“He was a puzzle I could tinker with for years and get to know a little at a time, treasuring each little kernel of himself that he shared with me instead of consuming him all at once.”
Seduction of a Psychopomp – Elsie Winters 2023
Elsie Winters is the author of an interconnected series of 3 novels and three novellas in the fantasy romance genre. Her work feels to me like drinking a perfect cup of tea beneath a Maxfield Parrish sky. It’s like combining the powerful intellectual and emotional appeal Charles de Lint’s urban fantasy had for me in the early 1990s and the unencumbered delight of young love in Netflix’ Heartstopper that soothes my tired middleaged mama’s soul. It’s a combination that I probably started unconsciously hoping to find over thirty years ago.
Last year my brain needed to take shelter from the world and I stumbled down the rabbit hole of fantasy romance. Like any other human creative activity, there are some people who are really good at it and there are some who are absolute shite. Sorting one from the other takes some work, because “shite” is somewhat subjective. Elsie Winters is good at it, objectively in that she crafts a well-turned sentence and properly paced plot, and subjectively in that she hits all my alchemical notes.
When I was a kid my ratio of friends to books was about 1:500. I had one friend at a time, two at most until I was at least 13. I had rooms of books (mostly at libraries, but there was at least one full room of books at my house). By young adulthood my nonacademic reading paths had firmly coalesced into two strands: romance and fantasy, with a light side of science fiction. This is probably self protective when your academic and professional interests are American law and social history. This is still true.
Fantasy: “A genre of speculative fiction involving magical, folkloric or mythical elements”.
I read Anne McCaffrey (because I liked it), Robert Zelazny (because my boyfriend liked it), and Stephen R. Donaldson because I thought I was supposed to. As I’ve gotten older I’ve read tons of forgettable stuff with lurid covers, Tolkien’s minor and major works, some dreary Arthurian/post-Tolkein mishmash, Terry Pratchett, and Naomi Novik. And I have a particular nostalgic soft spot for Charles de Lint, one of the first to put the fairies and demons of legend in cars prowling the Rockies, or apartments in urban Canada..
Romance: genre fiction with the primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and usually has an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending”.
I’ve read a LOT of romances, for any number of reasons, both bad and good, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. I’ve written several (three, to be precise), although it would be a stretch to say I’ve published even one.
One of the reasons I tried to write romance was because I wanted the exuberant adrenaline of my favorite movie genre (science fiction action) and the soothing dopamine of romance all in one package. Action movies are notably terrible to their protagonists on the romance front (see: every Marvel movie except Ant Man).
Then I realized that other people have already got it figured out.
Fantasy: a fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person dwells at length or repeatedly and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes”
Oxford Languages
Fantasy romance–#FaRo if I’m trying to coach the algorithm—recognizes the ways in which “romance” in the genre sense and “fantasy” in genre and psychological sense are the same thing. The desire to populate a fantastic world with one’s desires: whether simple or complex, and spin tales of the world as you would like it to be can take many forms. The cynical side of this is about the degree to which, for many women who love and desire cis men, feeling physically safe, much less having regular orgasms, is about as likely as a world populated by elves, mages, and werewolves.
It’s amazing how much of fantasy romance–purportedly fun escapism and/or recreational erotica–is really allegory about surviving sex trafficking or the intersection of sexual and economic coercion. Elsie Winters is not one of the writers whose whole oeuvre derives from resolving the underlying tensions around women’s lack of sexual and economic agency. Although she’s a better narrative stylist than many who do, and would probably do a better job at it.
Romance: something (such as an extravagant story or account) that lacks basis in fact
Winters doesn’t appear to be trying to take on the social Big Questions of sex. She probably falls in the category of “Comfort Reads”. (I’ve learned that labels and acronyms are very important for a diligent consumer of fantasy romance.) Her books are not totally low stakes rom-coms, but the plot of her books doesn’t turn on potentially world ending drama and traumatic personal peril. Her protagonists are fighting crime and social discrimination, not averting zombie apocalypse or surviving years of sexual slavery.
Her characters experience angst, uncertainty, and fear but they are also going to be making Twilight jokes, not being forced into marriage by the specter of starvation and violent blackmail. In addition to lighthearted banner, Winters throws in the occasional easter egg reference to other widely read fantasy romance writers, because fantasy romance writers all read one another’s work and cheer each other on across their social media channels. This adds to the general feel-good, wine-book-group, support-mamas vibe.
“It’s got little eyeballs!” he said too loudly, and I flinched. “Sorry,” he said, dropping into a whisper. “I’ve never seen a plant with eyeballs!”
I gave him a side eye, considering some people might consider me to be a plant with eyeballs. Sylvan were pretty closely related to dryads, after all. “I just explained, they’re not plants, they’re not even related to plants—” “
Yeah, yeah, I know, but those are little plant dudes with eyeballs. You can say what you want.”
Green Eyed Monster – Elsie Winters 2021
The big joke about a lot of romance books is they have [tee hee]…SEX…! It’s bothered me for years that no one blinks if we take kids to watch Star Wars where literally billions of people die, Luke Skywalker’s beloved guardians are depicted—on screen—as smoking corpses, and kids get to learn the words “torture” and “bounty hunter” while being marketed Yoda stuffed toys. At the same time NFW would Lucas have ever had Han and Leia get happily, consensually naked together on screen. Or even show them getting out of bed after implied nookie.
Even without a “Think of the CHilDreN!!” aspect, writing consumed by and for adults has a “seriousness” scale that accords violence and sexuality (at least good sex, versus sexualized violence) very different levels of respectability. Seriousness in this case isn’t quite the same a literary merit. An adult can ride a bus ashamedly reading a spy thriller or murder mystery in which people get shot, dismembered and stabbed on the page, and the characters participate in or discuss in detail all kinds of assault and homicide and people will treat it as “casual” reading but not laughable or shamefully vulgar. Some of this is just sexism (John Grisham is inherently more respectable than Jackie Collins because he is a man writing for men), but some is more complex negativity towards sexuality. And the more something is about sex, with no other obvious “purpose” the more awkward we’re supposed to be about it.
Elsie Winters’ protagonists have (cis, het) sex. On the page. The ones with penises get erections. However she’s not writing “erotica”. If you want a book that’s half a writing exercise about fluids and positions, there are other writers who are totally into that (with all the species in Tolkein’s canon), and again, some can make that a fun read, and some are annoying and boring. “Erotic fantasy romance”, like any other erotica, pushes the bounds of what we are supposed to admit to reading, and thus admit to thinking about, enjoying, or creatively imagining as part of public discourse.
Fantasy: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need
Merriam Webster
The reason to read Elsie Winters’ Boundlands books isn’t too push those boundaries, so much as it is to appreciate people being happy. Sex is just grown up, kinda vanilla sex, if people in their 20s or early 30s always had joyful, non-toxic sex. But more than that her characters are adorable. Reading about them is a Grinch heart-grew-three-sizes experience. My heart needs that these days.
He had no way of knowing this—he couldn’t have—but a proffered stick, a nice one, was the magpie equivalent to a marriage proposal. I watched my hand lift of its own accord and grasp the stick, taking it from his hand. My bird brain was doing an end zone victory dance, even as my rational side was telling me there was no way he meant it. Bird brain didn’t care. He’d just proposed.
Magpies & Mayhem – Elsie Winters 2022
rage. creation - joy 