Hi, friends! What a week.
I try to divide my newsletters up into TikTok trends and dispatches from the platform about how readers are talking about books, recommendations and current reads, and genre deep dives (and, of course, imaginary celebrity book clubs). Previously, we’ve gone long on Romantasy, Hockey romance, Cowboy romance, and Zodiac Academy (a genre unto itself).
This week, we’re tackling Why Choose romance. What is why choose romance? Like most romance sub genres, it contains room for many types of books, but at its core, a why choose romance is about a main female character with multiple male (sometimes also female) love interests. Why choose, when you can have them all? This genre was previously called Reverse Harem, a term that is retrograde at best. It has also tended to encompass primarily straight relationships, whereas why choose romance now often contains queer relationships as well.
Here, Emily Rath, a popular writer in the genre who we’ll talk about more later, explains her understanding of the differences between the two terms, and why she prefers to call her work why choose (warning - this video is 9 minutes long, but at least she tells you that right there on the screen. It’s a very enlightening watch, though!).
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Next, we need to define some other popular terminology that booktokers use to describe characteristics of books in this genre. First, this tiktok with over 1 million views explains that the pairings in why choose books are indicated by the way ms and fs are arranged in the description:
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So a true throuple where all members have sexual relationships with each other would be mmf, and a throuple where the men don’t have a sexual relationship would be mfm. Add letters accordingly.
On booktok, some readers have a slightly more crass way of talking about what types of relationships are contained within a why choose novel:
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I think sword crossing is pretty self explanatory! This terminology is ALL OVER booktok. And again, this video has 212,000 views - these books are extremely popular.
I haven’t read much why choose (Twilight fanfiction where Bella gets with Embry and Quil doesn’t count, right?), so after a brief detour on Monday to read Stephanie Perkins’s adult romance debut (Overdue, AMAZING, not the last time you’ll be hearing about it here), I dove in by picking up several of the most popular why choose romances as dictated by passionate friends and booktok creators.
Why choose isn’t a particularly new trend - some of the books I was reading were released in 2022 or 2023 - but its popularity on booktok seems steady. And much like monster romance, what might seem fringe as far as romance goes has actually begun to cross over into the mainstream.
Den of Vipers
Den of Vipers, released by author K.A. Knight in July 2020, is a classic of the early why choose canon, with almost 200,000 Goodreads reviews. It’s an FMMMM - if you watched the video above, you’ll know that means that it’s about one woman who gets with four men, but none of them get with each other. I’m a pretty open minded romance reader, so I was excited to dive into a sub genre I don’t know much about, and I started with this book. I found it to be astonishingly violent, something that comes up again and again in most of the why choose romances I read. I didn’t realize why choose was so frequently paired with dark romance tropes.
Den of Vipers is about a young woman who owns a dive bar in a violent city with a teeming underworld (I was picturing somewhere in the US until I realized the author was using British slang, so who knows. It was so violent that after a certain point I started thinking of it as a dystopia) whose father sells her in exchange for his gambling debts to the Vipers, the four criminal overlords who run the city in the shadows. For me, this brought to mind the classic “sold to One Direction” meme:
Except Harry, Zayn, Louis, Niall, and Liam (RIP) would never. The Vipers are composed of Garret, Ryder, Kenzo, and Diesel. The first three are sort of your typical dark mafia romance guys who like underground boxing rings, but Diesel is a psychopath always one breath away from murder?
I knew this book wasn’t for me when one of the heroes punched the heroine in the head to knock her out like 5% into the book. Your mileage may vary. The Goodreads reviews are a mix of “I need therapy - 5 stars” and “I need therapy - 1 star” and isn’t that the way of things? I do think books like this sometimes resonate because when they break containment and reach a broader audience, it might be one of the first times a reader has seen any sort of kink portrayed in fiction, and that can be exciting.
I only made it about 20% through this book before I decided my one precious life was better spent elsewhere, but I have confirmation from a friend who finished it that it remains unhinged throughout. It is 654 pages long.
The Losers Duet
Next, I moved on to Harley Laroux’s Losers, which I’ve seen recommended across many TikToks. Losers is an MMMMF bully romance where the main female character is the bully (sort of). I can get behind that! Jessica was popular in high school - a cheerleader dating the captain of the football team. Manson, Jason, Lucas, and Vincent were burnouts and outcasts, bullied by Jessica and her boyfriend. But now that she’s home for the summer after college, will she be able to resist the magnetic pull that has always existed between the five of them?
This book was more fun than Den of Vipers, but still quite violent? The men, who now live together, hook up occasionally, and own a mechanic shop, are really intent on punishing Jessica for her high school treatment of them. She likes it, but a lot of the consent here is sort of between the lines in a way that I struggle with. That said, if Den of Vipers sounded interesting to you, I might try this one first, instead. Also, it starts with very thoughtful trigger warnings, which I appreciate in this space.
From Goodreads user @Crystalreads2: “Losers are what Spice dreams are made of. It's CNC, Bondage, knife play, everything dirty and nice; get ready for more of Manson and the clowns.”
Pucking Around
I told you we’d circle back around to Emily Rath, and shout out to the readers of this newsletter who have recommended her here before. Pucking Around is a MMMF hockey romance (there’s always at least one hockey romance in every subgenre, it is a law of nature at this point) that is so popular it’s carried in Target. And after the intense vibes of the two previous reads, a breath of fresh air.
Also, it starts by telling the reader the zodiac signs of the protagonists, something I’ve never seen before, alongside some good trigger warnings. I appreciate the authors who are writing and sharing transgressive books thoughtfully.
Pucking Around reads much more like a conventional hockey romance, with normal rom com banter - it just has 3 male main characters: Jake, a star hockey player, Caleb, a former hockey player whose career ending injury forced him into a career as an equipment manager, and Mars, a goalie. The heroine, Dr. Rachel Price, is a sports medicine doctor assigned to the team. I haven’t finished it, but this is the one I’m most inclined to finish. It’s pretty fun. If you’re a more standard romance reader who wants to try out why choose, this is probably where I’d start. That said, this book is 750 pages long!!! I guess it takes more time to develop multiple love interests.
This TikTok captures the general consensus about this book:
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Recs from TikTok
In conclusion, read what you want! Here are more why choose romance recs from booktok:
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And just for laughs:
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Imaginary Celebrity Book Club
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve done one of these, but I’m not sure which celebrity is strong and bold enough to venture this far into the booktok waters. That said, this stuff typically starts in fringe, indie published erotica and fanfiction and then one or two big hits help it cross over into the mainstream, so we’ll see! Maybe Chris Pine (who may or may not secretly be Chuck Tingle) can be our standard bearer.
Thanks for joining me for another wild week on the internet. If you have any favorite why choose romances, please shout them out in the comments! And if there’s another sub genre you want a deep dive for, let me know!
Omg I had no idea Pucking Around was a why choose romance. Wow, can’t wait to read this. I absolutely love a bully romance but true bully, not dark romance in disguise. There’s not enough of them in my opinion. Unless I’m searching wrong.
For a truly unhinged why choose romance, check out Split or Swallow by Lindsay Straube. The choice is between a prince or an ancient basilisk. Amazing. Really drove me insane.
Add Power Play by BP Gilmore to your list!