I may have found a cure for teen screen addiction: romantasy novels

Telegraph

13-03-2025

My teenage daughter can't stop reading books. Two a week, at least. She's at it all the time: over breakfast, in the bath, meandering distractedly to the bus stop. If I try to talk to her, she raises one hand as a stop sign and gently shushes me, before bowing once more over the page.
If this sounds like a middle-class boast – well, obviously it is. A bookworm in the family feels like a miracle in the smartphone age. But the credit does not belong to me. It belongs to a parade of strong and independent heroines, some with magical powers, who must fight to survive in assorted dystopian kingdoms peopled with dragons, elves and cruel but broodingly attractive princes.
This is the genre known as 'romantasy ', which, over the past five years or so, has almost swallowed the publishing industry whole. As the name suggests, it's a heady blend of sci-fi, fantasy and romance, most of it written by and for women. It tends towards the formulaic, with dependable romantic tropes such as 'enemies to lovers' or 'fated mates'. Within the genre there are varying 'spice levels', ranging from chaste but yearning love stories, fit for the young adult market, to absolute faerie filth.
Right now, many of the UK's bestselling novels are romantasies.
One of these, Onyx Storm, by Rebecca Yarros, sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, making it the fastest-selling adult novel in the English language for more than 20 years. When Yarros does publicity events, her fans – thousands of them – come dressed as her characters, in a riot of medieval corsetry, albino wigs and nylon dragon wings.
This is not, I admit, the path into bibliophilia I had anticipated for any child of mine. One of the vanities of parenthood is to imagine that you can shape your offspring's cultural tastes into a copy of your own. Or rather, a selectively remembered, suspiciously highbrow version of your own. Because now I come to think of it, I didn't read that many Edwardian classics either.
My own literary addictions began with Enid Blyton, the unrivalled mistress of repetitive tropes and archetypal characters. At one point I refused to read anything but Malory Towers books, over and over, high on their delicious predictability. My parents, in desperation, locked the entire series in a cupboard, hoping this would force me to broaden my literary horizons. It worked: I moved on to The Twins at St Clare's.
After that came Jilly Cooper's early romantic novels, which all had female names as their titles: Octavia, Imogen, Emily, Bella. They, too, were blissfully formulaic, with a gentle steaminess perfectly attuned to the sexual curiosity of a teenage girl.
Cooper and Blyton taught me to read for pleasure. They made me want to read, not for reasons of self-improvement or intellectual display, but for the fun of it. Pleasure is habit-forming: once you know you can get the good stuff from a book, you are liable to keep going back for more.
Everyone needs a literary gateway drug – now more than ever, with screens competing constantly for our attention. A survey published last week to 'celebrate' World Book Day found that almost 50 per cent of men had not read a single book over the past year. By contrast, 63 per cent of women still read, in part, perhaps, because they have found a genre that gives them pleasure. What men need now is a romantasy of their own.