To explain a little about what this post will be about, I’m taking the intro I did for the last one: In every romance book you read there are tropes or archetypes. You can also see them in shows, movies, plays, etc. Romantic tropes are everywhere, and they are fabulous. I adore them and I always tend to find my favorite ones in romance books so I can enjoy them more. I decided to do a sort of Trope Tuesday piece where I will be talking about many tropes and recommend you all some of my favorites that fit.
What is a trope? Urban Dictionary explains it best I think: “Despite the erroneous definitions already published here, trope on the interwebs really refers to an often overused plot device. It can also be described as another variation on the same theme. TV shows, movies, comics, games, anime’, & books are full of tropes & many rabid fan-sites now name & track said tropes with a self-explanatory title for each one.” We can name a few: accidental pregnancy, best friends to lovers, sibling’s best friend, marriage of convenience, and so many more for sure. Your favorite couples? They probably got a trope too! It’s always so nice to realize or find out your favorite romance trope and keep searching for books with the same theme.
You all know my love for this book, Hold Me. It has that trope we love so much in ‘You’ve Got Mail’: enemies who dislike each other in real life but somehow end up liking each other online. Like ‘You’ve Got Mail’, Hold Me has this intense anonymous romance online while our heroine and hero both discuss and argue and clearly do not like each other in real life. Courtney Milan truly makes this trope so much better with her writing and style and the romantic plot inside of it.
I chose Broken Resolutions because it features a librarian falling for a reclusive author. Jack, our famous author, is trying to not get recognized but he is invited to a dating meet-and-greet and while there he meets this cute librarian who will change his whole life. It’s not the actress meets bookseller, but I thought it was a nice match to this romcom movie.
Again I’m cheating with this one but I had to choose The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang where Michael, an escort, is hired by Stella to be her fake boyfriend and teach her the dating life. It doesn’t really follow ‘Pretty Woman’s’ whole plot but it does feature fake dating, an escort and an amazing and lovely romance between two characters who have so many layers that you cannot wait to find out more about them/
‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is possibly my favorite romantic comedy. The estranged spouse trope is really well done here. While The Day of the Duchess by Sarah MacLean doesn’t have the “want to divorce you to marry another one”, it does feature a woman who has been exiled for a long time and now is returning to ask her estranged husband for divorce and find happiness finally. In between we find that both of them hold feelings deep inside them that are unresolved and will find the way to get to that happiness they so much crave.
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