Sapphic Slow-burn romances
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.
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.
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.
Category #7 of the Sapphic Reading Challenge features another group of people that is definitely underrepresented in WLW & lesbian fiction: characters who have a disability.
It can be a book about a character with a physical disability, a chronic illness, or a mental disorder. When you pick the book you’re going to read, don’t forget that some disabilities are invisible or less apparent, for example, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, and mental illnesses.
This week’s Sapphic Reading Challenge category features a trope that seems to be quite popular in women-loving women romance. I call it the “only one bed” trope. It includes two characters who are not (yet) a couple having to share the only available bed.
Usually, that leads to hilarious situations: one character clinging to the edge of the bed so she won’t give away her attraction, or they wake up in the middle of the night, cuddled up to each other. And sometimes, a whole lot more than cuddling happens.