I just started re-reading a book I really like.  Though some people re-read a lot, for me it’s really rare, even with favorite books.  Though…perhaps lately it’s been getting less rare?  I think this’ll be my third time through this one.

The book is called The Wizard Hunters and is the first in a trilogy called The Fall of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells.  Like many, I quite like a lot of Martha Wells’ work (Murderbot, anyone?), but I really think this particular trilogy does not get nearly the love it deserves.

It’s a magic-plus-steam-power portal fantasy that acts as a many-years-later sequel to the gas-lamp, cloak-and-dagger The Death of the Necromancer, set while the country of Ile-Rien is beset by an all-too-powerful and mysterious foe.

The heroine, Tremaine Valiarde, before the war and everything else, was a playwright.  Now, she’s a maybe suicidal ambulance-driver-turned-adventurer.  (I say maybe because she just couldn’t stop herself from beating the ghoul to pieces with a lead pipe when it jumped out at her, and she keeps on doing things like that.)  The hero is from another dimension where swords and sailing ships are still very much the order of the day, and if he’s sometimes kinda reckless, he can point to his occupation as (evil-)wizard hunter as posing a definite need for that sort of behavior.

Tremaine is not exactly a standard heroine.  Or at least, she doesn’t see herself that way, and even people who quite like her think she’s a bit odd.  At one point, she reflects that, as a playwright, she could never pull off romantic plotlines.  She would try writing them in, but then the people watching, or even reading, the play would just get confused and not be at all clear that the two characters were supposed to be in love.  Partly that was because she just couldn’t bear the write things like speeches with over-the-top declarations of love; to her they sounded absolutely ridiculous.

That scene, of course, is a bit of the author, Martha Wells, hanging a lantern on the fact that the romance in this series is very understated.  And I love it.  It’s one of the main elements that keeps drawing me back to these books.  The protagonists don’t do weird, dramatic, romantic things.  They just like each other, and are pretty up front about that fact, mostly, even as they acknowledge that’s kind of weird for someone (from a different planet!) they just met.

What’s even better, they like each other as they are, not as some idealized, best-self version of them.  As the story and their romance continues, they don’t morph into better people whose problems and hang-ups all fall away (though they do make a kick-ass team).  They just connect, as they are.  Which is such a treat when it comes to romance.  (Though note, these books are at least 95% action/adventure/fantasy and only maybe 5% romance.)

The rom-com example that pops to my mind that emphasizes the love-you-as-you-are idea is Bridget Jones’ Diary, BUT that romance also has a lot of overcoming-initial-bad-impressions, so it’s kinda not the same thing at all.  The straight-up romance novel that does love-you-as-you-are wonderfully, in my opinion, is Book Lovers by Emily Henry (and maybe also Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, which pretends to start off as an enemies-to-lovers romance, but pretty quickly acknowledges that the enemies part was never really there and the two leads are pretty much just really enthusiastic about each other.)

In Red, White, & Royal Blue, though, the protagonists are young enough (college age) that personal growth is pretty much a requirement of the plot-line, so even though they don’t need to change to be good enough for each other (as is definitely true in Pride & Prejudice, upon-which Bridget Jones’ Diary is based), they do need to change to survive the story.  In Book Lovers, the protagonists don’t need to be anybody but themselves to both survive the story and be together, and this feels like it’s true too in The Fall of Ile-Rien.

“Now wait!” I hear you say, “How can a story possibly be any good without character growth?”  That’s a good question, and so obviously I’m playing with different shades of ‘growth’ here.  I think what the difference comes down to is what’s fundamental about a character, and what are their values.  In a story with lots of personal growth, the characters’ values shift by the end of the story, and/or the model in their head about who they are and who they want to be shifts.  There are lots of other ways that people can grow though, learning different skills, gaining mastery and confidence, confronting new realities about their world.  But those types of growth don’t have to be paired with a person’s shift in their understanding or expression of self.

So, I’ve now named several example romances.  How do those examples line up when it comes to character growth?

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen: Lizzy starts out very confident and sure of herself.  But then she learns that her surety has been painting the world in much more black-and-white terms than reality actually is.  She learns to forgive people for certain types of flaws and to realize that she is flawed too.  She still ends very confident and sure of who she is, but with values that have shifted to be kinder.  (And nearly the exact same thing happens to Mr. Darcy.)  Both their images of themselves evolve, and if they hadn’t, they’d never manage to get together.

Bridget Jones’ Diary starring Renee Zellweger: This movie ends with Mark Darcy declaring that he loves Bridget just the way she is (she doesn’t need to be slimmer, or drink less, or smoke less, or…) and this is the big revelation.  It’s a good intended message.  But to get there, first we have to have a whole movie that goes over just how undesirable / unbecoming many of her traits are, and then Darcy absolutely has to change into the sort of man who is able and willing to see past and accept those things.  It’s rather a Thou-dost-protest-too-much kind of messaging problem.  (Also, there’s less growth for Bridget, which fits the intended theme, but in my book loses it points in terms of excellent romance, due to lack of balance between the leads.)

Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston: In this book, the main characters love each other, flaws and all (there’s one bit about one of the characters suffering depression and the other character reflecting that he still quite likes him in that mode, just as much as he likes him in his other modes).  However, to survive the story, one of the characters has to discover that standing up for himself needs to be one of his defining values, while the other character learns that he needs to be okay modifying his dreams for himself, because some things are more important than striving for a single ideal.  Again, they both end with a changed image of themselves; it’s just not (fundamentally) a necessary component for the romance to succeed, the way it was necessary for the romance in Pride & Prejudice.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry: In book lovers, the main character, Nora, is a literary agent with the behind-her-back nickname The Shark.  She’s fiercely protective of the people she cares about, but is also extremely aware that she is the stuck-up-city-girl character every Hallmark hero leaves to be with his true, down-to-earth love.  And it turns out that that is exactly what Charlie loves about her.  She thought she didn’t like Charlie, but it mostly turns out she caught him on a bad day, for both of them.  Even though other people, like her sister, might want Nora to transform into the down-to-earth heroine, Charlie actively doesn’t want that.  I kept back-of-my-mind expecting for it to happen anyway, and it just never did.  It was amazing.

(My main complaint about Book Lovers, which I otherwise adore, is that it has a lot of the-hero-worshipping-the-heroine vibe, which is nice for a little bit of escapist fantasy, but really isn’t a good role-model for how to have a healthy relationship for both people in said relationship…In this way, Pride & Prejudice still remains the classic best, healthy-relationship romance there is (except that in copying that classic premise, a lot of stories manage to misconstrue it into something way less healthy.  It’s: The rude guy could be secretly into you and could learn genuine kindness; not that he definitely is and will.  And also, in the meantime, you girl need to work on your own self-reflection.  Sigh).)

Anyway, that’s (Book Lovers) what I mean by the characters not having to change to be together, and that’s what we get in The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, albeit in a really-not-a-romance-but-rather-a-fantasy-action-adventure-story format.  But also with the Pride & Prejudice standard of both romantic interests being very equal in their treatment, both with flaws, both just really liking and respecting the other one for all of who they are.

And all of who they are is a) kick-ass when the chips are down, and b) kinda weird and non-conformist in ways that makes other people who like stereotypes confused and uncomfortable.  I’m usually thumbs-down when it comes to even the hint of a love-triangle, but the first book of The Fall of Ile-Rien introduces us to an ex-boyfriend, only for both main characters to mostly ignore him in pretty short order.  Yeah, he was an ex-boyfriend for a reason; he had delusions of the heroine having a different (more standard) personality.

Anyway, lots of other super-cool stuff happens in these books.  The world-building is great (this is Martha Wells, after all) and includes things like a matriarchal society where it’s the men who have to worry about marrying into money, multiple worlds each with multiple layers of cultural history, different peoples with very different takes on magic systems, and journeys by steamship and airship. Also, it’s my very favorite kind of portal fantasy, where all of the worlds are cool, secondary worlds, not just the new world(s) the characters travel to.

Not sure why folks don’t talk up this series more.  I say they most certainly should!