2023 is the year we evidently settled on romantasy as the portmanteau of choice, and I cannot say I have fully resigned myself to this decision. But whatever my feelings about the word romantasy, which I guess is fine, ish, in some contexts, and however bleak the personal and global events of this year have been, we can at least rejoice that we are living in a boom time for SFF romance. In recognition of our good fortune, I bring you this guide to 2023’s SFF romance, with recommendations to help any reader get started in the genre.
If you like to stay up late checking out Zillow listings, read: The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
Nothing is more soothing than staring at photos of real estate, am I right? There is something truly therapeutic about imagining alternate lives for ourselves, if we were wealthy enough to afford down payments and the country were not sinking into a generational housing crisis of our own stupid, terrible making. But suppose our home were not precariously perched on the edge of the crumbling cliff of capitalism. Suppose, instead, it was precariously perched in time?
In Ashley Poston’s The Seven-Year Slip, book publicist Clementine is grieving the sudden loss of her beloved aunt Analea. She’s inherited Analea’s New York apartment, and along with it, the secret of its magic. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you walk into the apartment and realize you’ve gone seven years into the past. Which means that Clementine, just as she’s about to land the big promotion she’s been waiting for, is suddenly roommates with her aunt’s friend’s son, a hot guy named Iwan who’s staying in the apartment while Analea-from-seven-years-ago travels the world with Clementine-from-seven-years-ago. But Clementine remembers what Analea told her: Never fall in love in the apartment.
The Seven-Year Slip is Poston’s second foray into adult fantasy romance, and it’s a book that will—despite, or perhaps because of, its careful and generous engagement with the process of grief—land a permanent spot on your comfort reads shelf.
If you’re a Hallmark movie aficionado, read: Kiss and Spell by Celestine Martin
As the Vulture critic Josef Adalian recently pointed out, Hallmark remains a thriving space for holiday scripted content, and its fans can pretty much watch a movie every day in the month of December if they want. But one cannot live on TV alone. For the person in your life who cherishes the coziness and comfort of small-town romances, I recommend Celestine Martin’s Kiss and Spell, a witchy Black romance set in a small town on the Jersey Shore.
After being jilted at the altar by her fiancé, Lincoln, Ursula Caraway stopped believing in fairy tales, and she’s determined to get her life back on track. But she can’t seem to stop flirting with the fae prince Xavier Alder, and before she knows it, she’s promised to help him break the curse that’s been laid upon him, which requires him to experience the perfect kiss. Not with Ursula, though. Definitely not. Kiss and Spell is a warm, heartfelt romance, and I loved where it landed on fairy tales: like so many things in life, they’re wonderful! But you have to take care to deploy them in a way that serves you in becoming your truest, most joyful self.
If you’re groaning under the weight of all your AO3 bookmarks, read: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske
Quelle timing! The third and final book in Freya Marske’s Last Binding trilogy, A Power Unbound, arrives just in time to get your loved one the full trilogy for this holiday season. It follows the arrogant Lord Hawthorn, introduced in A Marvellous Light, and the keenly ambitious writer Alan Ross, whom we met on board the ship in A Restless Truth. Together with the protagonists of the previous two books, they’re working to prevent a small but powerful cabal of English magicians from claiming all of English magic for themselves. Also, everyone remains very horny at all times.
Marske has a rich background in fic-writing, and it shows up in her novels in all the best ways: her tender compassion for embodiment, the biting, usually erotic, subtext that thrums underneath every interaction, and the guarantee that our central couple is going to bone and it’s going to be Excellent. A Power Unbound features one of my favorite kinds of protagonist in Lord Hawthorn, who pours a huge portion of his considerable energy and intellect into coming off like an asshole while not actually being an asshole. As soon as he showed up in A Marvellous Light, I was like, “this man is going to find love and it is going to stomp him to pieces,” and not to brag, but I was right. A Power Unbound is a terrific closer to a terrific trilogy.
If you’re a Brothers Grimm superfan, read: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Okay, you don’t have to be that super of a Brothers Grimm fan to appreciate T. Kingfisher’s latest novella, Thornhedge. Our heroine is a changeling, taken from her human parents as a baby and raised by swamp spirits. For the last don’t-know-how-many years, she has been sitting guard—most often in frog form—at the edge of a forest of brambles, behind which lies a sleeping princess. It’s been some time since princes and knights came in droves to the edge of the forest to try their luck at fighting through to the tower, and Toadling had begun to hope that her watch, as they say, was ended. Except that one day there comes a soft-hearted, soft-spoken knight called Halim, who would like to try his luck at waking the princess before he heads back home to his hearth and his mother. And Toadling, who cannot bear to help him and cannot bear to thwart him, is forced to confront the dark secrets that have held her in this place all these years.
Kingfisher writes gentle, low-heat romances that depend less on sexual tension and more on building trust over shared projects. Thornhedge doesn’t feature any promises of true and eternal love, and the most that happens between Toadling and Halim is a kiss, at the very end, the way it always goes in fairy tales. The relationship that builds between them may be quiet and slow, but it is the catalyst for nudging Toadling beyond the still and circumscribed life she’s made for herself. Like so many of us, Toadling doesn’t want to grapple with the mistakes of the past. She can’t do it on her own behalf; but she can do it for (and with) Halim.
If your family relationships are, um, complicated, read: Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
‘Tis ever most truly the season for navigating your family bullshit, breaking bread with relatives who simply can’t seem to shut up about your weight or your relationship status or their extremely ill-informed opinions about the situation in Palestine. While romance is a genre that privileges a specific and often heteronormative view of what family looks like (for more on this, watch this space in 2024), it also holds space for those of us who have had to step back from family relationships that were no longer serving us.
Mia Tsai’s debut fantasy romance, Bitter Medicine, follows the child of a Chinese medicine god as she tries to protect her older brother from the people hunting him, a group that includes their youngest brother. Elle has spent the last way-too-many years of her life trying to keep her siblings safe—from their parents, from each other, from themselves. Not until she falls in love with a sexy French elf who really admires her magic calligraphy (not a euphemism) does she begin to realize that she deserves her own happiness too—and that you can’t ever find happiness by trying to make your loved ones, your maddening imperfect loved ones, be other than what they are. The current crop of contemporary fantasy romances can feel a little cookie-cutter, and Bitter Medicine stands out for its richly varied world-building and its emphasis on the power of magic to create, rather than to destroy.
If you’ve been rooting for Kristen Stewart to marry a lady since the Obama presidency, read: A Long Time Dead by Samara Breger
Every time I start to make the claim that vampires have been culturally overindexed, some book or movie comes along to change my mind. In 2003 it was Robin McKinley’s Sunshine; in 2013 it was Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown; and in 2023 it’s Samara Breger’s A Long Time Dead. Breger isn’t so much reinventing the classic vampire tropes (if it ain’t broke, why fix it?) as repurposing them for the lesbian readership that has been craving this content since the 1872 publication of Carmilla .
Victorian sex worker Poppy Cavendish awakes from a night on the town to discover that she’s been turned into a vampire. Luckily, she has a sexy, sexy vampire Yoda to guide her, in the form of the centuries-old Roisin, who’s trying to get out from under the thumb of her own vampire sire, the controlling and abusive Cane. Really, this book serves a double purpose alongside Bitter Medicine when it comes to complicated family relationships, as it’s overwhelmingly about the challenges of recognizing, and breaking free of, cycles of trauma. But mainly I do feel like it’s for the Twilight girlies who turned out gay in the end.
If you waited and waited as a child for Wishbone to do The Count of Monte Cristo, and then when they finally did it, you had to leave after five minutes to go to your little sister’s doctor appointment, so you’ve still never seen that episode of Wishbone, read: The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q by Felicia Davin
Previously on Felicia Davin’s French Letters series, our protagonists conspired with Not!George Sand to kill a very wicked villain, who was using sorcery to control his wife, Delphine. I’m telling you this in case you feel anxious about reading The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q before having read the first book in the series. I certainly recommend reading both! But you will not be lost if you start with the second book; it is that kind of romance series.
Recently free of her terrible husband and eager to pursue a romance with Not!George Sand (really called Camille Dupin), Delphine also hopes to track down her first love, Ari, who vanished before Delphine had a chance to tell him that she was pregnant. Turns out that Ari was falsely imprisoned and has now returned to Magical France to do revenge and get back with Camille. My delight at realizing this was a Count of Monte Cristo joint was so extreme that I had to hit pause on reading, fetch the 2002 Count of Monte Cristo movie out of my DVD collection, and rewatch the scene where Edmond weaponizes a sauna to sweat a confession out of Villefort. (Villefort is a drip, but also, I really hate being hot and damp so this strategy would work on me.)
The Scandalous Letters of V and J was an unexpected delight, and I loved The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q—if possible—even more. Davin seems more comfortable with the epistolary form here, and this book is a tautly (sorry) tightly (sorry!) penetratingly (okay just kidding) elegantly plotted romance with just enough thwarting of bad guys’ plots to keep things interesting. Davin’s a dab hand with complicated emotions, as our three protagonists try to figure out how to fit in one another’s lives. Plus, if you came here for the smut, you can rest assured that Davin is always keeping perfect track of where all three people’s limbs (and feelings) are going. Marquise de Q is a funny, joyful, compelling story of magic and love and second chances; and it reminded me that, like, the Count of Monte Cristo episode of Wishbone is almost certainly available on YouTube.
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Happy holidays, everyone! May all your gifts be elegantly wrapped and graciously received, and may your TBR stacks always remain fat and happy.
Jenny Hamilton reads the end before she reads the middle. She reviews for Strange Horizons and Booklist, and she can be found at her website, on BlueSky grudgingly, and occasionally still on the dying shores of Twitter.
