August is Read a Romance Month (RARM).

“Woo hoo. Yay.” <—muttered with less-than-enthusiastic intonations

I’m just not one to get all excited about romance novels, but my mother sure was. In fact, Mama was so much into reading historical romance novels that she would devour about 4-5 of them each week. She was always an avid reader and passed the love of books, all books, on to me. Thank you, Mama.

But, about 5 years before she passed I began to notice tons of paperback books scattered about her house. This was a good thing. I figured that it kept her mind active. But as I looked at what she was reading I noticed that all of the books had illustrations of hunky pirates, soldiers, earls, counts, farmboys, whatever, on the front cover. The hunky hero usually had his shirt off and held in his beefy arms a gorgeous woman who was sometimes scantily clad and always appeared to be swooning. I questioned my mom about the literary quality of these books and pointedly asked her if she left them laying around when her Sunday School class came to visit. She assured me that her class often exchanged these books, describing them as solid pieces of great writing with literary merit because they were “historical.” So, I bought her a Kindle and taught her how to download books, so as not to advertise to the world her penchant for “Red Hat Society” porn.

Every month was Read a Romance Month for my mother.

I probably chided her too much about her taste in books. So, because it’s Read a Romance Month, in Mama’s honor, I’ve decided to read nothing but historical romance novels this month. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Lots of people, okay, lots of women adore the genre. After all, what book lover wouldn’t want to take a Jason Momoa-ish hero to bed with her each night? What aging 60-plus-year-old red-blooded female doesn’t dream of having an 18″ waist and beaus swarming around her like bees to honey? But still, I’m not overly excited about my August reading commitment.  We’ll see what happens at the end of the month. Maybe my waist will shrink and Capt’n Clean will get hunkier.

As a writer, maybe I just don’t know enough about what goes into a romance novel, so I did a little research. According to the romance novel experts, these are the elements that must be present to classify a book as a romance novel:

♥ The hero and heroine must be likable.

♥ The hero and heroine meet early in the story.

♥ A barrier comes between the hero and heroine and prevents them from finding true love with each other.

♥ Romantic tension between the hero and heroine builds as the book progresses.

♥ The romance between the hero and heroine eventually comes to a happy ending, i.e. they live happily ever after

♥ The story is told from a woman’s perspective and the female heroine is generally strong-willed and clever

♥ The moral of any romance novel is that good behavior is rewarded by true love.

♥ Oh, and the hero’s shirt and heroine’s bodice are ripped off when the couple finally come together.

Yawn! But I must admit that the last bullet point is what will keep me reading.

You would expect that February, because of Valentine’s Day, would be chosen as Read a Romance Month. But no. August, maybe because it’s hot and steamy is RARM. From what I’ve seen, almost everyone is dealing with hot and steamy weather conditions right now, right? So, since most of us are sweating buckets during the hottest summer on record, I figured it would be unkind just to toss you a list of romance novels and encourage you to take a look at them. Your glasses might fog up with all that heat. So, as an alternative incentive, here is “the list” of historical romance novels that I’m going to read/reread (listen to) this next month, and to make them palatable, I’ve included the Wimpy Girl ice cream flavors that were inspired by each book. Maybe this will cool you off a bit. Heck, even if you, like me, can’t stand romance novels, who doesn’t like ice cream? Here we go:

Wimpy Girl’s Top  Historical Romance Novels