Reddit reviews Indigo

> It is a light fluffy candyfloss of a genre that really just can't be taken seriously as it does not take itself seriously.

This stinks of the edgy, "I'm not like other girls" thing. There's no shame in that. A lot of us have gone through it. Hell, I went through it. But you're wrong. And I don't mean "oh my feelings" wrong. I mean you are factually wrong.

There is my comment about Beverly Jenkins' Indigo about a woman in the underground railroad. More importantly, how many black women saw themselves in the heroine, called on back of the book "the dark skinned beauty" -- for many, this book was first time they heard themselves called a beauty.

There is Courtney Milan's Brothers Sinister Series, which deals with mental health in the mid-Victorian era. Nothing says fluffy like OCD, depression, anxiety, hoarding, and insane asylums in 1850s Britain.

There is Mary Balogh's Simply LOve about a solider with PTSD and a teacher with PTSD, and how they fall in love and deal with their own pain.

Hell, I wrote a romance novel featuring a heroine who suffered from panic attacks. There's nothing "fluffy" about a book that has helped women seek medical treatment for their anxiety and panic.

Or what about the Jane Austen adaptation I wrote about an inner city worker with PTSD who ends up on stress leave because she finds one of her clients dead. And how a young woman decides to go to the police about her rapist to help protect another woman who is being hurt by him. Yeah. Hilarity. (And, to be fair, this book is hilarious. And also dark as night sometimes.)

Just like spec fiction can be light and fluffy (Landover, The Palace Job) or dark as all fuck (Warhammer, Prince of Nothing) and every version of that in between, romance - just like every other genre out there - is also the entire range.

You don't have to like romance to be able to respect it.