Sometimes people wonder why romance is a genre I love to read and write. I think to them it sounds frivolous and not as meaningful as literary fiction or non-fiction. I read broadly, so I do read those other kinds of books both personally and for my professional life. They are important in how I learn to understand others and myself better.
But I just keep coming back to romance.
I’m guessing that the first romances I read were probably inspirational romances. The women in my neighborhood also mostly attended the same small church and they would swap Grace Livingston Hill novels like they were gold. Some days, you would end up walking home with a brown paper bag filled with those thin, white covered books. I can still visualize the swirls on her name years later!
The first romance novel I actually chose for myself came from a series of young adult historical romances called Sunfire, published by Scholastic. The series focused on girls who were finding new pathways in America. These both pre-dated the American Girl dolls and surpassed them, in my opinion. The plot was always the same, girl has established love interest but needs to leave her home to find a new life in America or its frontier and amidst that transition found a ]man who potentially suited her new life more than her old love. The frontier changed… I read about Plymouth and Virginia settlements, the Oregon trail, and the Hudson River valley… but the questions of which man was the best were consistent. To be honest, I think the old love interest was dispatched with pretty early in the books (by Chapter 4, maybe), and much of the rest of the book was her adjusting to her new life. I loved these books!
I remember standing in front of the shelves at my local bookstore in the 1980s, trying to decide which book I would convince my mother to buy for me. I usually picked out the thickest book I could find, and one that I thought would stand up to multiple readings.
I had several favorites, and recently found the first one I ever read on a used bookstore website. I couldn’t resist the splurge to have my hands on a piece of my childhood, and the book Amanda is now mine again! Amanda is a bit of a spoiled, headstrong Bostonian, forced to head to Oregon with her gambler father when all of his debts come due at once. She had an agreement to wait for handsome Joseph but that doesn’t matter to her father. And on the trail, she meets Ben, the wagon train master’s son. Will Joseph follow her to Oregon? Will Amanda learn how to cook over an open fire? Will Ben carve her name on a rock? Will the book be casually racist and destroy all my memories of the series?
(That last one is actually making me nervous as I reread through this childhood favorite!)
What about you? Did you read Sunfire romances? Do you remember your first romance novel?
Alys Grant, Author 