Sapphic Slow-burn romances
For this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo square, read a sapphic book with more than 400 pages. There aren’t that many sapphic books that are 400+ pages long, which is why this is a Book Unicorn category.
If you know the word count, which is more accurate than page numbers, pick a book with more than 130,000 words. If you choose an audiobook, pick one that is at least 13 hours long.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge features sapphic books with a mistaken identity theme.
A character is mistaken for someone else for at least a part of the book. Usually, it’s misunderstanding (or at least it starts out that way), rather than one character intentionally lying or disguising herself. The misunderstanding can be cleared up quickly or the other character can play along and start pretending to be someone she isn’t, but the situation didn’t start out as an intentional disguise.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge category features body-positive books that celebrate women of all sizes and shapes, e.g., a plus-sized protagonist.
The romance novel industry has a reputation for abiding by Hollywood’s standard of beauty. It’s rare to find plus-size characters in f/f romance novels (or any romance, for that matter). Most of the main characters are portrayed as slim, with perfectly sized breasts, and if they are a bit chubby, their goal in the story is probably to lose weight.
So let’s break with that tradition and search out diversity when it comes to how the main characters look.
By the way, body positivity includes not just fat or plus-sized characters; it also refers to characters who are skinny or flat-chested such as Eliza from Wrong Number, Right Woman or who otherwise deviate from society’s beauty standards.
I hope that going forward, there’ll be more body positivity in romance novels and that women of all shapes and sizes will find themselves represented in a positive way.
For this week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge category, read a book in which at least one of the main characters is of a different race, ethnicity, or culture than you.
Please pick a book that is own voices, meaning the author shares the character’s racial, ethnic, or cultural background.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge post is all about characters who come out later in life. For the purpuse of this reading challenge, let’s define “later in life” as a character who’s in her 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond.
Pick a book in which the protagonist comes out as LGBTQIA, either because it took them longer to figure out they aren’t straight or because they were struggling to come out to friends and family.
Today’s category–sapphic books about neurodiverse characters–might as well be one of the Book Unicorn categories because there still aren’t that many.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term: a neurodiverse person (also called neurodivergent or neuroatypical) is someone whose brain works differently compared to neurotypical people. They might be on the autistic spectrum, have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), dyslexia, dyspraxia, or Tourette Syndrome.