"Apollo himself had ne'er crafted such a beautiful adagio, and with that encouragement, Lord Rayven brought his sensual, masculine lips to Beatrice's mouth.
And--" Er, uh, hi.
I… uh… I don't like this low art form that is the romance novel.
No, uh, not at all.
I'm just going to go back to my … uh … copy of Jonathan Franzen's… Freedom.
The romance novel has been the subject of intrigue, derision, and shame in literary discourse long before the modern genre as we know it today existed.
Romance novels are relegated to your Aunt Muriel's bathroom, thrift store book sections, and that one aisle in Barnes and Noble that you pretend to walk through because you got "lost" looking for cookbooks.
But it deserves a closer look than that - it is after all the highest grossing of all literary genres, out-selling its next nearest competitor twice over.
So what actually MAKES a romance novel different from any novel that has a love story, other than brooding highlanders and billowing shirts?
When we say "romance" it is, like most classifications, a marketing term - it means more than whether there is romance in the novel.
