A Passion for Passion: A Delirious Love Letter to Romance

Tea with Alice podcaster Fraser debuts with a frivolous send-up of romance novels that alternates between meditations on the appeal of various subgenres and satirical back-cover copy for fictional romance books. She argues that Regency romances’ popularity stems from the period’s rigid social norms, which allow writers to construct elaborate obstacles for their protagonists to overcome on their way to happily ever after. Modern vampire romances, she contends, use the dangers of having sex with a “blood-crazed monster” to justify tension-building sexual restraint that might otherwise feel implausible “in a world where there are few taboos against even one-night stands.” These sharp analyses illuminate why certain tropes endure, but unfortunately, the pulpy copy for nonexistent novels will test readers’ patience. Many are humorous enough, as when Fraser pokes fun at romances based around shape-shifters (“Born of an unnatural threesome at a satanic 70s swinger night, he is part-leopard part-human part-vampire and all hunk”) or time travel (“Out of Time and In His Arms is a swash-buckling frenemies-to-lovers romp... full of excitement, boners and rogue dinosaurs”), but the joke wears thin well before readers finish the more than 50 book descriptions that constitute the bulk of the volume. This buries some thoughtful insights under a surfeit of parody. Illus. (May)