The Sweetest Oblivion

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of misogyny, sexism, sexual violence, and emotional abuse.

The Sweetest Oblivion is a contemporary romance novel that falls under the subgenres of dark romance and mafia romance. These categorizations dictate the parameters of the narrative and the tropes it employs to facilitate its primary romantic storyline. As the subgenre name suggests, dark romance books contain darker themes and characters with questionable morals. Dark romance titles place the characters’ traumatic experiences at the fore of the narrative, rather than shielding a character’s difficult past to create character complexity. Another key element of dark romance novels is their abundant sexual content, colloquially termed “smut,” which includes explicit depictions of sexual relationships and sexual encounters. The novels embrace “open-door” versus “closed-door sex scenes” in order to intensify the passion between the male and female romantic leads.

In the dark romance subgenre, the primary characters are known to be morally duplicitous, possessive, and violent. These character traits most often manifest in the male leads, who will take extreme action to “protect” or maintain their power over their female love interest. The female characters are often more docile and find their male counterpart’s aggression arousing rather than repellant. At the same time, the male characters might display “a softer side,” occasionally exhibiting palatable traits that humanize them to readers. The female characters may also have more feisty hidden qualities, which manifest in the context of their romantic relationship.

All of these dark romance staples appear in The Sweetest Oblivion. Nicolas (Nico) Russo is the stereotypical hot-headed, possessive love interest who is willing to kill for Elena Abelli. Elena is the demure, innocent romantic counterpart who’s surprised by her own attraction to the hateable Nico. These dynamics are also entwined with the novel’s use of the forbidden romance and enemies-to-lovers romance tropes. The characters don’t like each other and aren’t allowed to be together, but their sexual attraction to each other erases their logic and pulls them together.

The Sweetest Oblivion also falls under the mafia romance subgenre, a subsect of the dark romance genre. While dark romance novels can be set in any historical, fantastical, or contemporary realm, the mafia is just one possible backdrop. Mafia romance novels are stereotypically violent and use organized crime to facilitate a tense and volatile narrative world. This is no exception in Lori’s novel. Elena and Nico are both members of renowned organized crime families in New York City. The novel never explicitly identifies the temporal setting for the novel and only loosely references New York life. Context clues imply that the novel is set in a fictionalized version of contemporary New York where the Italian mafia is still at work. (There are no temporal, historical, or geographical details to authenticate that the novel takes place before the Cosa Nostra was disbanded in the late 20th century.)

Another key facet of the romance, dark romance, and mafia romance genres is their use of tropes including but not limited to: arranged marriage, forced proximity, kidnapping, taboo pairings, revenge, and blackmail. The forced proximity, arranged marriage, and taboo pairing tropes feature in The Sweetest Oblivion. They are used to intensify the stakes of Elena and Nico’s relationship and to reinforce stereotypes regarding power dynamics in heterosexual relationships; these stereotypes err toward violence, abuse, manipulation, misogyny, and sexism.

The Sweetest Oblivion is in conversation with other dark romance novels including Brynne Weaver’s Scythe & Sparrow and Kate Stewart’s Flock.