Romance and why it’s for me…

I have been a lifelong reader… and as a kid I read anything and everything that was put in front of me.  I loved it all from the classics to the biographies… fiction to non-fiction. If it was in book form, I wanted it in front of me.  When I was little, my mom got the monthly Harlequin romance boxes in the mail.  Without fail, that little box of books showed up and she created this vast library of romance novels.  Now, being that I was barely in double digits I never really thought anything of it, aside from I really want to get books in the mail like that. 

But then I got a little older, and the covers drew me in, and I started taking a deep dive into the books.  Now, if you listen to the podcast at all, you know I am a fast reader.  I can read a 200 page book in a couple of hours now and as a kid while my speed wasn’t quite where I am not, but close.  So I would devour those books without fail.  I would hide in the corner of my room, and not get up until the book was finished.  

At the time, I never really thought much of it.  It was a good story that I enjoyed, but I still read everything else that I could–and had to because of school–and never really thought much of it.   There was a time after college that I kind of lost my love of the written word.  Life was changing.  I still read on the regular but not as much.  But then I had my first child.  And I fell back into it, and I rediscovered romancelandia.  

I started in category and other trad pub books because I had to go through the library and we were on a tight budget.  Plus, I firmly believed that I needed to hold the book in my hands.  After almost dropping (and actual dropping) of books onto my kids’ heads when they were nursing, I made the move to the e-reader and I found a whole new world, and haven’t looked back.

What’s so great about this world you might ask?  It’s a fictional world that while bad things happen you know that in the end, it ends well.  It’s a world that no matter what, characters find the person (or people).  It’s a world where I can escape from the bad in my life, and know that no matter what there is an HEA.  Romance is an escape… It’s a world created by someone’s imagination.  ANd the best thing about it, it can be so far out of the realm of reality that it seems fantastical but authors have done an amazing job creating a world that while fake seems real.  Romance is an escape.  Romance fills my bucket, and I will continue to read it and love it and not be sorry about it in the least. Here are some of the books that I read when I truly started my deep dive back into romance, and here are some that I can’t get enough of now.