Kelly Stewart

Staff Writer

I was looking through Borders recently, trying to find a book to read, when a thought struck me. As I looked down the rows of books intended for ‘young adults’, I realized that most of them were romance novels or had some kind of romance in them. Why is that?

Now that I think about it, a lot of the books I’ve read recently have had some sort of romantic subplot in them. I think that is why I’ve been getting so tired of them, because I want something different to read that doesn’t involve the characters staring into each other’s eyes. But I might be out of luck, because everyone else seems to like them, and so the publishers keep churning them out. According to Romance Writers of America website, romance novels raked in $1.37 billion in 2008 and have stayed the largest share of the consumer market.

It’s a genre that is geared toward women, and of course teenage girls, who read about 90.5% of romance novels, so it’s no wonder that most of the books that I find, revolve around romance. But what about the girls who get tired of romance after a while, or who don’t mind it but hate the way the love interferes with the plot in some form or another (or, in some cases, becomes the plot)? Unfortunately, it looks as if that demographic gets forgotten all too often.