Reminders of Him

Although romances have been an element of the publishing industry for generations, perennial fixtures on best-seller lists, the genre has enjoyed a significant increase in popularity among so-called post-Millennials, or Generation Z. For the generation born after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and raised within the reach of the Internet, social media, and video games, the genre offers a comforting sanctuary from a real-time world that can be both unsettling and complicated. The genre offers what this generation so seldom sees in the daily news cycles that define their era. In a culture defined by a resurgence in racism, the heated rhetoric of partisanship in politics, the exponential increase in gun violence, the global lockdown against the coronavirus, climate change, as well as the endless economic cycles of inflation and recession, Generation Z finds in the romance genre a quieting world where characters find their way to emotionally satisfying relationships. What the generation before, Millennials, found in novels of alternate worlds with vampires, werewolves, and wizards, post-Millennials find in stories of wounded hearts ready to take a chance again on love.

In that resurgence of interest in romance novels, few writers have found the acceptance that Hoover has. Any time since her debut in 2011, she has had multiple titles on weekly best-seller lists, most notably The New York Times and Amazon. She embraces the cultural popularity among 20-something readers, using the reach of social media, most notably TikTok, to become part of her readers’ lives. In turn, they are not so much readers as they are fans. To this generation, she is CoHo. Her prose is accessible, and her characters are recognizable, contemporary, and complicated rather than the two-dimensional caricatures often associated with the romance genre. In this generational appeal, Hoover has established herself as a leading figure in the reading habits of the post-Millennial culture widely dismissed for electing not to read recreationally. Generation Z has found Hoover’s plots engaging, her characters intriguing, and her happy endings irresistible.