In one of those, “Wow, everyone’s thinking the same thing,” moments, Faygie Levy at RTBookReview (who is awesome) contacted me about my thoughts on the number of new romances featuring small towns and communities. Starting with the steadily growing popularity of Robyn Carr‘s Virgin River series, along with Toni Blake’s new Destiny series (which I think of as, “Why, yes. Yes, I am excited to read about Ohio”) there are a number of series and romance novel collections set in or around supremely small towns.
There could be any number of reasons for this trend, and I won’t jump in front of Faygie’s article by listing my own thoughts, but before she emailed me about it, I received an ARC of Kate Noble’s The Summer of You, which is also a small town story, but with two differences.
First, it’s a historical, which I find fascinating because I have noticed smaller community settings in historical romances, almost as if that genre were paralleling the plot community downsizing that we’re seeing in contemporary romances. For example, two books in Tessa Dare’s series took place at country house parties among family, or on board ships, both of which embody the “small town” motif: a very intimate group of people you know, who know you, and who are undoubtedly all up in your business.
Second, it features a heroine, Lady Jane Cummings, who leaves London for a small summer town:
Lady Jane Cummings is certain that her summer is ruined when she is forced to reside at isolated Merrymere Lake with her reckless brother and ailing father. Her fast-paced London society is replaced with a small town grapevine. But one bit of gossip catches Jane’s attention- rumors that the lake’s brooding new resident is also an elusive highwayman.
Jane must face the much discussed mysterioso after he saves her brother from a pub brawl. She immediately recognizes him from London: Byrne Worth, war hero and apparent hermit-whom she finds strangely charming. The two build a fast friendship, and soon nothing can keep this Lady away from Merrymere’s most wanted. Convinced of his innocence, Jane is determined to clear Byrne’s name-and maybe have a little fun this summer after all.
So it’s not just a small town, but a tale that removes the heroine from a heavily-populated urban setting and places her in that intimate rural locale.
I was pondering why this motif of urban-to-rural movement and small town setting seems prevalent in the last year or so. It occurred to me that perhaps it’s due to the downturn in the economy. Perhaps in times of economic strength and growth, readers are more interested in urban fantasy of a different sort: the rich, luxury fantasy of a glittery metropolitan setting. But if the economy is shrinking, perhaps readers crave rural simplicity, the fantasy of hearth and home, with villas in rural areas and small towns and themes of agriculture replacing the urban grit and corporate glitter.
It might be that I’m assigning a pattern where one doesn’t exist, or that the urban/rural setting switch off has always been a part of romance, one that follows an ebb and flow pattern unrelated to the economy. I’m sure as hell not an economist, and I’m not saying that the books themselves were purchased with an eye on the economy. But I do think the reason they are popular is a reflection of changing feelings due to downsizing, diminished returns, and general economic doldrums. Thus the themes of intimacy, community, support and people all up in your business for better or worse are more desirable due to the feelings of isolation exacerbated by the external stressors of mass financial crapitude.
I don’t think that every trend and temporary popularity in romance can be attributed to external factors – it’s not like romances featuring sheikhs and mythical countries in the middle east are more or less popular based on the progress or stagnation of the peace process in that part of the world. But I have to wonder if there’s a correlation between small community set romances, and those featuring characters who are removed from urban, densely populated areas and relocated to much smaller, rural ones. I am definitely more curious about these types of books and am presently looking forward to reading them, though, as I pointed out to Faygie, New York and northern New Jersey function similarly to small towns – New York City is made up of a few bazillion small towns all stuck together.
Do you like small town or rural romances? Which of the recent ones have you enjoyed – or is there an older one you adore? Do you think it’s possible that there’s an external factor contributing to the popularity of these books?
@Suze
This is a really interesting point. There are already a few romances that celebrate, not just small towns, but “normal heroes.” I’m not very familiar with this genre, but based on titles I’ve seen @ SBTB, there are firemen, carpenters, cops, local artisans, etc. And none of them have secret-trust funds. (That’s the catch to a lot of “small town” romances…yes it’s a small town where everyone knows each other, but the hero is a super rich rancher/author/oil tycoon: all the advantages of a metropolitan fortune with all the appeal of county fairs.) I think the “averageness” of these settings is their hook: average woman struggling to be a good mom, and a hero with kind eyes and rough hands is just what she needs. It would be interesting to find out when these kinds of heroes first appeared.
Socialist-type countries: cold and distant Canadian lumber Tycoon who secretly gives most of his profits to the Peace Corp, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Rain Forest efforts.
Can anyone recommend romances set in the small towns of Maryland? I have a blog, Reading Local: Baltimore, http://baltimore.readinglocal.com and I,‘d love to review a few. (Yes, I realize small towns are not Baltimore, but we’re open-minded here. Bonus if there’s a romance set in Ellicott City.)
This is what I’ve noticed (that hasn’t already been covered):
-One of the protagonists in a small town romance is always new to town. The heroine just moved back from the big-city with her teenaged love child and hooked up with her high school sweetheart (guess who her kid’s father is). Or the local vet/doctor/cafe owner catches the interest of the mysterious new stranger in town (who is in the Witness Protection program).
-Small-town romances always feel “safe”, and I mean in the emotional sense, not the physical sense. She is always surrounded by people she knows and who love her, or even if she’s returned to town after 15 years, the people will accept her again (especially once she hooks up with the one that got away).
But on a different note—I grew up in a small town (5500) in Oregon, and my parents still live there (and my husband does a lot of business there). As an adult, I worked in emergency services in that same town and the ones nearby. All I can think when I read about the idyllic descriptions of small town life is WTF?
Where are the yards full of rusting cars and appliances? Where are the crystal meth cookers and users? Where are the drunken high school students driving around on weekends? I could go on.
And the thought of marrying my high school sweetheart leaves me in a cold sweat. I can’t even entertain the thought of having his love child.
As someone who has lived in a lot of small towns, I always think the same thing.
I tend to think of the town as another character in the book that acts or reacts to the main characters in ways that the author needs in order to push along the plot. It probably has other facets, just like the human characters do, but we don’t really see them because they aren’t necessary; they aren’t the bits that the main characters are interacting with. The towns are about as fully developed as the rest of the characters.
It seems to me that, in fiction, small towns are either overly idealized (Mayberry-ized) or vilified (Peyton Place-d). I’ve never lived in a small town that looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. Sure a few picturesque neighborhoods here and there, a quaint “downtown” area, but then there’s the dilapidated trailer parks and the amateur wrecking yards that some folks allow to build up in their driveways.
On the other side of the coin, I’ve never lived anyplace that was full of small-minded jerks or hatemongers, just the normal 5%, or so, of the population, just like everywhere else. I’ve also never lived in a small town that was full of busybodies who were overly interested in what everyone else was doing. Maybe that was true in the ‘40s, when there wasn’t much else to do but listen to a radio program in the evenings and discuss Bessie across the street. But, these days, everyone has had cable for at least 30 years, everyone’s seen internet porn, everyone has vicariously stolen cars and shot people on their XBox. The average new person in the neighborhood just isn’t that unique or interesting. You may run into a nosy, old granny here and there, but most folks will say “Hi,” eyeball you for a while to try and make sure you’re not a drug dealer or a child molester, and then they ignore you while they go to their jobs and take the kids to soccer practice and mow their grass.
Heh. Good luck finding a Canadian lumber tycoon. From what I can tell, everybody making money off our lumber is Japanese. Say what you want about Canadians, but we sure don’t capitalize on our natural resources.
I’ve always been puzzled by the abundance of super-rich authors who appear as heroes in romances. Don’t romance AUTHORS know that most authors aren’t super-rich? And a super-rich rancher who isn’t also an oil tycoon is a figment of somebody’s imagination. Probably Elizabeth Lowell’s.
But I suppose that’s the fantasy aspect of it. Certainly if Greece DID have as many tycoons as appear in Harlequin Presents, they’d probably have triple their actual population.
I would be a little wary of trying to track current trends to books on the market now because there is a fairly substantial lag time between when things are written and when they show up in stores. For instance, both Tessa’s books written in smaller settings were written (and approved by the publisher) before the current recession hit.
I suspect the same is true for Toni Blake—she started writing books set in small towns before the recession started.
Actually, I live in a medieval village with its own international airport.
No, I honestly do.
That’s just crazy enough to be true. And it sounds pretty awesome actually.
Pam,
Re: Emma’s circumscribed existence in Highbury—the latest BBC adaptation (Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller) addresses this idea in ways that previous productions do not. I know there’s some division of opinion on this production, but I loved it.
Cat, I’ve been trying to guess where this is. 😉 Heathrow and Luton are both English language possibilities, but Barajas is definitely in the running, and possibly Zaventem. And Narita. Thanks for providing a fun “research the airport” game, Cat. (Airports have cool histories. My dad still regrets that our local international airport is no longer poetically named “Idlewild” which I must admit sounds like a fantasy novel. The Frankfurt airport has a chilling story of construction by women who were slave laborers.)
Back on topic, I do tend to think that “small town” books (whether romances or mysteries) have a short hand code for “small town=values” albeit unconsciously, simply because the attractions of an intimate community all up in each other’s business can be so easily duplicated in urban microcosms like airports, schools, or apartment buildings….but generally aren’t. For example, I work in a school building that has roughly the complexity of a small town. With four floors, 3000 students and approximately 500 adults, the building has its own athletic complex, sub-station of the police, health clinic, and daycare center. In other words, a lot of the structures you’d expect to find in a small town (and a few that some small towns lack). But where are all the “heroine returns to teach at her local high school and discovers hot new science teacher in next classroom” romances? (Seriously, somebody write that. You could call it Chemistry Lessons as a wink to Guys and Dolls.)
Once you’re done with Cruisie and the like, you’d be well advised to check out Michelle Levigne’s “Tabor, Ohio” series. She’s a terrific writer and knows small-town Ohio very well. Great characters.
Small, large, I don’t care as long as I get a good story. Though I do not like westerns/rural stuff – cowboys SMELL! Seriously, they reak of cowpoop and other fecal matter. So not sexy except to George Constanza.
I do wish, however, someone would set a novel here in my home city of Costa Mesa, CA. AND that it would be such a huge run away best seller that it totally eclipses Twilight and all Nicolas Sparks’ books, gets turned into a movie, and the movie turned into a wildly popular tv series.
All so people will stop asking me, “Where’s Costa Mesa?”
Well . . . Austen has Col Brandon who I think fits the bill. Heyer has Mr Calverleigh (Black Sheep) and Mr Carleton (Lady of Quality).
Stansted 🙂 Although technically the village is much older than Medieval, there’s not much left that pre-dates the Normans.
@jamisings I happen to find the smell of cow manure (and indeed horse manure) one of the most comforting smells I know. I would be very happy to snuggle up to a cowboy who smelled of good, clean muck.
Well, if we’re going to be honest, cowboy/farm smell doesn’t yuck me out either. My grandparents were farmers and some of my very favorite childhood memories are from the farm. So I totally get it when Ros says it’s a comforting smell – and I agree.
Well this city girl can’t stand the smell. Makes me want to puke! So no cowboys for me! Give me a nice, clean smelling, metrosexual musician! Preferably one who started his career in the 70s.
Stansted! Darn, I was close. 🙂
@Kalen Hughes: I don’t think either Col Brandon or Heyer’s Calverleigh or Carleton since they’re all specifically filthy rich. In Heyer’s case they’re marrying rich women, who definitely neither need nor are interested in their money, but Austen makes it pretty clear that poor air-head Marianne who thinks 2000 a year is a “moderate” income needs a rich man to take care of her. BUT in the same novel as the wealthy (and once upon a time dashing, red-coated) Brandon Austen gives us Edward Ferrars, a young man who by the end of the novel has serious worries about having enough money to live on, and who is
That sounds more like the kind-eyed (relatively) rough-handed hero to me. And in Emma, which people have mentioned up-thread as being specifically and claustrophobically a small town book there’s John Knightley, who walks to a dance rather than taking his carriage, is specified as having “little ready money” and spends most of his time worrying about his farm with William Larkin and the (definitely rough-handed and kind-eyed) Robert Martin, who could be argued as the secondary hero of the story. (In his love for the estate of Donwell, Knightley also pre-figures the rancher hero, without being too much of a tycoon.)
Kalen for the win.
I think small town books have been constant. If we suddenly saw big city books, then we’d be trending. Speaking from a historical perspective, when’s the last time the Duke Of Dough turned to the Sweet Scent Of Socialism and whispered “Don’t you just love London? I could live here forever” No, it’s always “But I miss the country” or “town is sooo boring” or “I wish we could get hitched and run away to the hinterlands, where my heart is.” I mean sure, if I had a massive country estate and an army to wait upon me I might feel that way too, but…..
I love the city. I love urban centers and hustle and noise and the unification of all being from a huge place together. I love strangers being met with curiosity instead of suspicion and being able to agree to disagree and all the rest. I did some time in small towns and realized I was right – they are not for me. So while I’ll read about these small towns that are more like Regencyland than any real small town, I never wanted to live Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life.
I think above, where it was touched on that ‘small town life’ is a coded values statement isn’t far off the mark. Just as slut shaming never goes out of style in romance the ‘authenticity’ of small town life is eternally with us.
Historically speaking, maybe, but modern England seems to be divided between the Londonists and the rest of the bovine population. All right, so maybe a fifth of Englanders live in the capital…but that means 80% don’t. And it’s 80% the Londonists can’t fathom.
Country vs city is one of those endless debates. Didn’t Beatrix Potter even cover it?
My parents are both from small towns. Dad’s so small even years after he left it there’s still no stop lights, just one caution light, that’s it. I’ve visited both towns many times. And it is SO BORING! After 8 there’s nothing to do.
Even though I get up early in the morning and go to bed early because of my job, I am at heart a night owl. One of my favorite things to do when my folks are away camping is to wait until 1 or 2 am – when I know I don’t have to work the next day – and go on a rambling drive through Costa Mesa. Looking at all the other night owls who are still up. Some for their jobs, some because they were out having fun, some are trying to get their babies to sleep – whatever their reasons, there’s dozens of us, driving along, sharing the darkness the way you never can the sunshine. In my parents’ hometowns if someone so much as steps into their own yard during the night it’s a source of wonderment. Forget driving. The lone cop will sleepily get out of bed to ask you what the hell you’re doing.
While Costa Mesa may not be LA or NYC, it’s still a good size place and there are places still open after midnight. People around. Things to do if on a quieter, smaller scale. Give me that life over some place out in the middle of nowhere or some small town where if you fart the entire population knows in less then 10 minutes.
I don’t have much to add, though I find the debate/discussion interesting. I really just want to caution some of the people in here that suburbia and small towns are NOT interchangeable.
Also – to the people talking about the ripe smell of cowboys, it’s one of those willfully ignoring things romance enjoys doing sometimes. Cowboys all smell like leather and man or some such. Just like in historicals, when people weren’t nearly as fastidious about their personal hygiene as the romance characters tend to be. We ignore the implied smell that goes along with whatever historical period we’re after, too.
I’m happy with both small town and larger city romances.
@ Lindsay:
This is a really great idea. There are tons of movies and “serious” books in this kind of setting (for instance, about 50% of coming-of-age books written in the 80’s.) I would love to see a modern take on it. “Struggling Factory Town” could be the “Encroached Upon Open Range” of the 21st century.
And concerning the all-important topic of manure: I grew up in suburbia nursing a major case of cowgirl-envy. Now that I live in the country, I really love the manure smell from small farms. The aroma wafting from the stockyards, however, is a COMPLETELY different matter. 🙂
@Sugarless – For years now my parents have gone camping at the Lundy Lake Resort (URLS to follow) near Lee Vining, CA. So I’ve been around cowboys as there’s a lot of ranchers around that area. Seeing sheep or cows isn’t unusual when they’re transporting them from one place to another. It’s also not far from Hawthorne, NV, where you can go to one of the casinos and also be surrounded by cowboys who are gambling. There’s never been one I’ve been around who didn’t smell of dried sweat, cow/horse poop, and chewing tobacco.
Having actually smelled cowboys, I just can’t suspend my disbelief in books that a cowboy could actually smell good. Historical romances that have knights and such, or even the Victorian England/Victorian American east coast, I can because I’ve never smelled and actual knight or English nobleman. Plus they describe them as taking baths now and again. Even have sex scenes in bath tubs once in awhile.
Anyway, for those curious – the URLs
Warning, this one had REALLY ANNOYING “music” playing. Hit mute before going on it. But it also has the best descriptions and pictures of some of the old mining stuff you can see around Lundy – or at least used to before they started hauling a lot of it out to make it “safer.”
http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/ca/lundy.html
Ariel view of the Lundy area –
http://wikimapia.org/6542685/Lundy-Lake-Resort
Lee Vining’s official website –
http://www.leevining.com/
Hawthorne –
http://www.nevadaweb.com/cnt/pio/hawth/
There’s one thing Robyn Carr taught me. People in small towns spend a lot of time at the gynaecologist (and yes, that’s how we spell it outside of the US, so suck it up!!). Seriously, read her books – there are four times more pelvic exams and ten times more babies being born than there are romantic or sex scenes. If she dumped her women’s health agenda I’d love her series.
I seriously think people are trying to jump on the Carr bandwagon. Even Mariah Stewart of the gritty murder/crime world has moved to small town romances. I’ve tried some others in the genre and they’re all pretty terrible. I super-duper hate how Robyn Carr has all of her characters fleeing to the ideal little town after some Big Bad event (their husband was murdered or they were raped or they were shot or their husband tried to kill them). Yeah, small towns are perfect and everybody walks around in a state of perpetual bliss. That’s how it is.
seriously think people are trying to jump on the Carr bandwagon. Even Mariah Stewart of the gritty murder/crime world has moved to small town romances. I’ve tried some others in the genre and they’re all pretty terrible. I super-duper hate
The serendipitous nature of the internet – I had just been thinking about why I read the Vrigin River series and had decided that it isn’t about the couple romances which can almost be perfunctory, but that it is a romance of community that the romance lies in; the “ideal or the intimate, recprocating, local community”. That in fact there is a sort of right-wing communitarian thing going on – which is a contradiction in terms but is about how the context of the local VR community which has an interest in shaping the values and moral goods lived out by individuals, so all the young men join the armed services and all the young women commit as wives. Actually the VR books are westerns I think.
re Ohio as a setting; Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife books are a fantasy set in an alternative Ohio/Ohio like world similar to the times when Ohio was settled. I think she won an athor’s award from Ohio for these.