The cover confused the hell out of me.

Infamous by Lex Croucher is ‘Booksmart meets Bridgerton’. It says so on its illustrated cover featuring the now-familiar back-to-back stance of two protagonists with wry smiles. One of the young women is in a pale Regency gown and tiara and the other wears a waistcoat and wields a dripping feather pen that would destroy pastels. Opposites? Check. The namedrop of the still-revving Netflix juggernaut made sense too. Half of the trade Historical Romances on the market now are labled ‘For fans of Bridgerton and [add popular novel, film or television show].” Before Infamous, the YouTuber’s debut novel, Reputation, was originally pitched as Pride and Prejudice meets Mean Girls – before the inevitable Bridgerton hook.

So, Infamous is a YA Regency Romance right? Booksmart’s heroines are graduating high school. Also, there’s that tiara, an accessory that screams Ye Olde Senior Prom. Flip the book over and the blurb promises us ‘practice kissing’ between childhood best friends. Case closed. Wait. The blurb also discloses that its twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer heroine, Eddie Miller, is going on a voyage of self discovery. Hmmmm, that’s firmly within New Adult range (18-23). But… but can an Historical Romance even be New Adult? Other Romance subgenres write in very specific ways about freshly hatched grownups testing out adult life within rarefied conditions: Contemporary Romance with their college-aged protagonists obviously. Paranormal and Fantasy with their equivalent fancifully named training grounds. Historicals? Not so much.

Historical Romance operates on a different timeline of maturity to the present day. At least in the eras that dominate the subgenre. Thankfully, we’ve mostly dispensed with our OG teenage heroines who metamorphosed from adolescent hellions into adult life partners within days. Now our Regency and Victorian Historicals give us a delightful mixture of wicked spinsters, scandalous widows, and wallflowers who are secretly scientists. Female leads, including in sapphic romances, can range from their mid-twenties to – if we are very lucky – mid-thirties. But even if a Regency heroine is twenty, she is not in a New Adult Romance because there is simply a very short runway to adulthood built into this world of debutantes and marriage marts. She gets the equivalent of Senior Prom. Then she’s an adult.

But maybe this is all about to change? Let’s look beyond the cover.

The opening chapter of Infamous feels very ‘Bridgerton Family At Home’ with our wealthy, large, and unconventional Miller family squabbling entertainingly. So far, so fanfiction. Croucher gives us a wink and nod right away. Our aspiring writer Eddie is penning a story about Anne Bonny and Mary Read but shifts the action from a pirate ship to the ‘Jelly Roger Tea House’ where they reach for the last biscuit at the same moment, #onlyonegingerbread. And then Eddie is such an Eloise-as-played-by-Claudia-Jessie type, always slumping and slouching and sighing. Oh, and failing to realise that her best friend Rose Li might want more than a front-row-seat for Eddie’s life.

Compounding Eddie’s juvenile qualities is her total cluelessness about and, frankly, cruelty towards Rose. We don’t get Rose’s POV, but her unrequited love is obvious from the jump/practice kiss. Eddie wants this lovely person to just hang about beta reading her coffee shop fanfiction forever and is horrified by Rose’s desire to marry and start the next chapter of her life. That Rose’s experience of life, and of same-sex kissing, might be different to her own never occurs to twenty-two-year-old Eddie, despite that fact that Rose is Chinese British and not from a wealthy family. I initially assumed that Eddie’s obliviousness re: racism was part of the Bridgerton AU Regency of inclusive casting. Which begs the question: does the lack of racism in Bridgerton make any sense off the screen?

We all know the Shondaland take on Regency England is palate-popping gorgeousness where visibility is everything. Bridgerton allows all modern audiences to see themselves as potential belles and bucks of the ball.  The diverse casting gives us the best acting talent in front of the camera and more equitable involvement behind the scenes. In a non-visual medium, however, does it compute to have an AU Regency where racism in all its varieties is imperceptible and yetsexism, homophobia, and classism are all fighting fit? Intersectional feminism says no. My gut says don’t sit on the fence. Swing for it. Either tackle the Regency with all the period’s isms and fill it with characters determined to live their best lives regardless OR get rid of them altogether. Set Mean Girls or Booksmart with period pomp and ceremony but with modern sensibilities.

Anyway, these were my thoughts before the book suddenly became ‘Agatha Christie meets Sally Rooney’ in Infamous’s fantastic second act. Eddie and Rose are invited on a Regency writing retreat. Croucher whisks us away from Somewhere, London to Somewhere, Countryside where a crumbling Gothic castle sits atop an isolated island. Our motley assortment of mismatched guests can only approach by a creaking rowboat. And the weather is turning nasty… I cannot stress my enjoyment of this setup enough.  If Infamous was fanfic, it had just become inspired by J.G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy. Add in a charismatic douche of a sub-Byronic poet as host and I was very, very happy. I won’t get too much into what transpires in this superb setting other than to say that the uncomfortable dynamic between aspiring writer Eddie and the grandiloquent celebrity poet is fantastically well-judged. It fairly shrieks overly-keen-new-female-graduate-student meets young-but-not-as-young-as-he-pretends-to-be-psuedo-renegade-professor. Their interactions had me squirming with recognition at times. See, this is a college book! 

But if Infamous is New Adult – and it is – what does that mean for Romance’s best subgenre? So existing Historical devotees (me!) are clearly interested in authors shaking up the cis het White ballroom in a host of ways: from gay rakes to Asian dukes to honest-to-god middle class people who have real jobs. Historicals keep getting more entertaining as some brilliant authors research the hell out of erased people and cultures. We love the combination of sweeping imagination and painstaking historical detail. But what about the readers picking up Romance for the first time because they love Bridgerton? They might want fanfic-inspired Eddies leading their Regencies: technically grown-up people who are floundering about trying to find their gender, sexual. and vocational identities and who are allowed to do that without the hair-trigger threat of ‘ruination’. It may be that Historical Romance, however innovative, can’t provide that type of New Adult representation.

If we’re worried about a confusing reception line, maybe we should print up a hologram set of Almack vouchers to make room for the incoming AU Regencies escapades.

Next Up: Besties Book Club is back and all over the shop discussing Rebekah Weatherspoon, Scotsmen, and SIZE in Romance.

*We do get one scene in Bridgerton, Season 1 that provides a reason for this racial inclusivity. I would have left well enough alone and spent that filming budget on another wig for Queen Charlotte. Similarly, the inclusion of a Black author who can enlighten our young White heroine about Abolition at the Writing Retreat From Hell in Infamous asks more questions than in answers: namely, if we are living in a world where the actual African slave trade exists, why aren’t the main characters not, like, a lot more conscious about racism?