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).