Using Tags to Find Books You Love – Part 2
Last fall, I wrote a blog post about using tags at AAR, which you can find under the Vox Populi tab on the main website. (Using Tags to Find Books You Love) Everything I said in that post remains true, such as the lack of any kind of systematic purpose to my tags and the caution against using them for academic/statistical/analytical purposes.
If I haven’t fixed any of that, why do an update? Because I’ve added books to existing tags and added new tags altogether, and I want to share them with you!
The tags are sorted here first by category and then by date. The first cluster of tags is the original set, but if you haven’t checked them in a while, check again! I’ve added a lot of books, including books AAR has reviewed since last fall. The second, following the “Added April 2020,” are tags that have been developed since the original blog post.
I hope you find something you love here! And please leave a comment with your thoughts.
- Have you used any tags to look for books, and if so, which ones?
- Did you find a great read using tags?
- What tags should we have?
- Have we forgotten any great books that match a tag – an age gap story, a character who’s a medium, a romance set in the early years of the United States?
Let us know!
~ Caroline Russomanno
Diversity and representation: AoC (author of color), PoC (protagonist is a person of color), male/male romance, f/f romance, LGBTQ+ romance, Tropical Romance Book Club, disability, older couple, older heroine, Muslim, Amish, LDS, Jewish, neuroatypical
- Added April 2020: Mental illness, blind, PTSD, chronic pain, deaf, HIV and AIDS
Content tags: Christmas romance, tearjerker, funny, dogs, horses, sports romance, hockey romance, addiction, tech romance, virgin hero, dystopian romance, working-class historical, film/tv making, environmentalism
- Added April 2020: Football, reality tv, suffrage, working-class contemp, baseball, adoption, baseball, Viking, rugby, motorcycle club romance, mafia, National Parks
Plot types: troubled relationship/troubled marriage, shipboard romance, road romance, Pygmalion, Jane Austen adaptation, fairy tale, Cinderella, epistolary, Beauty and the Beast, amnesia, Cyrano plot, shipwreck, gothic, unplanned pregnancy, mail-order bride (or groom),
- Added April 2020: Cabin romance, enemies to lovers, childhood friends, childhood sweethearts, age gap, second chance romance, friends to lovers, roommates, age gap, coworkers,
Career and character tags: archaeologist, spy, doctor, nurse, journalist, photographer, actor/actress, law enforcement, artist, Olympian heroine, Olympian, writer, cons and frauds, bakery, veterinarian, royalty, dancer, clergy, thief, thief heroine, designer, STEM heroine, sex worker, immigrant, bodyguard, paleontologist,
- Added April 2020: model, midwife, British navy, wedding planner, athlete, ice skaters, athlete heroine, pilot, firefighter, private investigator, genius, single dad, single mother, writer, teacher, librarian, barbarian,
Supernaturals: mermaid/merman, shifter romance, dragons, fairies, vampires, zombies, ghost, gods and goddesses,
Countries and Regions: Scotland, Canada, China, Australia, India, Caribbean, France, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Egypt
- Added April 2020: Russia, Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany
Cities: Chicago, New York City, Toronto, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Added April 2020: Las Vegas, Venice, Washington D.C., Vancouver, Detroit, Boston, New Orleans
States and Provinces: Texas, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Georgia, Alaska
- Added April 2020:
- Domestic Regions: Maritime Canada, Western Canada, Southern, Southwest, Appalachia,
- US States: North Carolina, New Mexico, Minnesota, Montana, Colorado, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Maine, Louisiana, Tennessee, Wyoming,
Time settings: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Arthurian, The Anarchy Matilda of vs. Stephen, Norman Conquest, 1500s, Tudor, Elizabethan, 1600s, English Civil War, Georgian, Colonial US romance, American Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, American Civil War, Reconstruction Era, Victorian, Gilded Age, 1900s, 1910s, World War I, 1920s, 1930s, World War II, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Modern Historical (any novel set after World War II but not written at the same time)
- Added April 2020: Dark Ages, 1100s, 1200s, 1300s, 1400s, Young United States era (Revolution to Civil War), Tang Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Australian Historical Romance, Renaissance Italy
AAR tags: DIKlassic, Top 100 Romance, novella, mini review
Is there a mistaken identity tag under plots/tropes? I realized that lots of the romances I enjoy have the couple first meeting while one is pretending to be someone/something else. I’m not sure how to best phrase it for a tag?
I don’t have a mistaken identity tag – that’s a good idea! The two closest things I have are:
– Cyrano plot. This is books which play off of the old Cyrano de Bergerac story, where the characters have been exchanging letters (or texts, nowadays) with a different person. IE she thinks she was writing to her husband, who died at sea, but it was really the captain. https://allaboutromance.com/review-tag/Cyrano-plot/
– Cons and frauds. Most of this category is about con artists or forgers etc, but when someone is deliberately impersonating another person, I have put them here. Ex – Penny Reid’s Motion, where one twin pretends to be the other to cover for her sister, who is in jail. https://allaboutromance.com/review-tag/cons-and-frauds/
I’m starting that tag here, so do check back! https://allaboutromance.com/review-tag/mistaken-identity
I was thinking of books like Cordina’s Crown Jewel, by Nora Roberts, or Devilish by Jo Beverly
Bonus that the hero of Cordina’s Crown Jewel is an archaeologist!
That one looks less like “mistaken identity” and more as “in disguise,” like SEP’s First Lady. Maybe not a necessary distinction?
Good point. Maybe it’s more complicated than I thought. It’s more that they are not specifically conning the hero like the Penny Reid twins. They are hiding or in disguise and have an encounter. Another one would be First Lady by SEP?
Also, the Jo Beverly above should be Something Wicked, not Devilish
Thanks for adding the tag!
Others:
Dating-ish by Penny Reid
Sex, Lies, and Online Dating by Rachel Gibson
Potent Pleasures by Eloisa James
In Mhairi McFarlane’s If I Never Met You, the hero pretends to be a playboy and player, but as we find out, he’s anything but. He has his reasons.
A favorite Serena Bell of mine is Yours to Keep, which could be tagged with immigrant (heroine) and physician (hero).
also, single dad
Thanks for the suggestion – we don’t actually have that particular Bell in our database.
Maybe add London to the cities list? Practically every Regency ever written has it at least mentioned in passing.
That’s the reason I didn’t do London. It would take me dozens of hours and at the end of the day, I suspect there aren’t a lot of readers who say “Gee, I’d like to read a book set in London but I can’t find any.” That’s not the ONLY purpose of tags, but it’s a big one.
I am thinking Edinburgh would be my UK city pick. So many Scottish romances are set in the Highlands or on vague ‘estates’ so it wouldn’t just replicate the “Scotland” tag, and Edinburgh is a really neat city.
Thanks for writing in with an idea, though!!!
These are indeed amazing, but is there a way this post can be tucked somewhere in an easily accessible location on AAR? Like, could it have its own page or tab under Vox Populi? Because this post is so succinct and I would like other people to be able to find it without having to do a bookmark. This is way easier to navigate than other pages on this subject.
It does have its own link under Vox Populi as does Caroline’s earlier post.
Thanks! For some reason, it wasn’t showing up on my computer earlier. Either that, or I was looking in the wrong subsection…
You ladies do a fantastic job with AAR and are wonderful to put up with scatterbrained dingbats like me. :)
These are great. Thank you for all the work that’s gone into creating them!
I ❤️ that you differentiate archaeologists from paleontologist.
Some people don’t?!?!?!?
Alas, way too many people don’t.
so, so different!