Isn’t it Romantic? I Have No Idea: A Guest Post from Leigh Bardugo
We love historical fantasy and we love Leigh Bardugo even more. With her romantic (and gothic) twist on the genre and brand new characters to obsess over, we’ll be revisiting The Familiar for a long time. Bardugo reflects on writing her latest novel in the exclusive essay down below.
Hardcover
$26.99
$29.99
The Familiar
The Familiar
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.99
$29.99
There are the books that you read, and then there are the books you experience — like the ones Leigh Bardugo writes. So if you’re looking for magic in all the right places, catch her latest historical fantasy.
There are the books that you read, and then there are the books you experience — like the ones Leigh Bardugo writes. So if you’re looking for magic in all the right places, catch her latest historical fantasy.
On a long ago vacation, my husband and I looked up our hotel’s dining options and found a “Romantic Dinner on the Beach for Two.” This was our first trip together since pandemic restrictions had eased and we were saying yes to lots of dubious things—ziplining (terrifying), free surf lessons (traumatizing), mixology classes (delightful). Why not a little pre-packaged romance?
We arrived to find rose petals arranged in a heart on the sand and a frothy pink welcome cocktail. Halfway through a glorious sunset and a mediocre bottle of wine, a beetle the size of my palm dropped from the sky and landed on its back, legs waving helplessly, until my husband righted it and shooed it down the beach. If we hadn’t been laughing so hard, we might have mistaken such an interruption for an omen.
At the time I was just starting work on a historical fantasy set in the Spanish Golden Age. I like to create a new challenge for myself with every book or series: Six of Crows was my first heist. Ninth House my first murder mystery. When I sat down to write The Familiar, I knew I wanted to write a love story and that it would belong to Luzia Cotado and Guillén Santángel. Is a love story a romance? And what makes something romantic? I didn’t really know. I still don’t. As a kid I was obsessed with the conventional trappings of romance—long stemmed red roses, teddy bears, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, candlelit dinners, saxophone solos. But as I got older, I began to distrust them. Cheesy, corny, generic. They seemed insincere: a commercial shorthand we are manipulated into using to communicate the messy reality of love.
But we tend to treat love stories with the same contempt. For as long as I can remember people have been rolling their eyes at romance novels, scoffing at meet cutes and snappy banter, at grand declarations and tragic turns. And yet, all the while, most of us fumble desperately, hopefully toward romantic connection. In bars, on apps, in offices, and discord channels, we seek love. In therapy, on date nights, and through scraped together staycations, we seek to preserve it. We know how unlikely the getting and keeping of love are and the need for it embarrasses us. To look directly at love, to try to tell the story of it, leaves us uneasy. We know from experience that, while nearly everyone around us seems to be practicing some version of it, love is sacred, strange, and nearly impossible. So maybe it feels wrong and even dangerous to reduce it to something you can pick up in the greeting card aisle of a drug store or see punched into a three-act structure on a movie screen. It’s as if in allowing ourselves to love love stories, we risk falling for a con artist. We fear these smooth charmers, these rom coms and tear jerkers, are playing us false. They’re making promises the real world can’t keep.
In truth, love stories make the same demands of us that love does: Be sincere. Be giddy. For a moment, stop sneering. Be a little foolish, a little lost, a little more trusting than we know is good for us. I’m still not sure if I can call The Familiar a romance. I only know that it’s the story of two people hungry for connection and willing to risk disaster for it. And I suspect that in the sweep of our own stories, we don’t get to be Achilles and Patroclus or Elizabeth and Darcy or Gomez and Morticia. We’re more like that beetle on the beach: dropped from the sky into something we don’t understand, frantically waving our legs until someone has the grace to help us find our bearings, full of hope at the sign of this small kindness, as we give ourselves over to the promise of what might happen next.