This is a paid book review for the BlogHer Book Club, but the opinions expressed are mine.

Reflected in You, by Sylvia Day, is currently number one on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.  The reasons for this are a mystery to me, but then so is the popularity of Fifty Shades of Gray, and by many accounts the Crossfire Novels, of which Reflected in You is book two, is a Gray clone.

I thought it would be fun to review this book to see what all the fuss around erotic romance is about.  I do have a bit of experience with the genre, having endured a brief career editing it a few years ago, but I thought things might have changed since then. (Read a post I wrote about writing erotic romance here.)

As in, I thought maybe an actual storyline might have become important.

But, no.  Not so much.

Because in erotic romance, the story is all about the romance.  So once the two lovers have mated, there needs to be ways to keep them apart.  And therein lies one problem I have with this genre, which is that keeping two people who are attracted to each other apart can come across as contrived, to put it mildly. Very mildly.

The other problem is that the main story line is the romance.  All the rest of it–minor career issues, a roommate with love problems of his own–seems thrown in for seasoning, nothing more.  And honestly, watching two people histrionically come together and break up over and over again is not my exact thing.

But I am no doubt in the minority here, because erotic romance is a hot, hot genre.  If you're interested in writing it, I think the Crossfire series is probably an excellent introduction to the field.