2018 Was the Ultimate Meet-Cute
a guest post from Moonstruck Reads
I’m thrilled to welcome Natalie of
to The Eclectic Reader today! I love reading Natalie’s musings on the romance genre each week. Today she brings us an essay all about the romance boom of 2018, which titles launched a new era of contemporary romance, and why this year marks a significant turning point in many readers’ lives. I hope you enjoy reading her piece as much as I did, and I’m sending a huge thank you to paid subscribers who made this guest post possible.2018 Was the Ultimate Meet-Cute
The year is 2018. Marvel still reigns supreme at the box office and in the hearts of nerds everywhere. We spent all summer drinking Aperol spritzes. Enamel pins, overalls, and succulents are millennial essentials. And two books are about to reshape the landscape of contemporary romance permanently.
To be clear, romance has always been big business. But when I worked at an independent bookstore back in 2017, we didn’t have any kind of romance section. A year or two after I left the bookstore, they got a spinner display for a small but mighty selection of romances. Now the romance section has two full bookshelves prominently on display at the front of the store. Romance has exploded into the mainstream in the last six years and I have a theory that none of this would have been possible without The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory and The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. These two books brought new readers into the genre, helped expand the industry’s ideas of what contemporary romance could be and who it could feature, and set a template for so much of the romance we have today.
Let’s start with the surface level. Both of these books were released in trade paperback, not the mass market format that most romances were packaged in at the time. There are no shirtless men or dramatic embraces to be seen on either of these covers. Instead, both feature cute illustrations of their main characters in silhouette slightly reminiscent of 2000s chick lit, albeit without a shopping bag in sight. They’re the kind of covers you could read in public without getting the side-eye. The Wedding Date even features a quote on its cover from Roxane Gay, an author you wouldn’t normally see blurbing romances, that I think serves as a welcome mat for genre novices and a promise that smart readers do read romance. I know so many readers who didn’t go near romance until they picked up one of Guillory’s books.
Fairly or not, the dominant image of contemporary romance at the time was one of small towns, cowboys, and quaint professions. The Wedding Date, in contrast, is firmly rooted in the Bay Area, features a high-powered professional heroine, and emphasizes her supportive, loving friendships as well as the romance. I took a look through Goodreads reviews from its release and there’s several mentions of how refreshing it felt to read about a heroine who lives in a city, prizes her career, and has a lot in her life besides her relationship with the hero. It also has a Black heroine and a diverse cast of characters, a vanishingly rare thing in contemporary romance at the time. Guillory follows in the footsteps of trailblazing Black romance authors like Beverly Jenkins, Brenda Jackson, and Sandra Kitt but The Wedding Date is notable for how widely it was promoted and marketed.
The romance genre still has a lot of work to do when it comes to diversity but both The Wedding Date and the way it was showcased by its publisher were big steps forward. It’s also an important milestone in the development of what I like to call the gateway romance, books with wide appeal and a bit of a rom-com feel that can serve as an introduction to the genre for new readers. Think Emily Henry, Abby Jimenez, or later Christina Lauren titles like The Unhoneymooners. Suddenly, readers who’d suffered through the demise of the studio rom-com realized that they could find those meet-cutes, witty exchanges, and happily ever afters in book form.
The Kiss Quotient, on the other hand, reads to me like a romance for longtime romance readers. It leans into its gender-swapped Pretty Woman trope, as shy econometrician Stella Lane hires escort Michael Phan to teach her about sex and relationships, and it’s seriously sexy. Hoang understands both the joy of an expertly deployed trope and the character specificity necessary to make those tropes resonate and the reader fall for the characters just as intensely as they fall for each other. But, with its neurodivergent heroine and Vietnamese-Swedish hero, it also broke new ground for representation in the genre and even offered up a new kind of hero for contemporary romance. Michael has a lot of traditional romance hero traits: he’s devastatingly handsome, good in bed, practices martial arts, and has a fraught relationship with his father. But he’s also a talented tailor and designer who had to put his dreams on hold, not exactly a typical romance hero profession, and also struggles with feeling like he’s not enough for the very successful Stella.
When I first read The Kiss Quotient, I was struck by how vulnerable Hoang allows her hero to be. It felt fresh and exciting and like nothing else I’d read in a genre full of swaggering billionaires and veteran players. The book’s emphasis on consent in its sex scenes felt just as fresh and, post-MeToo, deeply necessary if romance was going to move forward. I’d been reading historical romance for years and ventured into contemporary with Christina Lauren, but The Kiss Quotient exploded my ideas of what contemporary romance could be and do. I remember being so excited just to recommend this to other readers and to discuss it the minute they finished. It felt revolutionary and to me, it still represents what the genre can be at its very best, right down to the giddy, fizzy, clutching the book to my chest feeling that I get from lifetime favorites. I see threads of its influence everywhere in today’s contemporary romance, from Chloe Liese’s thoughtful portrayals of neurodivergent characters to Rosie Danan’s exploration of intimacy in her Shameless series to even Ali Hazelwood’s STEM heroines.
Ultimately, the thing that lingers with me longest is the joy both books exude. The joy of a romance hero who knows to bring the heroine baked goods. The joy of two people learning to ask for what they need and getting it, no questions asked. And, most of all, the joy of talking about romance with other readers and flinging the doors of the genre wide open to one and all.
Natalie writes about “reading romance and the romance of reading” in her newsletter Moonstruck Reads. Start with her three part essay series: My romance with romance and dive into her backlist of spectacular posts!
Yes, yes, yes Natalie!! I'm so grateful to you for writing this piece and Chelsey for hosting it. I remember vividly the bookstagram community's discussions in 2018 around these books and the massive way they sparked conversations about representation AND mainstreaming of the genre. Those discussions seem quaint to me now, but also were vital and I'm happy to have been a part of them way back in the day ;-) I think I also mentioned in your piece this week, Natalie, that books like The Wedding Date may have been labeled "chick lit" in the past and now owned their romance labels.
I started reading Jasmine Guillory during early lockdown days in 2020 and I always say her books provided some light in my life! I never stopped reading romance but I certainly started reading them more again in the last 5 years.