Battle of the Bookstores

Josie’s distaste for romance fiction stems in large part from her belief that such escapist fantasies damaged her mother’s life, leading her to chase a fantasy of romance that doesn’t exist in the real world. Literary writers have long skewered romance fiction for distorting the expectations of its readers, and this line of criticism often takes on misogynistic undertones. Both Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1879) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) feature female protagonists who pursue the kinds of romances they’ve read about in popular fiction, and in both cases, this pursuit leads to tragedy. Josie’s mother, who in Josie’s view spent much of her life waiting for “her Prince Charming to swoop in and turn life into a fantasy—just like in those books she read” (67), takes her place in a long line of fictional women misled by fiction.

Despite this criticism, Josie recognizes the value of escaping into books. She recounts how adults always told her in childhood to get her nose out of books and go outside to experience real life. However, she mentions immediately afterward that “reality is vastly overrated,” noting that as a child she used reading to “drown out [her] mother’s shouting match with her latest boyfriend” and “take [her and Georgia] somewhere, anywhere, that was magical instead of messy” (25).