Lovelight Farms

Lovelight Farms falls into the genre of contemporary romance. Although the novel deals with serious subjects, such as complicated family dynamics, grief, and financial insecurity, 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 Lovelight Farms, 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 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 enemies-to-lovers relationships, marriage-of-convenience plotlines, and quaint settings. Lovelight Farms uses many conventions typical of contemporary romance novels, including the friends-to-lovers trope, in which two friends must navigate the complexity of their feelings while considering their history and their futures. Fake dating is another common romance convention used in Lovelight Farms; the act of pretending to have feelings for one another forces Stella and Luka to confront the feelings that they had been hiding from each other to not ruin their friendship. 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. Borison uses the small-town setting of Inglewild, Maryland, to show the strengths and struggles of tight-knit communities and highlight the protagonist’s efforts to feel like she is part of a family.

The Lovelight novels are also workplace romances, meaning that they have a professional setting or the characters have 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, such as Stella’s use of a romantic relationship to save her farm. 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.

Lovelight Farms and Borison’s other novels in the Lovelight series also fall into the subgenre of the holiday romance. Though Lovelight Farms is not set during Christmas, the setting of the Christmas tree farm and Stella’s fascination with the holiday make the novel a holiday romance. Holiday romances such as Alison Cochrun’s Kiss Her Once For Me, Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone’s A Merry Little Meet Cute, and Sarah Hogle’s Just Like Magic often focus on themes of love, family, friendship, redemption, and doing what is right. As with other novels in the genre, in Lovelight Farms, Stella struggles to feel like she’s part of a family due to struggles with her biological family. In time, she discovers the true value of her friends and a community that is willing to support her, yet she also learns a lesson about honesty and being merciful toward others.