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I sent an email to the NY Times Book Review. Following Robert Gottlieb’s wildly inaccurate and offensive article last week, “A Roundup of the Season’s Romance Novels” , Radhika Jones’s rebuttal “Who Gets To Write About Romance?” still completely missed the point yesterday. So I responded to her question: “What are the stories in the field of romance that you think are most significant?”
Here are mine! (I may have gotten a little carried away. The Times has so much room for improvement! *side-eye* Even still, I by no means had space to cover all of the offensive slights in either article. Please excuse the things I had to leave out.)
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Dear New Times Book Review,
I appreciate that you have a desire to cover romance. It is a nice change. Though, it is long overdue and the lack of coverage on the genre is itself discouraging. To have the article misrepresent the genre, whether written by a romance enthusiast or a critic, is damaging to the awareness the romance industry is attempting to bring to the validity of its genre.
The following are possible topics which would show respect for the marginalized genre that is so often derided, mocked and overlooked in our culture and by the literary world at large.
1) Feminist Ideas in Romance Novels
That’s not an oxymoron. Those of us who know, love and respect the genre see it for what it is: feminist ideas written for forward thinking women.