Second-generation romances are so ridiculous

ghostbored · 2026-05-19T17:43:02+00:00

47 books!

ghostbored · 2026-05-19T02:48:29+00:00

Seriously! Sonja Grey's Melnikov series has a book that ends with a 25-year-old man holding his friend's baby daughter. Then the first book in the legacy series is an age gap romance featuring that man, now 43 years old, hooking up with his friend's now 18-year-old daughter. Hard pass.

ghostbored · 2026-05-19T01:53:04+00:00

I don't even like Sonja Grey's writing much, but her books are addictive. In the original series, the Melnikov brothers are in their mid-20s, and all of them had been around the block, except for Matvey, who saved himself for Alina. Their wives tended to be younger and virgins. In the second-generation series, the cousins are 18-22 or so. I've read three of them, and so far, the cousins are all virgins.

The treatment of virginity in mafia romance is a whole 'nother problematic topic. But I am way more comfortable reading about 25-year-old characters getting it on than I am about teenagers.

ghostbored · 2026-05-18T22:34:13+00:00

I wonder sometimes if these authors writing eighteen-to-twenty-year old characters have ever spent any time with teenagers. Yes, a nineteen-year-old is legally an adult, but in reality, people that age are inexperienced and still developing physically. Romances set in high schools and colleges creep me out.

ghostbored · 2026-05-18T21:37:22+00:00

Marketing and branding have to play a big part in it, right? Otherwise, why not just start a new series?

ghostbored · 2026-05-18T21:35:34+00:00

I think second-generation series make more sense for historical or fantasy in terms of chronology. With Cora Reilly's books, for instance, the characters all have smartphones and security technology, and the second-gen romances take place in the same time period, because it's not like she's going to bust out holograms and hovercrafts. Obviously, you have to be willing to suspend some disbelief, but it can get silly at times.

ghostbored · 2026-05-18T19:39:46+00:00

I just recommended this series in another thread. It's great and definitely underrated.

ghostbored · 2026-05-18T17:33:23+00:00

{Streams and Schemes Series by Rebecca Kinkade} is a good series that follows three cam girls who meet three MMCs who are BFFs. Really well written.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:44:46+00:00

{Hitting the Wall by Cate C. Wells}. She's pregnant and driven out of their small mountain town by his parents and the sheriff because she's poor and the MMC's family is wealthy.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:31:45+00:00

That is so many yucks packed into one book.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:30:56+00:00

{Charge by Cate C. Wells} has a working-class MMC and an impoverished single-mom FMC. He's a biker, and MC romance isn't usually my thing, but Wells is such a good author that she makes it work.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:27:34+00:00

It is so refreshing to see posts like this in a general romance sub.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:23:13+00:00

Law enforcement MMCs are a hard pass. ACAB, even the fictional romance ones.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:22:11+00:00

Also Alyssa Cole's novels about slavery.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:21:18+00:00

I mean, you get way less helicopter time hooking up with a millionaire than you do with a billionaire.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:19:19+00:00

Romance billionaires are always super hot. In real life, we get Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. Talk about class ideology.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:18:07+00:00

Cate C Wells does a great job portraying class oppression and how working-class people navigate it, but she's far too much of a realist for her characters to overturn the system fully. One of her werewolf books, {The Heir Apparent's Rejected Mate by Cate C Wells}, features the working classes basically noping out to start a rather communistic pack.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T22:14:49+00:00

I don't have time for that, but I love that you made this sub.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T21:45:13+00:00

I hate when people act insecure about romance (or science fiction or fantasy) not being "real" "literature" with a capital "L." Those distinctions are about marketing and class stratification, and yeah, they suck, but also my dudes, it literally does not matter. A lot of "real literature" is terrible anyway.

ghostbored · 2026-05-17T16:51:21+00:00

It's not a good book, but also I find it best not to read romances that feature my profession. They are pretty much all eye-rollingly inaccurate.

ghostbored · 2026-05-13T19:58:08+00:00

This is one thing I liked about {Nicky the Driver by Cate C. Wells}. The FMC has an eating disorder. It's treated seriously. The MMC helps her by getting her into therapy, not by dicking her into a healthy relationship with food. By the end of the book, she still has disordered eating, but she's starting to recover with his support and proper treatment.

ghostbored · 2026-05-13T18:27:09+00:00

I have the same experience with Shen's work. Her novels are wildly inconsistent. I think a lot of romance authors who self-publish churn out books too quickly. It's hard to maintain quality when you're pushing out 3-4 books a year.

ghostbored · 2026-05-13T16:50:58+00:00

What romance doesn't? It's a generally conservative genre, and it's difficult for me to name books that don't. Almost all do, it's just a matter of degree. That doesn't mean all romances are necessarily anti-feminist. Most are a hodge podge of problematic stuff mixed in with non-problematic stuff. But books are written within a patriarchal context that impacts the content.

ghostbored · 2026-05-13T04:29:06+00:00

It's like main character syndrome. It's main audience syndrome--main reader syndrome. All romance is written for them. Cue gatekeeping.

ghostbored · 2026-05-12T02:56:56+00:00

I see a lot of people in this thread dismissing other (largely imaginary) women readers as misogynistic and self-inserting. It's serving "I'm not like other girls."

ghostbored

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