For years, my sister-in-law and I have joked that I need to fall in love with a Christmas tree farmer so we can get cheap Christmas trees every year, and honestly the logic is there. Because of this it shouldn't have come as a surprise when she got me a copy of The Christmas Tree Farm by Laurie Gilmore (obviously the special edition, iykyk).
I’ve always had my eye on Laurie Gilmore’s books thanks to the super cute covers, so I started reading it as soon as possible and ended up loving the book and finishing it in less than a day. This kind of surprised me since I normally can only finish romantasy books in a day, but this one drew me in so quickly that it made me think that maybe I had unlocked a new book genre for myself: Cosy Romance.
To test the theory, I started a new book the next day: The Baby Dragon Cafe by A. T. Qureshi and while it took me a bit longer to get used to the author's writing style, I again found myself finishing the book in one day.
This made me pretty confident that cosy romance was a good genre for me, but unfortunately, this meant I had a whole new range of books to add to my collection (guess it’s a good thing I work at a bookshop). Thanks to getting to see so many books going in and out of the warehouse every day, I noticed that more and more books were catching my eye and ending up on my camera roll for my future purchase list; from Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, and Check & Mate to The Lamplighter’s Bookshop by Sophie Austin and the rest of Laurie Gilmore’s Dream Harbour series. Plus having more and more holiday romances like Mistletoe All the Way By Lauren Blakely and The Holiday Mix-Up by Ginny Baird showing up these days has been making it really hard not to pop through to the bookshop to pick up extra books each day. Of course, it doesn’t help that many of these books also came out with special editions!
You might be wondering what makes a cosy romance, because surely you could call pretty much any romance book cosy, right? Well, personally, I consider cosy romances to be a low-stakes romances where you know the characters are going to go through a bit of drama but will come back together by the end (or the next book 😅). They tend to be based around pretty similar tropes like being set in small towns where everyone can butt into everyone’s business and have a nice slow burn relationship.You tend to get some loveable side characters backstories but you’re not so overwhelmed by information and world building that it becomes a task to remember all the little details. But more importantly, for me, they’re books I can count on to get me out of a reading slump if I’ve burnt myself out on a specific genre and they can be reread so many times without losing their magic and you can just curl up and disappear into their world for a few hours.
While romantasy books will always live at the top of my TBR, I’ll always make space for a fun, cosy romance.
