When I was a young girl, I loved to read. My reading adventure started with Nancy Drew. Those books were inside the bottom two rows of the town’s library. I can still smell the musty scent of the pages and the excitement of checking out my five books for the week. After I graduated high school, the library was flooded and the books were destroyed.
As I got older, I branched out to my mother’s stash of classic novels in our makeshift library. I devoured Jane Eyer and Emily Bronte’s novels. While at the same time, I headed to my grandmother’s house and ate up her Harlequin romances. By my late teens, I could read four of those puppies in a single day. I was the queen of the giddy feeling of falling in love.
In college, I read everything from Nora Roberts to Tami Hoag and Suzanne Brockmann. I even went through a stage where I was reading Diane Mott Davidson, Sue Grafton, Iris Johansen, Stephen King, and Dan Brown.
And then, I hit a bump in the road when the girls I worked with started down a Janet Evanovich and PNR/vampire rabbit hole. We passed those books like they were a joint at a Black Sabbath concert. I gave up on Stephanie when she cheated on Joe and never got to the part where Sookie ended up with Sam?
WTF? That makes no sense whatsoever.
After kids, I read books here and there but never had the time I truly needed to enjoy reading again. Then, my husband had several medical complications, leading him to nearly dying 5+ times, and the realization hit in my late 30s and early 40s that happily ever afters weren’t real. That broke me. My anxiety and depression were through the roof.
So, I took up writing non-fiction books and eventually returned to romance when I could finally stomach the HEA world again. But I couldn’t read those stories. They were too fraught with anxiety. What if the hero didn’t choose the girl? What if something bad happened? However, I could imagine and read what I wrote because I orchestrated the world.
But guess what? At the beginning of 2024, I forced myself to pick up ACOTAR on Audible and jumped headfirst into the SJM universe. I’m obsessed. Literally obsessed.
Even though I must peek behind the curtain to find out what happens when I’m feeling like a “certain” thing is going to happen so I can mentally prepare for it. But it hasn’t stopped me from having an entire personality change to a fantasyland that I don’t want to ever come back from.
I won’t say what court I belong to for those who haven’t read the series, but those who know Chapter 54, know where I belong. And that Celeana chick from the Assassin’s Blade? I don’t know all her story yet, but she’s one kickass queen.
If you love romance and found family as much as I do, then you’ve come to the right place. Let’s escape the shitshow of the world and live in a land of make-believe where the heroes are fucking phenomenal because most of them are written by women, and there’s no doubt in our minds that we can sleigh a Middengard Wyrm.
But seriously, we’re all better off if we get stuck in my world where we can grab a cupcake, get a beer, and watch some football.