Heroes and Heroines in Romance Novels with Unusual Occupations
I’ve been developing our “unusual occupations” tag, and I need your help!
I stated by visiting our old Special Title listings for Unusual Professions. Let me tell you, some of those jobs are a LOT more popular than we evidently thought. We have characters on that list who are, for example, archaeologists, paleontologists, and botanists. Well, it turns out that these professions are actually so common in romance that they can fill out their own tags! “Prostitute,” “male escort,” and “gigolo” are currently captured by our sex worker tag. Even tattoo artists and coffee shop owners are romance novel leads more frequently than you think!
The list did turn up a few awesome and original careers, such as the rival fireworks manufacturers of the book Diamond Rain by Constance Laux, Karen Harper’s tree house designer in The Stone Forest, and the sea urchin diver of Christine Feehan’s Water Bound. Still, to fill out the tag, I had to go further.
Our Special Titles Listing was last updated in 2013, making it nearly a decade old. Many recent releases have protagonists
worth adding. Kate Clayborn’s Love Lettering has a calligrapher heroine. The heroine of Courtney Milan’s The Devil Comes Courting develops a system for encoding Chinese characters for the telegraph. Tessa Bailey, in Fix Her Up, gives us a clown heroine. In The Love Con by Seressia Glass, the heroine makes cosplay costumes and accessories. And of course, who can forget one hero from Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, who works at a dung beetle charity?
I also decided to also include professions which aren’t unusual in the real world, but which don’t occur in romance novels very often. Working-class jobs are always underrepresented in romance, so I tagged New Life by Bonnie Dee, which has a janitor hero (alongside the more common lawyer heroine) and the trucker hero of One Christmas Knight by Kathleen Creighton. It is also unusual to see professions associated with death, so the undertaker hero of Pamela Morsi’s Wild Oats and the taxidermist of K.J. Charles’s An Unseen Attraction joined the list.
But as it stands, this is a list where I need some help! Readers, what occupations are “unusual” to you – at least, in the world of romance novels? Can you suggest books which have those characters in them?
~ Caroline Russomanno
I am searching for a book (was it Nora Roberts?) where the Hero and Heroine were both demolition experts and they were imploding buildings.
The only book I can think of that had a demolitions expert is Victoria Dahl’s Lead Me On, a book with one of my all time favorite heroes.
Oooh, a good unusual one!
Late to answer this, but the book you may be looking for could be Mary Jo Putney’s The Burning Point (previously called Stirring the Embers). The heroine’s ex-husband inherits her father’s demolition business while she inherits money.
I have fond memories of Lisa Cach’s George & the Virgin, which is about a pro wrestler who travels back in time to aid the quest of a barbarian princess.
That was a fun book.
Added! It’s now tagged Unusual Occupation (for him) and barbarian (for her) which is great because I don’t have enough lady barbarians!
Looking over the old special titles list, I was surprised not to see Laura Kinsale’s Midsummer Moon. The heroine is very unusual. She’s an inventor — sort of like an absent-minded professor type — that the hero wants to use to invent devices to defeat Napoleon.
Leaping to more current releases, in Very Sincerely Yours by Kerry Winfrey, the heroine works in a toy store, and the hero is a popular host of a children’s TV show. Think Mr. Rogers.
In Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren, the heroine is a freelance statistician, her friend is a romance writer, and the hero is the chief scientist at a matchmaking company based on your DNA.
The hero of Judith Ivory’s The Proposition is a rat catcher! https://allaboutromance.com/book-review/the-proposition-judith-ivory/
In addition to An Unsuitable Heir that Caz mentioned, KJ Charles’s Sins of the Cities trilogy also features a taxidermist in book 1 and the spiritualist Justin Lazarus in book 2. The Society of Gentlemen trilogy also has a couple of occupations that are not often seen in the genre: Silas Mason, radical bookshop owner and writer of seditious pamphlets (A Seditious Affair, and we all know Silas is THE BEST) and David Cyprian, valet and fixer of all things in A Gentleman’s Position. Also, while PIs and even female PIs aren’t that unusual, there’s only one Susan Lazarus, and she is awesome.
There are plenty of romance characters who are authors, but I feel like having the male lead be a romance novelist (Claire Kingsley’s Book Boyfriend) is a fun twist on that.
Erin Walsh in Kate Canterbary’s The Spire is a geologist working on a second PhD in something climate-related. Magnolia Santillian, who makes occasional appearances in Canterbary’s Walsh series and is the main character in The Magnolia Chronicles, is a landscape architect who specializes in sustainable design and roof gardens (and is thus referred to as Roof Garden Girl in the Walsh books). I haven’t read her book yet.
I’m not surprised that Rachel Grant is responsible for some of the tagged archeologists. Dabney mentioned cartographers, and while most of Grant’s heroines are in archeology or adjacent professions, Ivy from Poison Evidence works on advanced mapping technology – developed for archeological purposes, but with other applications. That one might not work as a standalone, though.
Justin Lazarus is currently tagged as “medium” and “Cons and frauds.”
Silas Mason is “activist” and “publisher”
We do have a geologist tag!
Mitch in Con Riley’s His Haven is a nurse who specialises in working with people with brain injuries. Tom, in the previous book, His Compass, captains a charter yacht. Pen, in KJ Charles’ An Unsuitable Heir, is a trapeze artist. The lead characters in Fearne Hill’s Brushed With Love and Dipped in Sunshine are both surfers (as in, they run a surfing business giving lessons).
In Eden Winter’s Diversion series, the leads work for an agency that tracks drug dealers, but what’s unusual – and that I’ve never read before (or since) – is that “the division of diversion prevention and control” they work for is about preventingthe misuse and illegal sales of legal and prescription drugs.
Oh, surfer! That’s neat!
Jill Sorenson was always good with occupations that were on the unusual side for a woman. She had a zookeeper heroine in WILD; a conservation biologist in STRANDED WITH HER EX; wildlife biologist in SET THE DARK ON FIRE; park ranger in FREE FALL; not to mention a stripper in SHOOTING DIRTY and a waitress in a Hooters-like restaurant in THE EDGE OF NIGHT—both heroines are treated as hard-working women worthy of respect, despite the sexism found in those jobs. CRASH INTO ME has an FBI Agent heroine (not an unusual occupation in romance), but the hero is a professional surfer.
We have a tag for FBI! and what, another surfer?!
Jewelry often features in romance, and is often lovingly described, but the only jeweler I can think of is the goldsmith, Luciano, in Stella Riley’s The Black Madonna.
I love that book!
I can think of jewel/gem TRADERS (in Elizabeth Lowell’s series Amber Beach/Pearl Cove/Ruby Bayou/one other I forget) but I don’t think I can recall jewelry MAKERS. That’s a good one!
In N.R. Walker’s IMAGO and IMAGINE, the protagonist is a lepidopterist–an expert on butterflies. And in GALAXIES and OCEANS that Caz recently reviewed, there is a modern day lighthouse keeper. Actually, N.R. Walker has quite a few unusual or uncommon occupations in her books. DEAR MILTON JAMES is set in the “dead letter” branch of the post office. IN TAXES AND TARDIS one MC is an electrician and one an accountant.
In Briar Prescott’s THE HAPPY LIST, one of the characters makes handmade custom furniture.
In MILO by Lily Morton, the titular character is an art restorer.
Do we have cartographer? I’m in the midst of Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha-verse and lead in three of the books is a cartographer as is Phin in Meredith Duran’s books.
Trish Doller had Keane (**sigh!**), a professional yacht crewman, in Float Plan and Mason, a professional brewer in Suite Spot.
I can think of several brewers in romance novels – Victoria Dahl had that series about the siblings with the brewery, Sarina Bowen had Griffin from Bittersweet (cider) and Alec from Speakeasy (beer), and if I’m not mistaken Mia Hopkins has written brewers too. I imagine there are others.
More generally, I have to admit that I found the old list format more useful than the tags. They were easier to browse and it was often indicated why the book was appropriate for that list. Is there any way to at least present the books given each tag in list form?
Sadly, the work that would require is beyond us.
The best way to do that is to go to the new Power Search and then type in or select the tag you are interested in. I actually really love those results because it lets me see the grade and any other tags for the book at the same time.
Being able to quickly click through to reviews and comments from search results is the answer to my criticism of the old list formats: just because a book has a particular trope or character type, doesn’t mean it was necessarily worth reading. I love the new search feature, including tags. But to June’s point – is there an existing tag for each of the old special list categories?
That’s a really good question! The answer is that MANY of them do (it was one of my starting points for coming up with tags) but not all? This is a big enough question that I could probably do a blog post on it alone. And I will!
In the meantime, though, the most recent list of tags (which is NOT comprehensive but is still the most recent) is here: https://allaboutromance.com/using-tags-to-find-books-you-love-update/
This is such an interesting topic! In one of my favourite books, Making Up, Lucy Parker pairs a trapeze artist with a make-up artist and makes their professions central to the story.
Trapeze is definitely unusual! Thanks for the title!