Summertime means summer books. There is nothing more exciting than lazy summer reading. The books may be a little clichéd, but you still keep turning the pages. They serve a unique function that no other books could fulfil. It’s a book that makes you travel emotionally. It’s exciting. It’s tantalising. It’s refreshing. It’s everything we wish for ourselves. More importantly, it’s stress-free.
But why are there so many clichés in our summer books? The answer is simple: Because they work!
We met abroad… and he came back to me
Can there be anything more romantic than a love story in a foreign country? The heroine meets someone on a sandy beach abroad. They fall in love. The typical book ended the story at the end of the holiday when the girl had to leave. But nowadays, more and more romantic fiction authors include a follow-up chapter where the dark-haired boy chooses to leave the beach and sunny weather of his homeland to meet his beloved in the UK. In the real world, if he wanted to stay with her, he would need to apply for a VISA and after a few years, he’ll have to get his uk ilr (indefinite leave to remain). In the real world, the paperwork would be stressful and confusing, Fiction gives us a simplistic life where administrative hurdles don’t exist. And truth be told, we all want to live in the fantasy world!
The road trip in the sunset
They met through a road trip, the sun casting long shadows behind them as they rode their Harley Davidsons on Route 66. There’s something adventurous about it. It makes us feel like a bolder version of ourselves to imagine riding a bike in the sunset. The landscape passes on both sides of the road like a film. In front of you, your beloved aims for the horizon. Behind you, the stress, the city, and the noise disappear. Bliss. However, a summer road trip can be tricky to organise. For a start, nobody is comfortable riding for long hours on a bike or in a car. And you often get stuck in traffic. But a summer road trip appeals to our imagination. We dream of freedom, of freeing ourselves from the conventions and the everyday routine. And it’s exactly why we love those stories.
Never-ending cocktails and dancing
Long days and nights on the beach, drinking cocktails of all sorts, dancing and swimming. Summer holidays are all about relaxing and having fun in novels. And we can’t help but feel like we want to be part of the story. We too would like to be on the same beach as our heroes, casually holding sipping a tropical drink out of a coconut shell. In real life, we know we can’t survive on cocktail and dance all day long. We know it would get dull after the first hour. But we envy their stress-free time. It’s tough to get a few minutes for yourself. So the idea of spending an entire day at the beach doing what you want with no worries about doing something productive is appealing.
Summer romance novels tap into our dream of a simple and stress-free life. We want to free ourselves from our shackles, whether they are self-imposed or created by others. So, for all its clichés, summer fiction gives our mind a much-deserved break. And we love it!