Hey, everyone! Welcome to Wednesday Links!
How are things going? We’ve hit the unpredictability of New England spring weather. I have family visiting soon and they keep wanting weather updates. I have to caution them that sunny, beachy weather is not a guarantee. Especially not in May.
As a reminder, if you’re free this evening, come say hi! I’m in conversation with May Berman for her debut novel Until Death. Tickets available here!
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I cam across this historical romance author spectrum chart on Reddit and thought it’d spark some interesting discussion here! The thread on Reddit is also pretty lively with readers’ thoughts. What do you think of the placements?
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Christy left a comment on last week’s links about this event and I didn’t want anyone to miss it. The Central Library on Ontario is hosting a Rom Con on June 20th. You can learn more here.
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Sarah shared this post from notable librarian Kelly Jensen on the Blink YA imprint. Jensen is a prominent voice against book bans and censorship, especially when it comes to young readers.
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And now, watch in awe at this tap dancer tapping along to DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and Flames.”
View this post on Instagram
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
I enjoyed the reddit discussion on HR to recommend to non-HR readers. Apparently my introduction was from the “Here Be Dragons” end of things because that was what I swiped from my mom’s bookshelf. 😀
Should we use this as a guide for the book club Amanda was taking about awhile back? Which category? Do we start with someone Beloved or jump straight into Love It or Hate It?
I also chuckled at u/schnockered ‘s blessing, which felt a bit threatening to me:
You’re a true hero. May you be unable to put the next book you pick up down.
I have more quibbles with the X-axis (the author category) than the Y-axis (the author…appeal? reputation?) on the HR spectrum chart. But that may be because I am not a new reader and most of my own gateway authors are sitting over in Here Be Dragons and of course I’m not going to recommend that someone start there now.
But mostly all I want to do is protest about all the authors who are missing and where they would fall and what it means that they didn’t show up on a first pass for this kind of graph. (Look, I was astonished to discover that mass markets are literally no longer a thing. So I don’t know if no Amanda Quick on that graph equals “OP has never read Quick” or “nobody reads classic Quick anymore, grandma.”)
This has probably been posted here before, but it is worth repeating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD6rVtaqTDo
I saw this back in the 80’s on PBS & I’ve now got it on VHS.
LOVE IT!!
Honestly, that chart seems totally random to me. Why is Anna Campbell “not for the faint of heart”, but Elisa Braden is “standard HR”? Is Loretta Chase less beloved than all those authors below her on the chart, a couple of whom I’ve never heard of? Yet many giants of the genre are missing, as @Deborah says, no Amanda Quick(or Stella Riley, Meredith Duran, Beverly Jenkins, Jo Beverly, NO LAURA KINSALE!)
The spectrum chart represents amazing work. Thank you for sharing here because I would never have noticed it otherwise.
I would think Grace Burroughs would be pushed a little more toward the right of that chart; she deals with some pretty heavy trauma in some of her books and on occasion really needs caution warnings.
There are lots of authors I like where I’d caveat suggestions with don’t start with X.
Like, I like Tessa Dare but I wouldn’t recommend starting with with Romancing the Duke (the sense of humor is kind of meta). I like Grace Burrowes, but I wouldn’t start with The Duke’s Disaster (SA in backstory and I found the resolution dissatisfying).
so many HR authors missing from that chart
Bryn Donovan’s Her Knight at the Museum will begin production for a Hallmark movie in July.
https://www.bryndonovan.com/2026/05/20/bryn-donovan-her-knight-at-the-museum-hallmark-movie/
While Hallmark will remove the spice, I’m sure they will keep the time travel aspect. If you haven’t read it, it might remind you of Kate & Leopold.
I agree about those left out. Amanda Quick for sure, because she was one of my first and when I found out she was really Jayne Ann Krentz, I started reading contemporaries that I had avoided until then since I thought of them as Danielle Steel books that didn’t interest me. And, although Grace Burrowes is one of my most favorite authors, I wouldn’t consider her in “Standard HR” either. She writes so well but covers some hard topics. In fact, I started with “The Traitor” because of the Jon Paul cover painting, and it dealt with a very heavy subject (see title) that surprised me. I’ve since read all her books. I’d definitely put a lot of her books in “Not for the Faint of Heart” (but they are so well done).
@suzyk Very cool video. I liked how they used the chairs as part of the dance. That was an important aspect of the performance by Bulgaria at Eurovision. I absolutely loved the use of chairs. Obviously not tap dancing but it’s what popped into my head:
https://youtu.be/EltgrumKJfk?si=wIGWDbGaTEh0SfKE
Wow, here I am sitting here in Kitchener, Ontario planning to go to RomCon at my local library in a few weeks and what do I see but my favourite daily newsletter actually mentions it!? This feels like a celebrity spotting. I’m blushing!