On being cranky about coziness

Last weekend, I had a miniature revelation about halfway through a perfectly pleasant cozy romantic fantasy. A princess is cursed to remain in a ramshackle bookshop until she finds her heart’s desire—cue the princes sent to break her curse with true love’s kiss, the new friends in a tiny village, and one annoyingly handsome pirate. It was whimsical and playful and fun and I found myself thinking so what? So what if this princess remains in the bookshop forever? Matters in the kingdom would basically be fine and so would our heroine. And I realized as I kept on reading, lured in by the prose and the pirate, that I am simply not a cozy fantasy reader. In fact, I may be less of a cozy reader than I had previously thought.

I’ve described dozens of books that I’ve enjoyed as cozy, charming, warm, and delightful. I’m certainly not a reader who goes in for bleak or dark, most of the time. StoryGraph has classified nine books, of the 107 I’ve read so far this year, as “dark” in their mood tagging and I’m not even sure I would agree with some of those classifications! But when I think of the literary fiction I’ve loved this year, like Lincoln in the Bardo or How to Be Both, its warmth and empathy is balanced with a keen edge of loss. When I think of my favorite romances from this year, the very real possibility of heartbreak is always hovering in the background before their characters triumph in their happy ending. There’s friction. Something is at stake, even if it happens to be simply someone’s heart. (And really, as any romance reader knows, there’s nothing simple about the heart.)

I think that today’s genre fiction often swings between extremes: high stakes drama with brooding love interests where the fate of the entire world rests on the shoulders of one young woman with magical powers or a quaint small town with whimsical bakeries and bookshops where no one ever has a miscommunication or a third-act breakup. I’m wildly oversimplifying here, of course, but there seems to be a sanding down of the edges in a lot of genre fiction, often in the name of coziness and comfort. However, comfort doesn’t work without the reader knowing what it means for these characters to be uncomfortable and if everything’s easy, nothing feels earned.

I love T. Kingfisher’s fantasy novels, especially her Saint of Steel series, and I’ve frequently described them as cozy but they’re also genuinely unsettling. Paladin’s Grace gives us a sock-knitting hero, a series of mysteriously decapitated bodies, high-stakes court drama, and decent-hearted characters caring for each other in ways big and small. The lurking danger makes Stephen and Grace’s love all the more precious and their flaws and uncertainties make their decision to choose each other all the more poignant. I’ve discovered that I want peril and adventure in my fantasy, I want complications in my romance and even when I know everything is going to work out in the end, I want a moment—just a moment!—where I doubt it.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve had a similar experience with cozy genre fiction or if you’ve had any moments where you found yourself reassessing your reading taste lately!

Currently reading: One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny, a m/m romance set in medieval England.

Recommendations, miscellany, and little bits of joy:

• I’m fully obsessed with Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, a scream-sob of the agony and the ecstasy of being a young woman.

• We went to see Masters of the Universe over the weekend and it’s definitely a tad too long but it’s also campy, colorful, and blessed with the charm of Nicholas Galitzine.

• I had the loveliest birthday gathering last weekend, complete with sparkling rose, lots of cheese, and a truly decadent birthday cake from Ladybird Bakery in Windsor Terrace. It was the kind of evening that just had me feeling very grateful for all the fantastic people in my life.