For this love-themed week, I want to highlight different types of relationships. These aren’t the ones that I typically see in romance novels. I love historical romances but I think that fantasy can sometimes do an even better job at depicting loving relationships.
WARNING – There will be spoilers for a few of these series when the relationships don’t develop right off.
This is primarily a story of a woman who has been in hiding and hiding her powers. She is a widow at the beginning of the story. Over time she starts a new relationship. Typical fantasy stuff. However, there is a childhood friend who comes back into the picture. It seems like this is setting up a love triangle and really, who wants that nonsense? So the guys sit down and discuss this reasonably like adults and say that they both need to be in her life for reasons that make sense in the story so they need to work this out. Then they work on developing a relationship between themselves. Polyamory ensues. No threats or ultimatums or temper tantrums.
Asexual, aromantic soul mates. I love this relationship. They are psychically connected and very deeply bonded. They are psychiatrists who use dream manipulation to help their clients. There are books later in the series where they take romantic partners and I haven’t read those because I don’t like it. I love this pair together!
Let’s fix some power imbalances. One issue I have with vampire stories is that the vampire is always hundreds of years old and the other person is about 19. Who wants that? The vampire knows everything and the young person is naive. Creepy.
In this story there is an age differential. That’s hard to fix. But Hazel is a young witch with inhibited powers who finds herself alone and needing sanctuary. She is taken in by a vampire house to be safe from the witches hunting her. Killian, the vampire, trains her. He gets her powers up to speed and gets her reestablished in her world. Only once she has achieved her potential does a relationship develop. None of this taking advantage of people when they are down and vulnerable stuff. I love this series!
Speaking of power imbalances, what about a relationship where one person starts out with all the power and then it shifts. (Literally in this case.) This is a shifter story where a human inherits a magical property. She starts a relationship with the local alpha. Over the course of the series she is transformed into a much more powerful person than he is. They need to deal with that and other people’s perceptions of that.
Written in Red is all about communities coming together to love survivors of trauma. It is also a lot about killing the people who hurt them but there is a lot of love too. Meg escaped from captivity and abuse to find a safer life in the Lakeside Courtyard. Sam is a werewolf puppy who was traumatized by seeing the murder of his mother. Meg and Simon are trying to love him back to health. Over the course of the series, other abuse survivors are brought into communities and learn to build new lives.
I’ll go ahead and put one romance novel on the list. I like older heroines. This is a romance novella with older lesbian heroines teaming up to run off one’s odious nephew. It is glorious.
Nice topic. A couple of these sound good should I ever want to venture out into the fantasy genre.
You’ve described these titles in a way that makes me interested in all of them, which doesn’t usually happen. Thanks for the list and happy reading!
I love that cover for Magical Midnight Madness!
I have read a few Anne Bishop books and very much enjoyed them.
I liked Written in Red quite a bit. Thanks for sharing these recommendations, and happy TTT and Valentine’s Day!
Magic Forged sounds interesting. Here is our Top Ten Tuesday. Thank you!
Mindtouch sure sounds good!
Great list of books! I haven’t read any of them although I do know of Anne Bishop’s books.
Yep, I like how you offered some surprising romances for us to mull over today.