I asked this question on Bluesky a bit ago, and was enchanted with all the answers (and all the covers).
What romance novel could you do a 10 minute presentation on with no warning?
Vintage old skool romances welcome!
When I first posted this back in September 2024, I thought it would be Midsummer Magic by Catherine Coulter, ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) the first romance I read, and one that “lives in the inside foyer of my brain, ready to be called upon.”
The arranged marriage, the absolute mismatch of the cover copy and the story itself, THE CREAM. Seriously, the use of a form of lube – one of the first instances I’d seen in romance, ever, and this was in the early 90s – really imprinted on my tender, naive brain. It indicated both a sense of regard if not caring from Phillip, the hero, who didn’t want to be in the marriage any more than Frances did. (This is the one where she disguises herself as a dowdy bluestocking to avoid said marriage. It didn’t work, obviously.)
The hero is rapey, but also aware of female signs of arousal, and doesn’t want to hurt her. Blew my mind when I read it.
But now that I’ve had some time to think about it, and now that I’ve come up with Nefarious Plans, I think I’d probably do 10 minutes on the value placed on home management skills in Devil’s Bride by Stephanie Laurens, and Born in Ice by Nora Roberts.
(Sidenote: the first in the Born In trilogy, Born in Fire, features a hero I think of as proto-Roarke.)
Devil’s Bride is the one where Devil, as is the case with all the Cynsters, is obsessed with marriage and family, and tries to convince Honoria, whom he inadvertently compromised, that they’re getting married. (Honoria: Nope.) (Devil: Yes, we are, have you not noticed I’m a duke and I get my way a lot?) (Honoria: Still no.)
But when he brings her to his family seat after they’ve been discovered, the household has to go into high gear to prepare to receive everyone for a funeral. There are, to put it mildly, A LOT of Cynsters. Honoria pitches in – there’s a line about “lists, and derived lists for cross-checking,” and let me tell you how much I identified with Honoria in that moment. I wrote a whole essay about it: “Organized Caretaking: A Brief Love Letter to Honoria Anstruther-Weatherby.”
That same level of organized caretaking is present in Brianna, who runs a bed and breakfast in Ireland. She grew up in a cold and loveless home with a volatile mother, and even in the cover copy, it says, “Brianna Concannon is a woman with a rare gift for creating a home.”
I could most definitely do a 10 minute presentation on either or both as examples of valuing the emotional and physical labor of maintaining a home for people.
I asked the SBTB reviewers, and got some really interesting responses.
Claudia: I think I am the resident expert on later Meredith Duran books! Especially Luck Be a Lady and Sins of Lord Lockwood!
Luck Be a Lady is tricky because it’s bad boy/crime lord hero and my opinions have shifted yet I still kinda like him, LOL. So I guess the presentation would be about learning your gaps in understanding and reconciling loving a problematic book or main characters.
Also a study on the role the Antipodes have played in romance, with a homage to The Count of Monte Cristo. That’s for Sins of Lord Lockwood.
Carrie: Bet Me by Jennifer Cruise because it is peak banter, has equal focus on male and female arcs, speaks to my personal struggles with body image, and features people who are total equals and who stand up for one another in the best ways.
Best of all at the end we find out not only the fates of the main characters but also their found family friends – and in that section multiple different kinds of happy endings are explored including staying single, which is given as much validation as all the romantic pairings. Also the main character starts the book not wanting kids and ends the book not wanting kids, and not having kids, and this is presented as a completely valid option.
Shana: Better Off Red by Rebekah Weatherspoon. I will talk to anyone who shows the slightest curiosity about my favorite lesbian vampire sorority book. It’s just so entertaining and camp and fun. And every time I’ve seen Weatherspoon at book events, I ask if I’m getting another book in the series.
So, what about you? What romance could you give a spontaneous 10 minute presentation about, and why?
Special note: If you’re a member of After Dark, I’m going to arrange presentation nights for us on Zoom, where we will actually give these presentations live, most likely with beverages hot and possibly strong. I’m definitely going to do one, and Amanda is on board, so if you think you’d like to tell us 10 minutes of your deep thoughts on a particular romance novel, stay tuned for that! And if you’re not in After Dark, you can join!
@Karin I love Nothing Venture. A++ mystery and romance. She was so good.
@Candy Laura London is the best! I still have my copies all these years later.
My talk would be on Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. Just such amazing writing, great suspense, and a hero you’d actually want to date. This Rough Magic could be another talk. I feel like I’m on Corfu reading it.
I’m dying to take a masters seminar on “The Romance Genre and After All These Years by Kathleen Gilles Seidel” but I’d settle for talking about it for 10 minutes. The oldest romance I’ve ever read (1984) and this BOOK IS A REFERENDUM on the genre’s relationship with toxic masculinity. Nonsense we forgive in other books as a “product of their time” decades after Seidel called it out.
YES there’s weird cousin stuff. Yes the hero takes the heroine’s teenage son to a strip club… BUT Seidel uses it as an opportunity to teach class solidarity by recognizing the strippers as fellow skilled laborers at a physically demanding job demanding of respect. I haven’t even gotten into the Viet Nam stuff and how formative the returning soldier narrative was to the genre.
10 years later Kathleen Gilles Seidel would write what I’m pretty sure (lmk if I’m wrong) was the FIRST rock star romance “Till The Stars Fall”, which I could do another breathless 10 minutes on
A Room with a View.
A Crown of Dreams by Kimberly Cates as well.
I could EASILY give a presentation on how much I hate Ash from Courtney Milan’s Turner Brothers series and how furious his entire book made me.
If that’s not allowed, The Soldier’s Scoundrel from *Cat Sebstian’s* Turner Brothers series is something I could take about for at least ten minutes.
@HAT, Edward Petherbridge is the ONLY Lord Peter. The other actor who plays him in that PBS version is so wrong, I can’t stand to watch it.
Another vote for The Blue Castle. But I really love Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife books, which are such great romance AND have some really great nature writing. And great characters, character growth, etc.
Maybe a 10 minute talk about Austen’s Mansfield Park & Emma. The first time I read Mansfield Park, I was really disappointed by it — Fanny & Edmund seemed so dull & priggish, especially when compared to the dashing Mary & Henry Crawford. But over the years I have come to appreciate not so much Fanny, but what Austen was trying to do with Fanny. And I think it’s especially interesting to compare meek Fanny, Austen’s most socially & economically precarious heroine, with confident Emma, Austen’s most socially & economically powerful heroine.
Other books that haven’t been mentioned that I could probably talk about for 10 minutes are Heyer’s Venetia and the Amanda Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters (focussing most on how Amelia & the series change over the years) or Pope’s The Perilous Gard.
My first instinct was Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me, just like Carrie. But my other one would be the logistics of time travel with and without soulmates, in the Jude Deveraux-verse.
(And I know it has nothing to do with romance novels, but I could give you an hour-long treatise on the Fast & Furious movieverse. Pro tip, it starts with Better Luck Tomorrow)
What a magnificent thread! I WANT to do Heyer’s Frederica but what I would actually do is possibly Miles Vorsokigan. Or I might also go with Deborah Harkness’s All Soul books. Ok fine it will be the All Souls books!
Slghtly Dangerous – Mary Balogh
The Enlightenment series by Joanna Chambers
On the one hand I’m loving seeing what everyone’s choices are and nodding my head at some, and on the other hand, I’m screaming inside that I cannot possibly give a ten-minute talk on anything because I despise public speaking, LOL!
But the ones most likely to get me going–Julie James’s FBI/US Attorneys universe, Shelly Laurenston’s Pride, Erin Nicholas’s Autre and Sapphire Falls worlds, Courtney Milan’s Wedgewood Trials, Jeannie Lin’s Pingkang Li universe…