characters that are well developed, a heroine with so much fight in her, a hero *major swoon* who you can't help but fall in love with (just ask all the Sylvia Day fans), and it covers a whole gamut of emotions, that you really can't help but get immersed in it. Just saying...

As we speak, the 3rd book in this series, Entwined With You, has just released, and it could not have come fast enough! Love this series! Love the characters and their story! Care to take a guess what I'll be doing this weekend? heehee...

In the meantime, I wonder, do you think that romance novels have just been getting a bad rep all this time? Just because it's a "fluffy" form of escapism, does that make it less of a written art? A well written story is a well written story, is it not? And if it gets people reading, hasn't it achieved its purpose in the end?