I wrote recently about my delight that an excellent second-hand bookshop has opened in my home city of Oxford. Well, karma has come around. In the upmarket district of Jericho, it’s recently been announced that Britain’s first ‘romantasy bookshop’, Bad Girl Books, will open next month. The shop is run by an American expatriate named Starlin Marot and is the permanent manifestation of a series of pop-up events she ran in London that have attracted thousands of readers.
Marot told the Oxford Mail: ‘The reason I like the romantasy genre so much is because it is so inclusive and empowering. It can be empowering to celebrate stories written by women, which feature women’s voices and desires. I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of new customers.’ And the shop – which, naturally, is painted pink outside – already has a large and potentially loyal fanbase. As Marot said: ‘I started Bad Girl Books as a way to meet the romantasy community in real life and create a genuinely fun, unique shopping experience. The response has honestly been unbelievable. So many people showed up to the pop-ups that I was able to scale incredibly quickly, and within six months I’d raised enough money to open a permanent shop.’
On the one hand, this is good news for many people. I am a firm believer that no city, especially one as literate as Oxford, can have too many bookshops. Marot is clearly someone who cares deeply about what she is doing, as well as being savvy enough to have identified a gap in an ever-growing market. When Bad Girl Books opens on Walton Street next month, it will be near-neighbours to several rather different bookshops – including my favourite Oxfam establishment and the inaccurately named Last Bookshop – and I have no doubt that it will be a great success.
On the other hand (leaving aside the rather aesthetically questionable, if on-brand, colour that the building has been painted), it represents a further step in the irresistible domination of ‘romantasy’ as a genre. For anyone who has not been fully initiated into the world of BookTok, this can essentially be described as an unholy mixture of Mills and Boon and Dungeons and Dragons, or, alternatively, what might have happened if a sexed-up Barbara Cartland had seen Lord of the Rings.
The average romantasy novel revolves around the usual contrivances of every romance novel ever written, but with a fantastical spin. Virtuous maidens, heaving of bosom and pure of heart, fall in forbidden love with Heathcliffian figures, who are often minotaurs, vampires or werewolves. There are invariably goblins and dragons, who can also engage in sexual congress, and the books have names like Throne of the Fallen or Trial of the Sun Queen. Their fervent admirers take to TikTok to extol the virtues of their favourite titles and their preferred authors; the most successful romantasy author Sarah J. Maas, whose works include A Court of Thorns and Roses, has sold more than 75 million copies of her books worldwide. Not at all bad, given that her first novel was published in 2010 and she is still only 40 years old. As Lara Brown previously wrote in these pages: ‘[Romantasy] is a world constructed perfectly for Gen Z, who are terminally online. It’s literary BDSM.’
They are not designed as great literature but it is not quite clear what they are instead – save indifferently written and repetitive exercises in wish fulfilment
The difficulty, however, is that most romantasy novels are not very good. When compared to the subversive political commentary of, say, Game of Thrones or the grand operatic sweep of Lord of the Rings, these are books with rather more basic aspirations. They often blend the would-be transgressively erotic content of Fifty Shades of Grey with ‘faerie’ details that amount to little more than unoriginal ‘go girl!’ tropes of empowerment and emancipation, set, of course, in a fantastical realm. They are not designed as great literature, which is fair enough, but it is not quite clear what they are instead – save indifferently written and repetitive exercises in wish fulfilment.
I wish Marot and her shop every success, and no doubt she will swiftly find a loyal and devoted fanbase amongst visitors and locals alike. Yet the chances of my visiting it are, I am afraid, not very high. This is perfectly understandable – even a bibliophile like me must admit that not every bookshop is necessarily aimed at everyone – but I am afraid that Bad Girl Books has brought out my not-so-concealed inner literary snob. There will be those reading this who are ardent admirers of Maas’s oeuvre and for whom A Court of Thorns and Roses and the like are essential bedside companions. I wish those people great joy but I’ll be sticking to my usual diet of those incorrigible Oxford graduates Evelyn Waugh, Martin Amis and Philip Larkin. They would, I think, have dealt with the coming of a romantasy bookshop with the amused scepticism that such an idea inevitably merits. And so will their present-day admirers, too.
Comments