Love Redesigned

Love Redesigned belongs to the genre of contemporary romance. Although Love Redesigned deals with serious subjects, such as death, grief, and infertility, it is underpinned by lighthearted and comedic moments. Contemporary romances are categorized by their happy endings and familiar plotlines, but often focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to achieve their happy ending. As in Love Redesigned, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed; these narratives often show protagonists helping each other overcome barriers to not only becoming romantically involved, but also to being better, happier people.

Just as contemporary romance novels rely on familiar narrative structures, they also often feature tropes, archetypes, and common situations, such as friends-to-lovers relationships, marriage-of-convenience plotlines, and quaint settings. Love Redesigned uses many conventions typical of contemporary romance novels, including the enemies-to-lovers trope, in which two rivals must navigate their drastically changing feelings while considering their history and their futures.

Forced proximity is another common romance convention used in Love Redesigned: Continually being in the same settings and situations forces Dahlia and Julian to confront the feelings that they have been trying to avoid. Small-town settings are also not uncommon in contemporary romance novels and can be found in works such as Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, Ashley Poston’s The Dead Romantics, Sara Adams’s When in Rome, and Tessa Bailey’s It Happened One Summer. Lauren Asher uses the small-town setting of Lake Wisteria to show the strengths and struggles of tight-knit communities, highlighting the protagonists’ efforts to reconcile their present with their past.

Love Redesigned and some of Asher’s other novels also fall into the popular subgenre of the “workplace romance.” Workplace romances are based on the characters having some form of professional relationship in addition to their romantic one. Though workplace romances vary widely in their plots, settings, and time periods, books in this subgenre are defined by the tension between characters’ romantic interests and their professional duties. In novels like Elena Armas’s The Spanish Love Deception, Ali Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically, and Rachel Lynn Solomon’s The Ex Talk, characters’ attraction to one another often causes issues in their workplace, as Dahlia’s relationship with Julian causes problems with her move to California. As a whole, the subgenre of workplace romance heightens the stakes of romantic conflict, as characters in these novels have more at stake than their hearts alone.

Additionally, Love Redesigned can be considered a “second chance” romance, as Dahlia and Julian nearly had a relationship before the action of the novel. This category of romance, which includes novels from Jane Austen’s Persuasion to Emily Henry’s Happy Place, focuses on the changing dynamics of a relationship as characters must confront their past entanglement. Though Julian and Dahlia were never officially in a relationship before the novel begins, their brief flirtation and heartbreak in college redefined their friendship. On top of their contentious past, their romantic involvement influences their relationship in Love Redesigned more than any other outside influence.