Whoa!mance: Romance, Feminism, and Ourselves

Whoa!mance is back in the saddle with a cozy sleeper set on the Colorado front range. In Cheryl St. John's His Secondhand Wife (2005), Noah's rakish brother is murdered in a saloon, leaving behind a pretty new bride, and a baby on the way! Honor demands Noah take Kate home. And boy howdy is Kate grateful that this brooding hermit of a rancher who hates gaslamps and sunlight has whisked her away from a life of drudgery in ye old Boulder. But Kate just wants to be of use, and Noah won't let her. Cue the slow burn.Morgan and Isabeau dig into the Beauty and the Beast bones of this one — the formula, the fantasy, and the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and what we deserve. Sometimes it takes a beloved outsider to call us on our nonsense and set us straight. And underneath it all: what does it look like when two people's vulnerabilities are seen and honored?Hitch the wagon, listeners — we're going for a ride!Tags: romance novels, historical romance, western romance, Beauty and the Beast, marriage of convenience, forced proximity, slow burn, reluctant hero, pregnant heroine, Cheryl St. John, book podcast, romance podcast, cowboy romance, Colorado, frontier romance, redemption arc, vulnerability, emotional romance, found family, cozy romance Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is that a wand base metal in your pocket, or are you just happy to see us again? This episode yr grlz begin their conversation about ALCHEMISED by SENLINYU.You're probably wondering how Helena ended up in a storage facility with most of her memory gone. So is she! And so is the High Reeve. The could-be inheritor of a very evil overlord and the person (zombie???) tasked with finding her pesky hidden memories in order to track down the last shreds of resistance in Paladia,.OR IS HE WONDERING AT ALL?!?! Cue flashback and oh, look at that, they were once in love...can they ever be again?What does hurt/comfort tell us about desire? How can we negotiate our nostalgia urge via FanFic? How do we even talk about this book?Only one way to find out...tune in for PART 1! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We dive into the exquisite love-letter architecture of This Is How You Lose the Time War and ask what happens when desire is literally written into existence. We linger on what it means to love with (or without) a body—across a multiverse full of potential and very real war crimes. Red and Blue, our sapphic leads, slip across timelines and into each other’s hearts in achingly human ways.But let’s say the quiet part out loud: romance does not need literary fiction to legitimize it. Distinct genres have distinct pleasures and emotional beats—that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Excellent books exist within the genre, and outside it--maybe we just stop trying to collapse the publishing multiverse and let genre conventions function as intended?Come for the yearning and love letters, stay for the unapologetic defense of the kissing books.#RomancePodcast #SapphicRomance #ThisIsHowYouLoseTheTimeWar #EnemiesToLovers #EpistolaryFiction #QueerRomance #BookDiscussion #ScienceFantasyRomance Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And now we arrive in Ireland. Finally. To discuss THE GROUND SHE WALKS UPON by MEAGAN MCKINNEY (1994).Ravenna is a social outcast who is also magically bound via geish to the Lord of her home, County Lir. Either Niall, at 20 years her senior, woos her, a lowly peasant, or his family looses the land they occupy in Ireland. What is the point of magic if it is just friendship or whatever? Does good romance determine a good romance, or is it all the other stuff? Is there ever such a thing as a good aristocrat?Trigger warnings: We talk about death and political violence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What was 2025, really? What did we say we were going to do—and did we do it?In this Year-in-Review episode, we take stock of the year with clear eyes. We revisit the wins, the misses, and the pacing problems from our shelf this year—from Ali Hazelwood’s Deep End to the dark-romance chaos of Nocticadia. We did a shadow-daddy bracket (a rigorous, peer-reviewed process; dissenting opinions noted for the record) that functioned as a useful tool for Isabeau, and found time to accidentally fall head first into the zeitgeist.Who earned the hardest Whoa!? Who took home the most definitive No? And which couples earned space on our mental shelves forever?We close by looking ahead to 2026: what we’re pursuing, what we’re done negotiating, and what we’re leaving behind—because not every arc deserves a redemption. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.