Top 10 Likes/Dislikes in Romance Novels

Every Tuesday the ladies over at The Broke and the Bookish host a book related Top 10.

This week’s topic is Likes or Dislikes (or Turn offs and Turn ons if you’d rather) in Romance Novels.  I picked 5 elements that will ruin a Romance novel for me and 5 that I love.

Turn-offs

1. Instalove – Falling in love takes time.

2. Stalkery Behavior – Girl tells a guy she’s not interested and he keeps showing up where he knows she’s going to be.  When we accept this in a novel or movie it makes guys thing they just need to be more persistent.  Not persistence, it’s stalking.

3. Asexual female leads – You know.  The ones who have never had a sexual feeling until they met THIS GUY.

4. Stereotypes – This is actually pretty specific.  I read a bunch of books by a romance author this year where all the main female characters were not skinny.  I actually like that.  What I don’t like is that she made all the skinny girls bitches.

5. Bad boys/transformed players – It’s just completely overdone and 99% of the time have no depth. 

Turn-ons

1. Non Virgin lead characters – I love female characters who own their sexuality and don’t apologize for it.  And I love the men who don’t shame them for it. I’ve really liked some books with virgin lead characters, but most of them fetishize virgins which I find gross. 

2. Non perfect body/face characters – I can relate more and like the message that you don’t have to be perfect to deserve love.

3. Well done sex scenes (especially in unexpected places) – In Flirting with Disaster by Victoria Dahl, Isobelle and Tom have ladder sex.  And it was hot and sad

4. Humor – Sometimes romance novels get too serious and the issues that the characters are dealing with so emotionally draining.  It’s refreshing when an author is able to make me laugh.  Plus is realistic because I don’t think I could fall for someone who didn’t make me laugh.

As an aside, Victoria Dahl is my favorite romance author.  My turn-ons were all things I thought of from her novels, and as I was writing this I realized she’s never done any of my turnoffs.