Why a Reluctant Romance Reader?
Romance novels aren't for everyone. They were certainly for my 10th grade English teacher. She was lending paperbacks to a classmate when I decided to give one a try. I think I read two that year: one involved pirates, I'm almost certain. The second had the respectable daughter of a petty nobleman who was accidentally raped in a stable ("Is this part of kissing, too?") by the new groom who was actually a prince in disguise, and couldn't understand why her father was overjoyed to hand her over to someone lower than her. I wasn't easily hooked. Harlequins and romance novels were cheap and tawdry, and I was devoted to real literature. The next year might have been when I read The Mists of Avalon about 6 times. So it wasn't the sex or seduction that I didn't like. Far from it. Also a sub-genre, and a popular one at that, but fantasy seems to have more legitimacy, somehow. In college I sought out some erotica that felt more transgressive--the diary of Joe