Jennifer Lee, a 24-year-old pastry chef from Connecticut, has read hundreds of books. She’s partial to romance novels with burning enemies-to-lovers arcs, especially those that lean on fantasy tropes: magical colleges, regal dragons, and slender, shirtless half-elves coiled in knotty muscle. She isn’t above the occasional steamy sex scene. She enjoys the work of Sarah J. Maas and her vast bibliography of kink-friendly fairies, just as she likes the Hunger Games–tinged entanglements of Lauren Roberts’ Powerless trilogy. But one thing Lee emphatically does not like is any book written from the perspective of a third-person narrator. I know this because on her TikTok page, where Lee posts about her literary proclivities to 15,000 followers, she has uploaded a video in which she scrunches up her face in disgust at the prospect of venturing away from her preferred syntactical architecture—the safe, ensconcing I’s and me’s of the first-person perspective. A single sentence is emblazoned across the bottom of the frame. It reads, plain and simple, “I HATE third person POV books.”

“It’s just off-putting to me. I feel like books are easier to understand when they’re written in first person,” said Lee, when I reached out to her for an interview. “Sometimes when I’m seeking out a new book, I want it to be as dumbed down as possible. These fantasy books often have all of this world-building. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to think. I just want to get lost in a story.”

To Lee, first-person point of view facilitates her needs, and she is far from the only person to feel this way. Studded across what is known as “BookTok”—the informal TikTok-based digital hub for the greater romance community—are innumerable riffs on the same conclusion. Dozens of book-focused content creators have posted videos of the smile dropping from their faces upon discovering that the novel they have just cracked open is written in the third person. The emotions expressed often amount to a feeling of betrayal, as if an author is snidely trolling them by purging their prose of copious first-person pronouns. (Some of the more dramatic TikToks with this complaint end with the offending fiction getting chucked into the garbage.) Elsewhere on BookTok, readers mourn their own self-diagnosed ineptitude; they’d like to savor the richness of third person, they say, but, for whatever reason, are unable to wrap their minds around the vantage point. “I feel like I don’t know how to read!” said one exasperated TikTokker, bemoaning the all-seeing narrator pervading two books she couldn’t quite grok. “I can’t do it. I tried. It does not work for me.”

Readers’ increasingly vocal partiality for first-person perspective over third person amounts to a profound shift in taste. Even while publishing is in dire straits elsewhere, the romance genre is in the midst of an unprecedented boom period. Sales in the genre have doubled since 2020, almost single-handedly rehabilitating an industry that had been ailing for decades. (Of America’s 10 best-selling books in 2024, six of them were romance.) But the readers buying those titles often demand that authors render them to their precise specifications: first person, with a fixed perspective, no omniscient lapses allowed. It’s a minor aesthetic preference, but it also might be transforming literary culture as a whole.

“I have had readers come up to me at book signings and say, to my face, ‘I won’t read this book of yours because it’s in third person,’ ” said K. Iwancio, a romance author who specializes in hunky baseball players. (Her best-performing book bears the joyfully gratuitous title Nailed at Home Plate.) Iwancio has written through the lens of a third-person narrator in the past, but after internalizing the realities of the market, she has rendered the most recent entries in her oeuvre in first person.

“I was like, Oh, I got to get with the times,” she said, laughing.

For decades, the quintessential romance novel was a gooey parlor drama with bursting corsets and lacy gowns written entirely in third-person omniscient. Within that framework, an author was liberated to accentuate the rippling deltoids of the novel’s rakish libertine, or to mire in the melodrama of a forbidden tryst, absent the limitations of personal subjectivity. Great sex requires a secret language shared by two or more souls; therefore, in fiction, the conventional thinking went, it’s most easily expressed by an all-knowing narrator.

It is hard to say when or why those norms changed, other than the fact that they most certainly have. Taylor Capizola, manager of the Los Angeles romance-centric bookstore The Ripped Bodice, told me that the ratio of first-person novels she stocks has “expanded greatly” in the four years she’s worked as a bookseller, to the point that they now dominate her shelves.

“It’s become the predominant perspective in the genre,” said Capizola. “We have readers come in and ask if we have entire sections dedicated to first person.” If fan fiction asserts the primacy of personal wish fulfillment, then you could argue that this new wave of romance novels serves—and reflects—the same purpose.

Capizola has her theories about why this is the case. Romance, as a category, is home to an infinite number of tropes, themes, and compulsions; it’s what these works are built on. There are novels featuring suave F1 drivers, forbidden private-school paramours, or swole, gentle minotaurs, and during this current renaissance—when more books of the genre are getting published than ever before—that has made the fantasies on display meticulously customizable. The guesswork of fiction has been removed from the process entirely. If a reader has determined that a story centering the illicit affair between a matriarchal baseball owner and her rugged bench coach will inflame their nervous system more than all other permutations, you best believe that there is at least one novel that fits the bill, and it’s easier than ever to find it thanks to unsubtle marketing, intracommunity recommendations, and search results that highlight those desired keywords.

“You have a breadth of all these characters, and you can kind of take your pick and go live in their world,” said Capizola. Romance consumers, she continued, “know exactly what they want to read, and they’ll stop at nothing to find the perfect book.”

Of course, that doesn’t fully explain why many romance readers prefer to experience those sagas exclusively in first person, from the gray matter of a seduced protagonist. But Capizola is quick to mention that a number of the most successful authors in romance got their start in fan fiction—as in the vast morass of derivative work spun off from established franchises and self-published and disseminated across the internet via platforms like Archive of Our Own, the promised land of fan fic. (Case in point: Before Ali Hazelwood sold 750,000 copies of her 2021 STEM-themed megahit rom-com The Love Hypothesis, she dreamed up steamy liaisons between Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker on AO3, as Archive of Our Own is called in shorthand.)

Fan fiction has always been underpinned by the fantasia of exploring a beloved fictional universe on one’s own terms, and unsurprisingly, a good amount of the work is written in first person, particularly within the subgenre known as self-insert, in which authors imagine themselves—or a thinly veiled surrogate—into the source material so they too may join the House of Gryffindor or glitter in the sunlight with Edward Cullen. These days in particular, a lot of DNA is shared between these two modes of publishing—traditional and fan-made—with the barriers that once divided them blurring to the point of becoming effectively indistinguishable, as publishing houses scoop up beloved fics, slap a new coat of “We changed all the copyrightable identifiers; you can’t sue us” paint on them, and sell the remixed results for $20.99 apiece. If fan fiction asserts the primacy of personal wish fulfillment, then you could argue that this new wave of romance novels serves—and reflects—the same purpose.

“Fan fiction was a catalyst for what’s happening in the literary industry,” said Iwancio. “Authors used what they learned in fan fiction in their romance novels. People who may have never read a fan fic before might still be like, Oh, gosh, I really love this.”

Lee, the TikTokker, put it this way: “When I read first person, I’m almost like, That’s me. That’s me in the book.”

Here is where I must admit that throughout my years as a reader, I have never given much thought to authorial perspective. I have read first person, I have read third person, and the differences between the two vantage points are basically immaterial to me. I’ve never walked into a bookstore in search of a novel that fits a checklist of defined attributes or aesthetic flourishes. Those are creative decisions I prefer to let the author make, which may set me apart from the typical romance enthusiast. That’s basically fine with me. I think people should be allowed to read what they want to read, and they retain the right to besmirch what they don’t on TikTok or elsewhere. But there are at least some voices in the romance community who believe that this growing compulsion—to dictate the punctilious traits a novel must possess, down to the basic language schematics—is eroding what makes the genre special.

Jennifer Prokop, co-host of the scholarly romance-centric podcast Fated Mates, told me a story to make this point. The most popular romance novel on the market right now is Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry, which was recently adapted into a series that went gangbusters after HBO Max acquired streaming rights. Heated Rivalry follows two professional hockey players navigating their smoldering queer love affair, as well as the macho norms in the realm of professional sports. Heated Rivalry is also the rare romance novel to be written in third person, and Prokop believes that the presence of a narrator enriches the text. “It allows us to get a distance from the characters, and that builds empathy,” she said. “I’m a married white woman. Watching someone deal with homophobia, seeing the effect that it has, helps me understand the impact it has on him.” What do romance novels ultimately want—and aspire—to be?

Prokop maintains that while those complex themes can be explored in first person, off-loading narrative tension into an internal monologue has a way of flattening a romance narrative, hemming in the scope. “It limits the kind of stories you can tell,” she continued. “It’s a lot harder to keep a secret from a reader.” Prokop is especially weary of the clear-eyed mindfulness possessed by the wayward lovers that tends to populate first-person novels—how their acuities remain crystalline and sharp, as if touched by the divine, across the pages, in a way that requires almost too much suspension of disbelief, even for a genre that traffics in that suspension.

“All of the characters are nice. There’s a trope called the ‘Cinnamon Roll hero,’ and he’s just a good guy who wants the protagonist,” said Prokop. “The best first person has a strong narrative voice. The character is super distinctive. But if the books all sound the same—which a lot of them do—then that’s not great for the genre.”

Ultimately, this circles back to the question at the heart of the first-person debate: What do romance novels ultimately want—and aspire—to be? Toward the end of our conversation, Lee told me that she read an eyepopping 50 books in 2024. That averages out to about a book a week, and it completely lapped what I had accomplished in the same time frame. I think that’s because we approach reading for different reasons. My friends and I are what is known as a “Difficult Book Club.” We conquered The Brothers Karamazov last summer, and I’m currently adrift in The Recognitions, a 1,000-page tome by postmodern legend William Gaddis that requires a Ph.D.-level appreciation of Flemish painting to fully unlock its nuances. When I sit down with such books, the experience is usually mustardy, adversarial, and homework-like, driven by some deep, subliminal conviction that enlightenment is the prime directive of fiction.

Lee, naturally, has the complete opposite approach. “I’m not reading difficult literature. It’s just not my relationship to reading,” she said. “Would I love to be an intellectual? Sure. But do I feel enticed to take on books like that? No, not really. I read to escape, not to learn.”

I found Lee’s candor to be strangely noble. I thought about the decades of withering angst about declining literacy rates—the ominous reports that college students can’t make it through a pamphlet, much less a paperback, due to the mind-boiling assault of the algorithms ruling social media. How, then, are we supposed to wring our hands over the fact that in 2026 some people are reading more than they had in the past—even if what they’re reading tends to conform to their preferred constellation of tropes, contrivances, and, yes, perspectives? After all, consuming these books changed Lee’s life. She never read much in school. She assumed that books were for brainier people, beholden to an academic milieu that had permanently sidelined her. Well, now she loves to read. Who am I to tell her that she uncovered that love improperly?

And for what it’s worth, Lee actually has started to dabble in third-person books. She was convinced by Sarah J. Maas and her high-fantasy series Throne of Glass, which—unlike her more popular romances, such as A Court of Thorns and Roses—is written in third person. Lee purchased the first Throne of Glass book without knowing about this different perspective and, upon making the horrible discovery, condemned it to her shelf for months. Eventually, though, she decided to give it a shot. She worked her way through the prose in fits and starts, grappling with the unfamiliar narrative omniscience until, finally, something clicked. “I got over it,” said Lee. “There was an initial shock that it wasn’t in first person, but eventually your brain adjusts.”

At long last, thanks to the gateway books that paved the way, the full vibrancy of literature has cracked open for her. She can read anything now. Ulysses, Middlemarch, The Power Broker—it’s all on the table. Or, as is her prerogative, Lee may very well stick to what she knows best: cute boys and cute girls falling in love over and over again, through God’s eyes or her own.