What ties them together is the HEA. I read the same recommendations for Madensky Square and I knew I could trust the reviewers but it took me several weeks before I could finally start it. And even then, I read the ending first just to see how much of a non-HEA it really was. As it turns out, I am glad it didn’t have an HEA and really only had the thinnest of an HFN. (And WWI was just around the corner for them as well.)

I would say that Megan Chance’s books are intentional HFNs. The Portrait, for example, ostensibly ends in an HEA but the hero is an artist suffering from bi-polar disease in the 1850s. He’s not going to get well and neither of them are independently wealthy so you can see poverty, alcoholism and marriage breakdown on the horizon. Megan Chance virtually warns you that it’s going to happen. Still, it’s a book about the hope that love can generate even against all odds and is there anything more romantic than that?

Sometimes really good angst should only end in an HFN. Anything more such as marriage, babies and acceptance by the ton belittles the reader’s emotional investment in the characters and story.

As I shop almost exclusively online, your description of your bookstore experience is one that I never experience anymore. Fitting with my anal personality, I keep spreadsheets of books I’ve read, ones I own but haven’t yet read, and ones which are on my radar for the future. I had a few incidences of buying the same book twice, hence the list.

I was in a big box store (Barnes & Noble) today and other than Nora Roberts, I really didn’t recognize many of the authors’ names in the Romance section. That may well be because my memory is rather sieve-like, but it could also be a factor of a) how many books are published (did someone say 400/month? I didn’t think that was possible until I was looking at shelf after shelf of new-to-me authors) and (b) how relatively inattentive I am to most reviews. I’m starting to think one needs a hand-held device (such as a miniature spiral-bound notebook — it doesn’t have to be electronica) to keep straight which reviews we’ve read, what books are on the shelves, and the intersection thereof!

All of which has nothing to do with this post, btw, and I apologize for hijacking the discussion, but your mention of “Skin Game” made me think of it. That book could have been staring me in the face at B&N and I’d have looked right over it.

I just finished Ava Gray’s Skin Game which has a light paranormal element but is ultimately a romantic suspense. It features a hit man hero and a con woman heroine. The body count is high, no one is truly good, but I still believed in the HEA.

I think readers see a book as “angsty” when it touches upon issues which are too close to home. Many readers don’t want to read about crappy childhoods, rape, abuse, infidelity, miscarriage and grief when they pick up a romance book. They’re looking for an escapist fantasy, not a story which will depress them.

This is one of the criticisms I’ve read of Sarah Mayberry’s latest Blaze title, She’s Got It Bad. The heroine is infertile. There’s no miracle pregnancy at the end of the book, nor hope of adoption. This is a woman who will never have a child and that’s made clear in the story. Her HEA is with a hero who will help her lead a happy, fulfilling life without experiencing motherhood. Apparently, some readers found this outcome depressing. Personally, I thought it was very well done.

Many of the darker romances published these days tend to be in the guise of paranormals and urban fantasies. While dreadful things can and do occur to the characters in these books, the world in which they’re set is not our reality. I think readers looking for romantic escapism with an edge are more likely to gravitate towards these books than ones which deal with subjects which are too realistic.

Are there romances that intentionally have a HFN ending? (You may treat that as a rhetorical question if you wish…) I suspect authors always think theirs is an HEA, but maybe the reader can see some potential dark clouds on the horizon.

I had a spirited (and fun!) Twitter exchange with Maili recently about why there weren’t more historical romances set in the Edwardian Era (1904-1910). She makes an excellent point — it’s got a lot to recommend it: the nascency of Women’s Suffrage, the advantages of the Industrial Revolution (yeah, indoor plumbing!), and great clothes — but I suggested one possible reason that it’s not more favored is that the reader knows what the characters don’t, namely that WWI is right around the corner. Whereas for the Regency Era, once Waterloo is won, the British aristocracy was pretty much out of the war business for 100 years. (To be historically accurate, I believe career army types fought in Crimea and later on, in South Africa for the Zulu and Boer Wars. But the earls & marquises we read about were most likely not on those front lines…)

And while there wasn’t a call-up (as the draft is known in the UK) for WWI, there was a massive response by all classes. The way I, as a reader, think about it is: even if the protagonists didn’t fight, they knew someone who did, and the men who came home were shell-shocked or worse. So that’s a bit of HFN for me. Still, to be fair, I loved Jane Feather’s Matchmaker trilogy, and they’re all set in the Edwardian Era, so . . .