Sapphic Slow-burn romances
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge post features characters who are medical professionals. Most of the books are medical romance novels, but any book with a protagonist who works in health care counts, e.g., a physician, dentist, psychiatrist, psychologist, nurse, chiropractor, paramedic, or EMT.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge category features longer books. Of course, “longer” is a pretty subjective term. For this reading challenge, “longer” means any book that is at least 120,000 words.
Publishing professionals define the length of a book by its word count, not by the number of pages. That’s because the page count can be misleading since the number of pages depends on the font, the font size, the margins, the page size, etc.
If you can’t find the word count for the book you’d like to read, go for books that have at least 350 pages.
If you listen to audiobooks, pick one that has a length of 12 hours or more.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge post features a very popular kind of protagonist: the famous (or maybe infamous) ice queen character.
Ice queens are characters who come across as cold, aloof, and prickly. Often, they melt a bit after falling in love, and we get to see their well-hidden vulnerable side, but they typically remain their ice queenish, frosty selves with other people. Ice queens are usually in positions of power–they own their own business, are famous celebrities, or made it to the top of the food chain in whatever profession they chose. Think Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, and you have the quintessential ice queen.
In WLW and lesbian fiction, especially in romance, most of the protagonists seem to be in their 20s and 30s. But there’s life–and love–in your fourties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond! So for the third Book Unicorn category, I’d like you to read a book in which at least one of the main characters is over 40.
It could be an age gap romance, in which the other main character is considerably younger, or all of the protagonists could be over 40. I’ll leave that choice up to you, as long as at least one of the main characters is 40 or older.
The 10th category of the Sapphic Reading Challenge is a long post because it covers WLW & lesbian speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for books with strong fantastical, supernatural, or futuristic elements. That includes subgenres such as WLW & lesbian fantasy, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, science fiction, superheroine books, and science fiction.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge features romance novels in which the characters never intended to become involved in a long-term relationship with each other. The romance starts with a one-night stand, a fling, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement.