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The story goes a bit like this: She’s the youngest daughter of a starving family, he’s a prince whose kingdom is suffering from a curse. Though she doesn’t know it, her love is the only thing that can save his kingdom from ruin. It could be the plot of a children’s fairytale—or the plot of Sarah J Maas’s for-adults book series A Court of Thorns and Roses, which has been credited with starting a bookbound sexual revolution.
“Romantasy,” the literary genre that fuses fantasy stories with adult-only romance plots, is the leading book genre according to market research company Circana BookScan. It’s also growing by leaps and bounds, with 1.9 million books sold since January 1 alone. Hop on BookTok (the TikTok community dedicated to reading books) and you’ll find romance books rebranded: Words like “spicy” and chili pepper emojis are common positive reactions to a story, and there are hashtags dedicated to tropes like “friends-to-lovers” and “marriage of convenience.” It’s a pretty good glow-up for the once-maligned romance book category.
“A seed was planted for the craze about 20 years ago or so with the Twilight series,” says New York Public Library librarian Anne Royer. “Romance wasn’t the main plot in that or The Hunger Games, but these are the books millennials were raised on. It makes sense that they want a similar story but with more adult content now that they are adults.” She adds that Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) was the third most checked out book from the library last year.
It’s just another industry proving the common saying of “sex sells” true. But for a lot of women—especially mothers—diving into the genre is helping them reconnect with themselves and escape the everyday.
“There is so much sex in this book,” says Let Them author and mother-of-three Mel Robbins, who listened to ACOTAR as an audiobook. “You literally blush. And what’s so cool about dramatic audio is that I would have my earbuds in all day long. I would be washing dishes, but I’m not in my kitchen with my hands in my soapy water, I’m literally flying with Rhysand through the skies of Prythian.”
Royer echoes Robbins’ sentiments. “If you’re reading a good sex scene, it can make you feel good. There are endorphins released, but it’s also a way you can get to know yourself and what you might be interested in.”
That’s exactly what happened to Caroline* when she read the first ACOTAR book. “I thought the first book was so bad that it took me a year to get through it, but the second book got me hooked,” the mother-of-one says with a laugh. Now, she’s read 32 books in the first five months of the year alone, finding the genre a means to escape from some of motherhood’s most testing moments. “I had terrible post-weaning depression where I stopped sleeping and had terrible anxiety,” Caroline shares. “Reading has always helped me cope, but these books take you out of your reality and give you little oxytocin boosts, whether it’s from the sex scenes or just the simple story being told. It’s really transportive. And now it’s helping to take me out of the political reality we’re living in.”
Another way to tell the genre romantasy is thriving? There are also independently-owned bookstores popping up across the nation that are completely dedicated to all the different ways romance can be told, like The Ripped Bodice in New York City and Dallas-Fort Worth s The Plot Twist.
“A lot of people didn’t realize they were into something like hot fairies,” she says. “Now, a lot of people have had epiphanies.”
