Tropes I’m Thankful For (2022 Edition)

More of These, Please

Welcome to Thanksgiving day 2022. When I started Shelf Life and chose Tuesdays and Thursdays to publish, it didn’t really occur to me that Shelf Life would always publish on Thanksgiving day. It’s the one Shelf Life per year I’m guaranteed to write ahead of time because I travel for this holiday.

What I am actually thankful for is Black Friday because I love shopping. Another reason to get Shelf Life out of the way ahead of Thanksgiving is so I can spend the week pregaming all the sales. I try to do all my holiday shopping before the end of November. Wish me luck.

Last year for Thanksgiving I wrote about book tropes I was thankful for in 2021. This is in the same vein as the tropes I’m tired of articles (regular and spec fic editions). These are the low-hanging fruit of Shelf Life because the list of overused literary tropes is long and the ones I’m into (or sick of) at any given moment are always changing based on what I’ve been reading.

To make this list, I combed through the books I’ve read this year to pick out the tropes I’ve enjoyed the most and that I am actively looking to read more of. And, actually, now that I’m looking at my short list, I’m psyched to see the books that have got me into these tropes right now all have new installments coming soon so that’s the best.

No matter how many times I read the following things, I’m always ready to read a little bit more of the same. I won’t keep you long on today’s Shelf Life because I’m sure you have a turkey to cook and stuff. If you’re deep-frying your turkey, please do it a safe distance away from any buildings.

Enemies to Anything But

Enemies don’t have to become lovers for me to be happy. They can become friends, mutually respectful allies or colleagues, family members of choice—or, yes, lovers. There’s a reason enemies-to-lovers is one of the most popular romantic tropes. I don’t know what the reason is, I just know there is one. People love this trope. 

I’m fine with it if the enemies end up as lovers by the end but I really just like anything wherein enemies, nemeses, or rivals do a 180-degree turnaround and end up on good terms by the end, even if the relationship doesn’t take a romantic turn.

I guess I like this trope because it forces a focus on character development, which is my favorite part of any book, and because at the end of the day I want everyone to get along as one big happy family. Even fairly dark books have some joy in them for me if someone’s relationship ends up mended.

Here are a few books with this trope that I’ve lately really liked:

• Enemies to friends and allies, as in Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

• Enemies to interspecies friends, as in High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson.

• Enemies to, uh, suspicious allies? as in Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian (also scratches that academia itch I’ll talk about in the next section).

• Enemy combatants to whatever it is they end up, as in This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

A further twist on this trope that I like is the whole Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed allies, fated-enemies to no-longer-enemies trope. For instance as in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series and Strange the Dreamer series, both by Laini Taylor, which both feature fated-enemies-to-families-of-choice; or the Three Dark Crowns series by Kendare Blake.

Obviously I’m waiting on tenterhooks for Alecto the Ninth, the conclusion to The Locked Tomb series; but in the mean time I am looking forward to reading Crier’s War by Nina Varela, Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, and Little Thieves by Margaret Owen.

Magical Academia

I ran a book club for over a year that read titles around a dark academia theme and it was really fun. I’m predisposed to enjoy anything that takes place in an academic setting; I don’t know why, because the thought of going back to any kind of educational setting myself at this point in my life is desperately unappealing. Anyway, I like school settings, university settings—students or faculty—laboratory settings, library settings, field research settings. If it’s academic-adjacent, I will probably like it.

The only thing that makes an academic setting better is when it’s a supernatural or magical academic setting of some kind. 

I’m not alone in loving this trope. Some of the most popular books of all time take place in an magical school setting (I know you know which ones I mean). However, those ones that everybody’s already read are just the tip of the magical school iceberg. For instance, magical universities are almost always more interesting than magical high schools (which are already more interesting than magical grade schools).

Some twists on this trope that I’ve really enjoyed include: 

• Magical-school-but-it’s-a-real-school (magical Yale), as in Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo; Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (science-fictional Oxford); or His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman (alternate-reality Oxford).

• Magical library setting, as in The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins.

• Magical school in a non-European/non-American setting, as in the Nsibidi Scripts series by Nnedi Okorafor, which begins with Akata Witch, or the Earthsea series by Ursula K Le Guin. (Not that it’s a true “twist” on the trope for the setting to be non-Anglo, but since so much of academic fiction is set in Europe or America, these are refreshing.)

For what it’s worth, this also extends to science fiction with an academic theme (for instance, The Echo Wife.) Another of my favorite examples is The Empress of Salt and Fortune, which follows a studious monk who travels around cataloging historical sites.

To get a little bit more of this trope, I’m looking forward to reading Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo (sequel to Ninth House), A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, and The Poppy War by RF Kuang, which everyone has already read but me.

Cozy Fiction

I’ll start by acknowledging that “cozy” means something different depending on which genre you’re in. Specifically, the word cozy has different, specific meanings in different genres:

• Cozy mystery—a mystery story in which sex and violence are implied instead of explicit, the setting is intimate, and the detective is an amateur.

• Cozy catastrophe—a disaster, apocalypse, or post-apocalyptic story in which the characters are not (significantly) negatively affected by the end of the world, and might even prefer it to the before-times.

• Cozy fantasy and cozy science fiction—light-hearted, upbeat, low-stakes speculative fiction.

Maybe it’s the colder weather or the earlier nightfall but I’m into cozy everything right now. Cozy sweaters (for me and my dog), cozy socks, cozy blankets, and cozy stories.

Cozy literature can mean a lot of different things, as I’ve described above, but overall I think of a cozy story as one that is relaxing and feels comforting to read. This feeling can come from a combination of factors in the setting (not too big or open), the cast of characters (familiar-seeing or friendly people), and the plot (stakes not too high, positive ending, redemption arcs for unsavory characters).

Sometimes a story is cozy in a contradictory way, like Gideon the Ninth, a book about space necromancers that constraints more skeletons and parts of skeletons than you can believe, but is in essence a locked-room mystery with cozy elements. Sometimes a story is just full-on cozy, like Legends and Lattes, about an retired fighter and her horde of lovable miscreant friends who open a coffee shop together. Some other cozy, comfy, easy-to-read books I have liked lately include:

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, about a rag-tag group of interstellar—construction workers I guess?

• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, a Japanese novel about a woman who finds meaning and order in life through working in a convenience store (exactly what it says on the tin).

• Provenance by Ann Leckie, a science fiction book about local politics and collecting antiques.

Winter is the perfect time to curl up with a stack of cozy books and I’ve got a bunch on my reading list, including Improbable Magic for Cynical Witches by Kate Scelsa, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, and All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

Okay that’s it, that’s all I’ve got. Go enjoy your Turkey and think about what tropes you’re thankful for and let me know what they are in the comments.

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