Dark Romance
Often overlapping with enemies-to-lovers or forbidden romance, dark romance is a popular genre that deals with explicitly dark or triggering themes. Morally gray love interests, scenes of intense physical violence, and trauma are all likely to be found in dark romance. Fans of this genre find it a safe way to explore darker themes, and many of the titles have content warnings included on the author’s website or in the books themselves. Heated Rivals by Katee Robert deals with an intense mafia family drama alongside the romance. Don’t Forget Me by Eden Emory kicks it up a notch with stalking.
Again, trigger warnings are thankfully very easy to find if you’re nervous about this genre. I find the trend of people who make video content about “this CRAZY dark romance” and say “there’s something WRONG with dark romance” pretty disingenuous—there’s a lid for every pot!
Work Rivals to Lovers
An important sub-section of the massively popular enemies-to-lovers genre, the setting of falling in love at work has had major success. The bestseller The Hating Game and the BookTok love for The Spanish Love Deception both foreground the workplace as a spot for sparring and tense flirting. Additionally, Beach Read by Emily Henry was a major hit in 2020 with writers who did not work in the same office, but had a professional rivalry going.
STEMinist Romance
A growing subgenre in romance for the past several years has been novels that place women in science, technology, engineering, and math in the main roles. Kicked off by The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood and The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, the genre about super-intelligent women is a runaway success.
These novels do have a feminist lean because the STEM world is so historically exclusionary to women, and all the women in these novels are running intellectual circles around the men. The academic setting is still a further slice of this sub-genre as many of its titles take place at universities.
Sports Romance
In a lovely marriage of two intense fandoms, sports have made a lot of inroads in the romance genre. Two of the biggest rising genres right now are hockey romance and Formula 1 romance. Hockey serves both straight and queer romance, with Icebreaker by Hannah Grace and Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid as representative examples. The TV adaptation of Heated Rivalry (streaming on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the U.S./Australia) essentially took over the internet.
Formula 1 has also risen in popularity, probably because of the general handsomeness of the men who race cars and the glamorous locations where they race. It’s a natural setting for a lush romance novel.
The old classics like baseball, football, and soccer are also still in the mix for sports romance readers. On the historical side, Cat Sebastian’s book You Should Be So Lucky dealt with a queer baseball player and a reporter working on a profile about him.
Grumpy Sunshine
Grumpy sunshine is a catchy term for an “opposites attract” romance. One is a difficult, unlikable person, and the other is a happy-go-lucky, positive one. The grumpy one usually shows kindness and adapts to the sunshine-y one, and the sunshine-y one may learn to stand up for themselves a bit more from the grumpy one.
The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan is a great historical example. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna and The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune offer cozy fantasy versions of the trope. And You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian also has a grumpy-sunshine dynamic!
Omegaverse Dynamics
If you’re not familiar with alpha /beta /omega dynamics, the first thing to know about these novels is that they’re sort of werewolf-inspired, and sort of not. As a trope, you can trace the origin back to the Supernatural fandom. But the basic appeal of the trope is that it takes the “meant for each other” bond to the highest degree. Alphas and omegas are deeply attracted to each other because of scent and are literally stuck together during the extended act of lovemaking. One of the recent popular entries of this genre was Bride by Ali Hazelwood (it hit the NYT bestseller list), but there are also plenty of queer omegaverse books to explore.
Soulmate Marks
The soulmark trope has been circulating in fandom headcanons and fanfiction for a long time, but it’s making its way into original romance fiction as well. Backhanded Compliments by Katie Chandler takes the soulmate mark trope and mixes it with the highly competitive tennis setting. The soulmate connection can also come through both people feeling the same pain or emotional intensity.
Going down the rabbit hole of romance tropes and their associated sub-tropes can be endless. That’s the joy of romance right now: there really is a lid for every pot. Additionally, many writers mix and match the tropes across their writing. This is something people who dislike romance tend to complain about, but I don’t agree with the critique that writers are only writing towards tropes. I think a lot of romance writers find certain dynamics compelling and use them as a starting point to tell the story.
When you’re looking for your next romance read, definitely check out the When In Romance podcast for recommendations and discussions. You can also keep studying romance subgenres and exploring other popular tropes like enemies-to-lovers or fake dating.
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