UNDERCROFT, n. Two of the romance novels that I wrote about below prominently feature an undercroft, that is to say, the cavernous space under a castle, filled with stone columns. So naturally I had to look it up.
Undercrofts tend to be a feature of Norman architecture, so we’re talking about England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They’re not necessarily crypts or dungeons, just underground spaces, but both romance novels played on their dim and ominous qualities. If you’d like to see one, here’s an example of Durham castle’s undercroft, which is now a bar.
According to the OED, the first uses of the word “undercroft” referred exclusively to the vault underneath Canterbury Cathedral. Based on the photo in that linked article, it’s a good one. Sort of like how we now say “google” to mean “search,” the word “undercroft” gradually acquired a more expansive usage.
A “croft,” by the way, has a first definition of basically a pasture—an enclosed piece of land, hence “crofter” meaning farmer—but a second definition meaning crypt or vault or cavern. It feels a little excessive to add “under” to a word that already means “underground space,” but I guess people had to distinguish the crypt-croft from the farm-croft.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
A Scoundrel’s Guide to Seducing a Nobleman (m/m, both cis and gay, historical) by KJ Charles. I wrote a newsletter about this book’s predecessor and how beautifully it uses the natural environment of Romney Marsh and the local language of Kent to develop its atmosphere. Scoundrel’s Guide is just as good on those points, and just as much about how noticing someone—seeing them fully, in ways no one else has—is essential to love. The plot is absolutely delicious KJ-Charles-reinterpreting-pulp bonkers, complete with a murder and a mithraeum—and a creepy old castle with an undercroft. Somehow it also makes time for quiet, intimate moments between the main characters, kissing hands, and handwriting, and I loved it.
Release (m/f, both cis and bi/queer, contemporary, erotic) by Suzanne Clay. You might not expect a romance novel where the characters encounter each other at a glory hole to be sweet, but this one is a wonderfully unexpected blend of filthy and tender. Danielle has been in love with her boss Victor for years now, and vice versa, but neither of them knows it. At the office, they keep their behavior scrupulously correct, showing their love through perfect attention to detail. But all that unrequited lust and pining has to go somewhere, and they’ve both chosen anonymous sex as their release. A mishap at the office causes them to recognize each other from their extracurricular activity, and then they have to reevaluate their relationship. This book makes a lot of space for Danielle to heal from her previous abusive relationship, where her boyfriend made her feel worthless for her submissive tendencies and interest in sex, and for Victor, who is in his 50s, to have had his love life as queer man shaped by US politics, particularly the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. It’s kind of rare to see politics brought up so concretely in contemporary romance, even queer romance, and I thought this book did it to great effect. Great characterization and scorching sex.
The Duke Gets Desperate (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Diana Quincy. This historical romance also centers around a castle—with a pivotal scene in an undercroft, natch—as the titular Duke, Strickland, finds himself forced into proximity with Raya Darwish, a Palestinian-American daughter of factory owners who has, in a very romance-novel twist of events, inherited his ancestral home. Strick and Raya have one of the most classic, beloved historical-romance dynamics, where they can’t stand each other—she’s an opinionated low-class foreign upstart and he’s an arrogant, macho aristocrat—but they want to bone so bad. Sparks fly when they bicker. It’s so fun to watch them provoke each other as they wrangle with the castle’s failing finances and end up working together to save it. Incidentally, they also catch a thief, narrowly evade a few attempts on Raya’s life, and expose a murderer along the way. I loved all the little details in this, like Raya’s Auntie Majida doing tatreez embroidery and Strick’s passion for Anglo-Saxon artifacts, whether he was overseeing archaeological digs or recreating jewelry at his forge. It’s not lost on me that this is an ethical way for a nineteenth-century English aristocrat to love antiquities; he’s not stealing the treasures of other cultures, but celebrating those of his own.
The Fake-Boyfriend Fiasco (bi m/het f, both cis, contemporary) by Talia Hibbert. This is scorching and silly and so much fun. Talia Hibbert is one of the best romance novelists writing today. (Note, for longtime Hibbert fans, that this is not an entirely new book; it was formerly published under the title Sweet on the Greek.) Here we meet Aria, a Black British tattoo artist with serious trust issues, and Nik, a Greek footballer who just retired from the English Premier League and who is trying to “retire from slutdom,” as Aria puts it. Nik likes Aria immediately and wants to ask her out on a normal date, but she shuts him down, so instead he offers her a ludicrous amount of money to go on holiday with him, posing as his girlfriend, which he pretends is a plan to fend off obsessed fans but is, of course, a plan to spend more time with Aria. She says yes. Believe it or not, before this book came up as a library loan, I’d been griping to myself that I was “tired of fake-dating books.” But Talia Hibbert managed to refresh this trope for me—there’s something so pure about this book, committed as it is to its bananas, horny premise, and I love that. I read it and returned it to the library in two days, and I hope whoever’s next in line finds it as delightful as I did.
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!