When Rowan Roth, aspiring romance author and heroine of Rachel Lynn Solomon’s YA romance Today Tonight Tomorrow, laments that her passion will never be more than someone else’s guilty pleasure I felt seen. 

And that’s not the only thing this book made me feel.

Rowan teaming up with her arch nemesis to solve an end of high school scavenger hunt is as much a love song to Seattle and adolescence in general than it is about the actual couple. Watching Rowan come to terms with the fact that she often gets so wrapped up in her dreams she misses the opportunities that are right in front of her was a sucker punch. Because who hasn’t done that?

When Rowans classmates express antisemitism, when Rowan herself discovers she has made wrong assumptions based on appearances, the reader is horrified right along with her. When her friendships start to fray at the edges, as all friendships do in times of change, I couldn’t help but mourn my own lost friendships that dwindled due to intention and distance. Yet I never despaired.  because I knew this was a romance novel. And in romance novels I am guaranteed a happily ever after. In fact the cover art basically gives away the entire end game. 

Which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel the feelings and go through the emotional roller coaster knowing there was joy waiting for me at the end. I needed that certainty in order to free myself to experience all the heartache and life lessons that must come before it. 

The moral here goes beyond “there’s nothing wrong with enjoying romance”. The world has been a pretty messed up, dumpster fire, of a place lately. If I can find something that delves into serious subjects but still gives me a happily ever after that makes my heart sing, you best believe I’m not letting anyone treat it as anything less than what it is: precious and rare. 

Today Tonight Tomorrow is a book I would give to writers of any genre looking to learn about craft. We know what the heroine wants, we sob as she is stripped of each and everything she holds dear and then we watch her grow and change and work for that happy ending. We have a character arc that is strong and believable, stakes that only grow as the book progresses, tension that has you reading into the middle of the night and pacing that I would give my left kidney for. 

This is true art. And if you fail to acknowledge that because it is “genre” and contains kissing scenes or is female focused then you don’t deserve the gift that is this book.  

I probably won’t ever write anything this good, I’d settle for even a tenth as good, but I’ll try to be less afraid of admitting the category I write in. Because maybe if we let Sci-Fi have more kissy scenes and be unabashedly female centric for a change it won’t be dead anymore. If we let fantasy feature more than the same white, cishet, European aesthetic we might realize only a very small portion of it is “oversaturated”. If I own this, like Rowan and her romance novel, they maybe I too can get my happily ever after. 

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