Archive for September, 2026

TV

Renegade Nell

I recently came across a fun series streaming on Disney+ that I somehow missed for the past few years, Renegade Nell. It’s a fantasy historical adventure show. A young woman who ran away with a soldier and followed him to the continent for a war in the early 1700s returns home after losing him, but she seems to have picked up something along the way. When she gets into a tough situation, she basically goes all Matrix. She can dodge or even catch bullets and has super strength, speed, and reflexes. This ability comes up when the son of the local lord is harassing her sister, but then it gets her in trouble when the son frames her for his murder of his own father (so he can get the title and estate). Now an outlaw, she goes on the run with her younger sisters, becomes a highwayman (briefly), and tries to clear her name, but everything she does to clear her name only seems to make matters worse, until she learns of a plot against Queen Anne that she feels obligated to stop. But she doesn’t realize just how sinister and powerful the forces against her really are.

I’m going to have to watch it again to pick up on everything because injustice can be hard for me to watch, and I had to watch this while I did other things, like knitting or crossword puzzles, to be able to tolerate it. It’s definitely “put your characters in a tree and throw rocks at them” writing, but now that I know how everything works out, I may be able to watch. I loved the main character, who manages to be a badass who’s very different from the girls around her without being “not like other girls.” She’s learned a lot in her adventures, and knowing what to do in a crisis means she can’t let herself turn her back on a crisis, even though getting involved may get her in even more trouble. A lot of her predicaments are self-inflicted, but mostly because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing the right thing, in spite of it being difficult and dangerous.

I don’t think we see a lot of things set in this particular time period, during the reign of Queen Anne, and the costuming is spectacular. It’s a time of highwaymen, broadsheets, and murder ballads. And yes, there is the Ballad of Renegade Nell, who becomes a notorious figure because of the rumors about her.

It’s a one-season series with a definitive ending, though it was left open enough that there was a possibility for more stories (and, unfortunately, it wasn’t picked up for another season). I’d call it a swashbuckling adventure with a lot of twists. But it does get pretty tense along the way, so if you’re a weenie like me you may be watching from behind a sofa cushion.

Books

The Return of Chick Lit?

As you might have been able to tell from the Enchanted, Inc. series, I was a big fan of the “chick lit” genre back in the early 2000s. Those books were a breath of fresh air to me and helped me realize that while I want a love story in a book, I don’t necessarily like romance novels, and that explained why I was having trouble writing and selling them (I managed to sell 5 romance novels, so I guess I did okay, but it really wasn’t the right genre for me). Back at that time, the expectation was that a romance novel would be primarily about the relationship of the couple. The main story conflict would be between the hero and heroine. They would meet early in the book, be strongly attracted but also have some reason not to want to be with that person, and the story would be about them having the push/pull between the attraction and the conflict until they got through or over the conflict so they could be together. Chick lit was more about the process of finding the right person. It might involve a lot of bad dates on the way to Mr. Right, and those bad dates would be what helped the heroine figure out who Mr. Right was. The story was more about the heroine’s journey and might also get into her friendships and relationships with her family or with her career. Those things could show up in a romance novel, but they would be secondary to the romance plot.

Basically, chick lit was like a romantic comedy movie in book form. Bridget Jones’s Diary is generally credited with being the book that kicked off the craze, though what’s funny is that it was a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, which is generally considered to fit in the romance genre (though I once wrote an essay about how it was really a chick lit book, since Lizzie has a brief attraction with Wickham and has to fend off Collins, Darcy is mostly offstage, and Lizzie’s relationships with her sisters and her parents are a big part of the story). Old-school, hardcore romance authors were outraged when chick lit became popular and didn’t want it included in anything that Romance Writers of America did because it wasn’t really romance. The genre burned hot for a few years, got glutted, and then crashed and burned dramatically a few years later, taking the Enchanted, Inc. series with it. It sold and was published as chick lit because that was what was hot at the time. Today, it would probably be published as cozy romcom romantasy.

I’ve missed this kind of book, but it seems to be coming back under the guise of “rom com.” I just read a recent one that could have easily been published in about 2003, with only the detail about smart phones having to be changed, and it was so much fun to read that I need to dig around to see if other books called rom coms are more like that or if they’re more like romances.

The book was Skip to the End by Molly James. Our heroine has an odd gift that gives her a vision of how the relationship will end the first time she kisses a man. It’s allowed her to dodge a few bullets when she sees abuse or cheating, but knowing that a relationship is going to end unhappily makes dating pretty difficult. Why bother dating someone when you know it’s not going to end well? At a friend’s wedding, another friend dares her to kiss at least three men. The wedding gets wild, she drinks a bit too much, and she wakes in the morning with no memory of the night before. Her friend says she told her that she did kiss three men. Two of them gave her disastrous premonitions but the third was the One, someone she would grow old with. But she doesn’t remember who she kissed or which one was the One.

So she sets out to uncover what happened at the wedding, looking at her phone log, text messages, and pictures taken at the wedding, then she tries dating the candidates to see if she can figure out which one might have been the one she could grow old with. Since she already kissed them, she won’t get the premonition again, so she has to learn to rely on her own judgment to figure out what she’s looking for and what makes a good relationship.

This book would make a great rom-com movie because there are a lot of funny set pieces with the wacky dates. She’s also got an amusing set of friends and family members. It was so much fun to read and I tore through it quickly, then was sad when it was over too soon. It left me wanting more of that kind of thing, so I either have to return to my bookcase for old books or see if I can find something else. I tried going through the “real alike” listings on the library website and I’ve checked out a couple of those, but they aren’t quite the same feeling.

The book was labeled “contemporary romance,” but in structure it wasn’t what would have been considered romance back in the day. I wonder if things have loosened up some in the past 20 years. I know that independent publishing has changed things because publishers saw what was successful and that readers generally didn’t care about the strict rules the publishers used to live by (for instance, I remember when it would have been impossible to sell a romance novel involving a hockey player, but that’s the hottest thing going right now). I would definitely recommend this book to fans of Enchanted, Inc., though it’s perhaps a bit spicier (but not graphically so).