This tough request came from Sue:
Something like a reverse Hallmark movie where the girl goes back to her close minded small town and realizes it’s NOT for her.
Sarah: Satisfaction Guaranteed by Karelia Stetz-Waters – One FMC moves to Portland from NYC to run her late aunt’s sex toy show. Granted Portland isn’t a small town but, well, the rest would be a spoiler.
Book Lovers sort of plays with this idea, though doesn’t fit entirely.
Cheers to Sue for giving me a tough one to think through
Amanda: Yeah this one was difficult.
Sarah: GO SUE!
Can you think of a recommendation for this request? Drop them in the comments!
Very interested in this one! Bonus points if the heroine is the sophisticate not the ingenue, and especially if she’s a monster who gets any plot moppets shipped off to boarding school so they can get a real education and have more, better opportunities. Maybe that’s just me.
Idk if it counts, but the first thing that comes to mind is Ruthie Knox’s TRULY, where the heroine (initially) just wants to get back to her small town life. Knox had a few city set romances that I found very refreshing back when they came out, but celebrating a city is not really the same thing as having to go back to where you started for plot reasons but not getting sucked into the hallmark quagmire of it.
And this one is also a stretch, idk if a historical can work as I think of Hallmark as being contemporary (although it’s very AU), but the book I think of as the antidote to the small c conservative values that romance as a genre is steeped in is KJ Charles’s BAND SINISTER. It’s phenomenal, as all her work is, and having to live at home in the remote, small-minded community is indeed a punishment, and the HEA is, delightfully, not simply being gaslit into liking conformity.
Also a historical, and possibly more of a mystery than a romance, but the second of the Cat Sebastian PAGE novels has them go back to where one of the heroes spent lots of his youth, and they’re both very interested in getting out of there the moment any familial duty is fulfilled – if not sooner. But they want to go back to the quirky small town community that is their home, so idk. Also both this and BAND SINISTER are m/m so there isn’t a girl at the heart of the narrative which I just realized makes them definitely not what Sue asked for, sorry Sue.
I read a magical realism book that may work, I just can’t remember which. I think it was the first book. The other two feature towns that are fictional to the main character.
Christmas People (Iva-Marie Palmer)
A Novel Love Story (Ashley Poston)
Prime Time Romance (Kate Robb)