RA Tool of the Week: Teen Romance by Trope

One of my favorite parts of my job is creating and sharing RA (Reader’s Advisory tools). I sometimes think in a different lifetime, I might have enjoyed being a graphic designer. But in truth, not all of my favorite designs come from within, as I am often inspired by outside sources. I follow a page called Book Buffet and they share a lot of great graphics, including the graphic that inspired my own RA tool below. I know that the arrows with information visual is popular. And although I am not often a lovey-dovey person, I have always found myself enamored by candy hearts with messages. So I was definitely trying to combine the arrows to trope and candy message heart ideas together.

And while I’m making confessions, I should also come clean and tell you that romance is not necessarily my genre. So it was a lot of hard work for me to research and find these tropes to make this RA tool. I started by taking a deep diver and making a list for myself of some of the most common and most popular romance tropes:
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- Friends to Lovers
- Enemies/Rivals to Lovers
- Forbidden Love
- Long Distance Romance
- Fake-Dating
- Slow Born
- Meet-Cute
- Next Door Romance
- Second Chance Romance
- Love Triangle
- Forced Proximity
- Hidden Identity
- Soulmates
- Star-crossed Lovers
- Dating a Celebrity
- Grumpy/Sunshine Romance
- Dating on Vacation
- Will They/Won’t They
I then worked on trying to find first a database of YA romances that just flat out told me the tropes. And while I didn’t find this tool that I envisioned in my head, I did find a lot of websites that did help:
Underlined: Get a YA Book Rec Based on Your Favorite Trope
Epic Reads: Our Favorite YA Romance Tropes, Explained
I even reached out to one of my go-to RA peeps for help: Jennifer Rummel at the YA Book Nerd. We started talking about creating a crowd-sourced, easy to share and maintain database of YA romance tropes like the one I initially wanted to make this RA tool easier for me.
So using all of those resources, I am sharing this RA tool with you in a template form so you can adapt it for yourself. Happy reading everyone! And maybe you’ll learn something new about YA romance, I did!
Filed under: #RA, Reader's Advisory, Year of RA

About Karen Jensen, MLS
Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 32 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).
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In your post you mention you follow a page called Book Buffet. Are you able to share the link/handle/platform?
Hi, I follow it on Facebook. You should be able to find it just by searching Book Buffet on Facebook.
NoveList includes a number of tropes in the themes you can search and filter by. Our school district doesn’t have it, but I use it through my public library and it’s a hugely helpful database for RA.