Boy meets girl, sparks fly and the two live happily ever after is a given in romance fiction.
But authors such as Jenn LeBlanc are taking the well-worn tropes used to bring lovers together and giving them a fresh new look with stories about nontraditional heroines and heroes.
“My characters are not all straight, they’re not all white and as sexual beings they’re not that simple,” says LeBlanc, a 43-year-old photojournalist-turned-author who specializes in Victorian erotic romance.
The stories dreamed up in the more than $1 billion romance industry are becoming more representative of the world, but the tropes remain the same.
That’s the fun of it, says Bea Koch, co-owner of the romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice in Culver City.
“There are things we all recognize as romance readers, tropes like the best friend’s older brother,” she says. “But instead of a young woman falling for her best friend’s older brother, it’s a young man falling for his best friend’s older brother.”
LGBTQ historical romance is a hot topic for both male and female romance authors, from Cat Sebastian’s hugely popular “The Soldier’s Scoundrel” to HelenKay Dimon’s “Guarding Mr. Fine,” which is due Valentine’s Day on Bantam Loveswept.
LeBlanc has also thrown her hat into the boy meets boy arena with her next release, “The Spare and the Heir.”
The book is set in 1885 when getting caught in the act with another man was certain to lead to a prison sentence. It’s the fifth in LeBlanc’s Lords of Time series, which have featured time traveler, masochist and asexual heroine characters. Sometimes their stories are intertwined.
For LeBlanc, Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series was her introduction to romance.
The mother of four read the vampire fantasy with her kids. Though she liked the story, it left her wanting more. After indulging in paranormal and historical reads from New York Times best-sellers Teresa Medeiros and Eloisa James, LeBlanc says she came to the realization, “I can do this.”
LeBlanc doesn’t just bring twists and turns to the romance genre, she photographs her own book covers and directs the costumed models through a series of suggestive poses for the inside pages.
Each book is filled with upwards of 100 sexy images.
But she leaves the explicit scenes to the text, including her work in-progress about Thorne Magnus Calder, a character that has appeared in every book since she launched the Lords of Time series with the straight romance “The Rake and The Recluse — A Tale of Two Brothers” in 2011. The books are available as eBooks or in print exclusively at The Ripped Bodice.
“My readers have wanted Calder’s story since the very beginning because he’s talky and obnoxious, and cute,” LeBlanc says. “I always knew he was gay, but I didn’t know what his story was going to be.”
LeBlanc admits she’s not a plotter.
But Laina Villeneuve — the pen name used by Anna Villeneuve, a Citrus College English professor, who brainstorms with her wife, Louisa Villeneuve — admits she knows where the lesbian characters in her standalone books are headed.
Belonging is a through line in all of the 44-year-old Bella Books author’s novels, which are set in Northern California and feature non-traditional types.
She’s introduced a woman struggling with her Mormon faith and sexuality, protagonists over 40 and a couple starting a family. (Villeneuve and her wife are parents to 6-year-old fraternal twins and a 9-year-old son).
“The coming out story used to be huge, and now it isn’t such a big deal anymore,” says Villeneuve, who plans to read from her fourth book, “Return to Paradise,” at an author’s event at the Ripped Bodice in June. “Alice Walker has that great quotation about how we write to heal ourselves, and I think that’s why I’m writing.
“I deal with pieces of what I’m struggling with in my own life in a lot of the books,” she says.
Villeneuve is now in the process of writing her fifth book that features characters who are mostly Latina.
In fact, women of color is a group increasingly finding its way into romance, from Beverly Jenkins’ African-American historicals to the East Indian characters featured in some of Alicia Rai’s sexy contemporaries.
Transgender romance is also on the rise.
“Romance is just the story of two people falling in love — or three people, or four people, or however many people falling in love,” Koch says. “That’s such a universal thing, and it can mean so much to someone to see themselves in a story like that.”
