in defense of a long series

I gave birth to my son in March of 2020. I don’t need to rehash all the hectic details but suffice to say, it was a wild time. Covid restrictions increased in the days after I gave birth and continued through the near month Dominic spent in the NICU. I had preeclampsia (a particularly dangerous condition for women, and particularly women of color, that doctors know next to nothing about predicting or treating beyond to monitor and induce asap). You may remember this being the condition that befell Sybil on Downton Abbey (remember how they killed off everyone?!?) Dominic was too early to go home even though he had nothing too worrying going on. Mostly, physically, we were both okay. But I was scared and confused and afraid of any interactions with the outside world. This would continue for at least his first year. 

I’d been reading romance almost exclusively since about 2017. That was the year I got married, finished grad school, took on a full time job (instead of part-time, several internships, and school), moved to the suburbs, and we got a new president. I was a mess (hah!) and when I cracked open The Hating Game, The Wedding Date, and The Kiss Quotient in quick succession…I was done for. As I was wont to do, I worked systematically through much of the most lauded romance using this NPR list from their Summer of Love. I read everything and anything. Almost all romance subgenres. Laying waste first to contemporary then historical. My friend Nicole connected me to her friend Lauren, also an avid romance reader and now co-owner of Tropes & Trifles (have I mentioned her before?), and we began a penpalship for the ages. An epistolary romance, as it were. It exists today in the form of my romance group chat and my frantic orders with her store. 

I found my way to paranormal romance in 2020. Postpartum, particularly when some of it was in the NICU, provided me with so much time to read. It was less sleep when the baby sleeps and more read when the baby sleeps. Read when the baby feeds. Read when other people have the baby. I was exhausted and blessed by a well-behaved baby, a mom who moved in for several months, and a husband who split the load of parenting 50/50. I knew I wanted to read Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark series and I knew the Fated Mates podcast was founded as a readalong. Since I am a liberal arts major and old habits die hard, I love the idea of reading a text and then reading an analysis of that text. Less a book club where I am beholden to other people’s choices of the books and have to leave my house, but still  a deeper look at books as I was reading them.

I like to say now that Kresley Cole saved my life. Or maybe better, transformed it. I was HOOKED. I do not know what she puts in those books and I will grant you that the first one is too Old School for many modern readers. But if you can buckle in for the series, god. I know a long series is a huge undertaking. I have several friends that prefer to avoid series altogether. You either have to commit to reading 16+ books in a row or have a very good memory where you can read them bit by bit over time with other books mixed in. Some friends of mind can read #7 in a series and then not come back to it for years and years…and end up reading #2 next. Bananas.

Kresley is to me the GOAT, the OG, The Great Bambino. She somehow manages to navigate a Fated Mates set up in a way that feels new and fresh with each book. The circumstances and world building that keep her characters together or apart is vast and complicated. By having characters who are new to The Lore (the world of her immortals), the reader gets to learn alongside a protagonist, often the hero. While almost every single hero is a pure “alpha” type (not all! looking at you, Conrad and Sebastian Wroth), her heroines are the real forces of nature. They are never easily caught in the spell of love and they rarely ever need a rescue. Competency is a game at which they excel.

Dark Desires After Dusk involves a volatile vampire imprisoned in a haunted house with a dead ghost ballerina he falls in love with but cannot touch. Kiss of a Demon King has characters who take turns sexual torturing each other. Pleasure of a Dark Prince is Anaconda with werewolves. An entire arc of the series involved a human run torture island which Cole returns to again and again to show how four separate couples escape. Lothaire cannot be accurately described. Dark Skye is the best book about overcoming Evangelism I have ever read. Wicked Abyss’s heroine is a fae princess hiding in Disney World as Cinderella. 

The escape that long romance series give me is the same type of escape one feels sitting down to start Gilmore Girls or Grey’s Anatomy or The OC (or whatever your comfort show of choice is!) from scratch again. You know that there are so many episodes, or books, left in the series to guide you through. You have to put next to no thought into picking your next book. A luxury only rivaled by not having to choose what to cook for dinner or where to eat out. The steady presence of more Kresley Cole books and of her heroine's ability to master any situation was with me through every late night feeding, or pump. Through every moment where my baby fell asleep on me and kept me stuck to the couch, unable to get a snack or use the bathroom. Through the moments when I needed another world, a new reality. Kresley, I love you so so very much.

Long series I have lost myself in:

• Immortals after dark - 19 books total. 

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: Lothaire and Ellie matching each other’s freak absolutely cannot be topped. Imagine being so pissed off at someone, you cut off your middle finger and mail it to them.

• Julie Ann Long’s Pennyroyal Green .11 books total. Think Romeo and Juliet in the English countryside but less death? Two households both alike in hating each other and seducing each other. This series is a bit uneven but JAL is so so funny and so clever. There are real standouts here. Lots of pirates, lots of antics, some children are freed from the mines, some teachers are made duchesses. What more could you want?

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: Hard to pick as What I Did for the Duke I’ve spoken about before but A Notorious Countess Confesses absolutely is a Hot Priest book. 

• Elizabeth Hoyt’s Maiden Lane - 12 books total. If you know this series, you know where I am going with this. Suppressed desires GALORE. Many men running around England in harlequin Batman costumes righting the wrongs? Somehow Hoyt makes men in powdered wigs believable heroes? Lots of “oh she’s so UGLY” until suddenly she is the hottest woman in the world. I would love to have someone buddy read this after Immortals after Dark because Lothaire and Valentine Napier are cut from the same deranged cloth.  

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: Thief of Shadows is the saddest horniest book there is. You cannot change my mind.

• Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy and Innkeeper - Hidden Legacy is only 6 books (as previously mentioned several weeks ago) and Innkeeper has 5. These series feel long because of their intense world building and just the general ride they all take you on. I would recommend doing them both in the same month like me. More competent women dealing with emotional dysfunction masquerading as a man with an eight pack. 

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: I have talked about Nevada and Mad Rogan before so I will just say that books 4-6 feature Nevada’s sister, Catalina and her socialite crush Alessandro who may not just be a hot influencer…but an assassin? Andrews’ proves their worth by making both of these characters so distinctly different from Nevada and Rogan in addition to having awesome new magic powers to explore. 

• CL Wilson’s Tairen Soul - 5 books total. CL Wilson makes the list because why did she need five books for one couple? Why did I read it anyway with no complaints? I read this and thought, have all the romantasys been copying her?!?! I will stan CL Wilson forever after The Winter King. I loved alternatively complaining and hyping up this series. Another classic entry in the plain face to most beautiful woman alive married to millenia old magic dude pipeline.

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: It felt like it took five years for me to read these books which is sort of a dig but was still an enjoyable time. It is hard for me to distinguish what happened in each book but my Goodreads tells me Lady of Light and Shadow got the most stars. I think it was the spiciest. I believe there was magic sex in a fountain of youth type lake situation. 

• Jill Shalvis’ Lucky Harbor- 12 book series. This is really the Gilmore Girls situation. One of the OGs of the small town romance. Be forewarned, there are lots of police officers and former military heroes here. Such is the life of the small town romance in contemporary! Everyone wanted to make a more diversified place where locals hide from police and the old Taco Bell is now a diner, please come to the front! Most of Shalvis’s books follow the same formula. I remember laughing that Shalvis has a character say “been there! done that! got the tee shirt!” about some form of life experience (trauma, heartbreak, illness, divorce, you name it!)  in every single book. It is pure cotton candy brain worms. I read these in 2017 and they were so ridiculously comforting once I turned my analytic brain off. 

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: Forever and a Day because there is a pet pug and the hero is a somewhat tortured single dad ER doctor. It’s giving more well adjusted Dr. House. Head over Heels does have a heroine with chronic illness! I promise that your local library probably has all these books.

• Monica McCarty’s Highland Guard series- 12 book series. This is like if Robert the Bruce had Navy SEALs….it is ridiculous. BUT it is hot and it is fun and it’s a great beginner series for Highlander romances. Each book has a unique plot which kudos to Monica! She had to get deep in the archives to come up with this many plots. 

SERIES HIGHLIGHT: I think I would choose Viper…my memory of this entire series is fragmented but I think this one includes the most emotional unavailable of the lot and a badass single mom on the run? Odds are he says and does some absolutely out of pocket stuff and then grovel time! 

MY PLANS! These are long series I plan to read:

• Ilona Andrews - Kate Daniels. 12 total. Imagine if I read basically all Ilona Andrews in existence in 2025. This series is very long and I think less romantic that previous ones so I imagine I will read it at a more leisurely pace, mixing it in with other standalones I want to read.

• Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling. 24 total?? This is an OG paranormal series by a BIPOC author. I am frothing to start it and scared about how it will derail my life. 

• Black Dagger Brotherhood - J.R. Ward. 23 books?? I don’t think I can do all of them but the core 10 or so feels like a piece of history I need to read. I’ve heard these are really books of their time, meaning the early aughts. They feel very Blade. 

We’ll see…we all know I cannot stick to a TBR if my life depends on it.

talk soon,

Britt

1  When I say Old School here I mean that consent is not firmly established between the characters. It is very “dub con” (dubious consent) in the first half of the book and some scenes are close to assault. Romance reader & scholar Sanjana writes a great Substack about these themes here. I cannot recommend it enough.