Keep your fantasies but be safe in the real world! And if you have some fun recommendations that would have changed my mind about romance novels growing up, drop them below 🫰 . If it helps, I’ve developed a guilty pleasure for Austen situations: where women assert themselves and men grovel and actually admit what they did was sucky behaviour.

My least favourite trope:forced romance/toxic romance, particularly when it comes to YA.

Even as a teen, I hated it when toxic traits were perpetuated as desirable. The “bad boy” trope was more annoying than appealing and teen girl characters in love were almost always the worst, written deliberately weak and pitiful or just obviously by a man. Of course, that isn’t true of every novel, but I read an incredible amount of YA as a kid/teen and couldn’t get away from it. And adult novels aren’t free from it either. There’s a difference between the romance having fun banter or spiced moments but when it’s just abuse painted in petals: no.

I trust adults to better understand that they’re fictional embellishments and people shouldn’t be treating each other like that, but I’ve seen too many young people romanticise being treated poorly without even realising and it has made me really conscious of how I portray relationships in my writing.

Also, I just didn’t like that every YA book I read just HAD to have a relationship. I don’t care about your first kiss, princess, I want to see you fight the troll. “High fantasy” had a lot less of that but sometimes my brain just needed the easy shred of YA books.