After The Happily Ever After…

The romance genre loves sequels. Once you have learnt all about a town, a team, a family or some other community you want to keep exploring the other people and relationships you have been introduced to. Romance after all is for people who are interested in other people and their stories.

It is difficult in book series, where each book covers one primary couple’s story, to give justice to those that have come before them. This means that the couples from previous books often come across as cardboard ‘perfect couple’ cutouts. They seem to loose dimension and character development and are instead are reduced to lots of ‘significant looks’ and ‘smitten comments’.

I recently read the Stephanie Bond series set in Sweetness Georgia and was infinitely pleased when the couple from the first book returned in the fourth story bringing along with them some discord from being unable to conceive. I was really excited to see a couple experiencing issues in their marriage, as that is part and parcel of any relationship, unfortunately the heroine of the story was able to set things straight a little too easily, not to mention that the returnee discovering she was miraculously pregnant just as she was talking her problems through. But hey congratulations to Stephanie Bond for acknowledging that it is the couples who work through their problems in life together that are the strongest and perhaps the most interesting.

Have you read any contemporary romances where you wanted to keep reading after the happily ever after?