All posts tagged: black romance

17 Black Romance Novels for 2021

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The interwebs tell me August was Romance Awareness Month. Although we’ve missed that delightful bus, I offer up this sparkly selection of romance novels because (1) we should celebrate romance every day (2) we’re going to need some tingly happiness to handle the annual slide from flip flops and ice cream to hot chocolate and falling leaves. Give yourself an extra challenge and try an author you haven’t read before.  

Talia Hibbert is giving Black women happy endings (and publishers a lesson in business)

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“When I was younger, I wrote stories with white heroines. I thought, ‘If I want to be published, this is what I’ll have to do. No one wants to read about black people.’” Romance writer Talia Hibbert is talking about her protagonists. Specifically, about the effort it took to stop imagining them as thin, white women and write characters who looked like her. “I grew up reading all these romances that I loved and they were so important, but they were also the kind of books that said, ‘His hand looked so dark against her pearlescent blah, blah, blah.’” She rolls her eyes and smiles.

Black Romance: race, progress and happily ever after

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Last year my mother’s secondary school friend came to spend Christmas with us. We were settled in the living room, slumped in the obligatory post-turkey coma-haze, when this five-times-a-day praying, Muslim grandmother pulls out a battered paperback. I could see the cover from across the room, the pert, white woman with flowing hair and translucent billowing gown, clinging to her shirtless, muscled white, male love-interest. The cover design was so typical of Mills & Boon I barely needed the M&B trademark initials they stamp in the corner to identify it. I was so amused to see Aunty retreat into the world of throbbing bosoms and hardened members I had to snap a pic. For posterity.