Smutty Fantasy Novels Are Taking Over Mom Book Clubs

Smutty fantasy — or, “romantasy” — novels, like Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, are capturing imaginations and book clubs. / Illustration by Tara Jacoby

I’ve messed up. I’d always wanted to be part of a book club, but now I’d finally been asked to be in one and I’ve blown it.

I had been invited to the club by Cynthia, a woman I’m loosely connected to through the sprawling Venn diagram that is Mom Friends, which means we overlap at kids’ birthday parties, the community pool and various get-togethers with mutual friends. We were at one such friend’s house on New Year’s Eve, and that’s when I first found out about this book club.

“You have to come,” Cynthia said as a chorus of kids with noisemakers stomped by in glittery 2024 glasses. “She’s in it, and so are they!” She pointed to a few women standing around her kitchen island. Before long, they all stood before me talking enthusiastically about these books they were reading, these books they were obsessed with, these books they stayed up all night to read, leaving husbands and children and pets to fend for themselves: a high fantasy romance series featuring a lot of faeries. And a lot of sex.

“So, like … fairy porn?” I asked. (In my world, it’s spelled fairy, as in Tooth or Tinker Bell. In theirs, it’s more dramatic — faerie or fae, a broader category of mythical beings.)

“Sort of?” Cynthia said, and then the women launched into a passionate defense of the books’ deeper meanings, their overarching themes of love, loyalty, grief, sacrifice, power. And sure, sex.

Cynthia and I left the party, fervently promising to get in touch about book club, and then of course we promptly forgot. In fact, I’d forgotten all about fairy porn until I discovered months later that yet another group of moms I know is fanatical about these books; they’re all in book clubs, too.

“Sarah J. Maas is technically my son’s godmother,” my friend Nikita tells me, referring to the fairy porn writer and ultimate queen of fantasy romance. She’d jokingly asked Maas to take on the role at a book signing and the author had gamely agreed, although Nikita admits that it’s really just in spirit because Maas is Jewish. Regardless, Nikita named her son after a faerie prince in the books.

What is it about these books that is so addictive? Is everyone I know secretly reading fairy porn? Are these book clubs some suburban secret society where all the cool moms I know become better, more enlightened versions of themselves? Do I need to be in them?

And so I reached out to Cynthia one evening in April about book club. She got back to me a little after 9 p.m. and welcomed me to the next meeting. Hooray! I was in! There would be drinks and snacks, she explained, and they’d be discussing the second and third books of the latest Maas trilogy. The only problem? The meeting was tomorrow, meaning I had less than 24 hours to read three books.

It was with wild ambition and mild panic that I downloaded the first book, House of Earth and Blood, on my Kindle, determined to finish it before morning. But the table of contents listed 97 chapters — 97! — and the book began with a map of a mythical world and a detailed breakdown of four different “spirit houses.” This was an entire universe to understand, like The Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones. When a talking wolf with a purple manicure appeared on the first page, I all but gave up. A few pages later, I fell asleep.

I woke the following morning with renewed resolve to finish the book, but, well, I didn’t, and before I knew it, I was knocking on Cynthia’s front door having read exactly 16 pages, which is a terrible showing for someone trying to earn a spot in book club. It’s hard to judge the length of a book on a Kindle and so I didn’t realize what I’d signed up for until I saw Cynthia’s hardcover copy, a brick of a book about four inches thick and more than 800 pages long. The other two books in the series are also as big as doorstops — ­each also easily clears 800 pages — ­and so at my first-ever book club meeting, I was more than 2,400 pages behind.

I’d done a cursory overview of the series in panicked last-minute preparation, reading reviews and plot summaries and combing through online discussion groups about all of Maas’s work. (There are 16 books in total, divided among three series. Her first book was released in 2012; her latest this past January.) And there’s a lot of discussion. A Reddit group dedicated to Maas’s cult-followed five-book series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (fans call it ACOTAR), has 162,000 followers. The ACOTAR hashtag has more than eight billion views on the TikTok subcommunity BookTok. There are countless YouTube videos dedicated to summarizing and dissecting the books. I started watching one about Crescent City, the series that’s being covered in book club, before I realized the video was more than two hours long.

Jesus, I thought. How much is there to say?

Turns out, quite a lot.

In the case of Cynthia’s book club, there is enough to fill three hours. There are seven of us here, most curled up on a giant leather sectional in Cynthia’s basement. Her husband made us a round of cocktails before heading upstairs; he’s not in book club. Our friend who hosted the New Year’s Eve party isn’t part of book club either, but her husband is here. He brought homemade cookies.

Things begin with a ceremonial first lighting of a candle from a romance bookshop in Brooklyn. The candle is supposed to capture the essence of Rhysand, a hot faerie lord from ACOTAR, but instead it just smells like cologne.

“Rhysand is supposed to smell like citrus and sea,” Cynthia explains. The candle, then, is a bit of a disappointment.

So, too, are the books.

“I was disappointed by the lack of smut,” says a woman I’ll call Kim. She’s a college professor who prefers I not use her real name, for fairly obvious reasons. In fact, everyone but Cynthia requests I use pseudo­nyms. One’s a semi-public figure, and others — including Cynthia — are in big corporate jobs. Kim is wearing an ACOTAR t-shirt that Cynthia got her for her birthday. (Apparently there’s a pretty big market for fairy porn merch.)

“It’s like you’re watching a movie that’s setting up bad spinoff TV shows,” says my friend’s husband, “John.” He floats the idea that Sarah J. Maas may now be simply churning out copious source material so that her books can be adapted for the screen.

He might have a point: In 2021, Hulu was set to develop ACOTAR for TV, though recent reports have claimed the project is currently stalled. Still, it seems a foregone conclusion that Maas’s mystical multiverse will migrate to the screen in some fashion, just like the books-turned-pop-culture-phenomenons that came before, like Twilight, The Hunger Games, 50 Shades of Grey and, of course, Harry Potter. (It’s not crazy to compare Maas and J.K. Rowling. Both share a publisher, Bloomsbury, whose CEO told the Times of London last year that the “signs of lift-off” between the two authors and their mega-hits are similar.)

I consider this comparison as I sit in Cynthia’s basement, mostly because there’s a framed Harry Potter art print hanging over the couch. But I can’t think about it too much, because Cynthia is calling the group to attention. She launches into a rapid-fire summary of the books, consulting detailed notes that she’s written in a pretty spiral-bound notebook. I have a vision of how she must have been in school — a serious straight-A student who ran study groups and took the lead in group projects. I probably would have copied her math homework.

“This is just a recap of the highlights so we can remember and answer the questions,” Cynthia says. There’s some confusion from the right side of the sectional, mostly from a brunette named “Jen.” Questions? What questions?

Cynthia slides to the edge of her seat and leans forward. “Jen, I know this is your first book club, but this is a book club and we’re going to answer questions about the book.” For a second I think she’s serious and I wonder what sort of fairy porn boot camp I’ve wandered into, but then everyone starts laughing.

They begin their discussion, flinging around terms like dragon shifter, fire sprites and viper queens. There’s talk of portals and spirit-eating. There’s talk of literary sloppiness — gaping plot holes, underdeveloped characters, untied threads. And yes, there’s talk of that disappointing lack of smut.

Jen chalks this up to the fact that some of the characters now have kids, including Rhysand, the hot faerie lord whose sexy, citrusy scent we are not smelling.

“I think kids make things un-hot. And I’m all about the hotness,” she says. Jen has three young children, so she knows all about the un-hotness of parenthood. (She’s actually the first to leave. “Sorry, guys,” she says around 10:15 p.m. “I have to go home in a little bit and pump.”) Everyone agrees with her assessment, but they’re quick to note that what draws them to these books goes beyond pure smut.

“It’s not like porn. I think there’s this misconception that it’s all about sex, but it’s really about the build-up and the character development and the slow burn,” says Cynthia. “It makes me feel young again. It reminds me of that feeling of first falling in love and the butterflies.” She chuckles: “You know, as opposed to the staleness of marriage.” Everyone breaks into loud peals of laughter. (“For the record, I did not laugh at that,” says my friend’s husband.)

She’s joking, of course; we all are. But there is a particular monotony to marriage. Everything that makes it wonderful — the safety and comfort of knowing that someone will always be there to have your back and hold your heart — also makes it a little bit boring.

“These books are a safe way to experience things that scare you or that you wouldn’t want to experience in real life. It lets you expand upon what you’re fantasizing about,” explains Dena Heilik, the fiction department head at the Central branch of Philly’s Free Library. She’s not only referring to Maas’s work, but the whole subgenre of “romantasy,” which fuses fantasy with romance. “It’s escapism. And there’s something really appealing about being able to escape your everyday reality.”

It seems plenty of people are looking to escape. At Heilik’s library, there are 91 people on a waitlist to borrow the first book in the ACOTAR series, and the library has 33 copies. (For context, the library typically buys about two or three copies of less-popular books, if it even buys them at all.) Cynthia remembers a months-long waitlist at our Yardley library when the book first came out.

But don’t blame this book-borrowing bottleneck on slow readers: “People neglect the rest of their lives to finish these books,” says Cynthia. She jerks her head toward Kim. “She stopped feeding her children.” I think Cynthia’s joking, but Kim nods.

“They complained to my husband,” Kim says. “My five-year-old was like, ‘I’m really hungry,’ and he said I didn’t give him lunch. I don’t know. I had to read.”

I find when things are really good in the world, you want dystopia. When the real world is hard, you lean into fantasy.” — Dena Heilik, Free Library of Philadelphia

It’s easy to regard book clubs like these with disdain, to sniff that it’s just a bunch of bored suburban moms reading smut to tune out and get off. (It’s also easy to snarkily dismiss these books as “fairy porn.” But lest you think I’m being snobbish about it, please note that I read basic, formulaic psychological thrillers, so it’s not like I’m over here reading Pulitzer contenders.) But it’s not just them.

“I think Bryce Harper read them and liked them,” says a woman called Lindsay, referring to the ACOTAR series. I can’t find any evidence of this, but I can find a 2023 interview in GQ in which the Phillies star talks about loving Canadian romance author Elle Kennedy; he’d just finished two of her books in a steamy series and was on the third.

“It helps me wind down,” Harper told the interviewer. “I get lost, so being able to get lost in something else makes you that much better the next day, because you’re getting away from your life and getting away from everything.”

Heilik has a theory. “Sometimes you look at what the world is like and you want to imagine something different,” she says. “I find when things are really good in the world, you want dystopia. When the real world is hard, you lean into fantasy.”

I think of the real world now, which seems to be falling apart — quaking, burning, flooding, warring, and literally snapping at the seams. (Evidence suggests that the tectonic plates under Tibet might be splitting in two.)

Who wouldn’t want to escape?

It’s midnight now, and I’ve sunk into the sectional in Cynthia’s basement with two of the cookies John brought. There are five of us still here. We stopped talking about the books a little while ago, moving on to topics like our kids, our families, our jobs. I realize that Kim and Lindsay don’t really know each other all that well. Their Venn diagrams put them in close proximity, but their love of fairy porn — no, faerie romance — brought them together.

“We’d never met. We didn’t know a single thing about one another because rule number one from the first book club was no talk of kids or husbands or anything. We’re just into the books,” says Lindsay. (Of course, plenty of book clubs are exactly the opposite. Lindsay is in three other book clubs, all of which are mostly about the wine.)

“It’s somebody I’ve never talked to before, but all of sudden we have a bond,” says Kim.

I have friends who are in other kinds of book clubs, ones focused on high literature, the sort of books that probably won’t ever be adapted into a Hulu miniseries or have candles made to smell like their main characters. But they say the same thing that Kim does — that their clubs give them a sense of connection at a time when we’re all increasingly disconnected, a way to bond with people over the shared experience of escaping to a different world. And if some of those worlds happen to have sexy faeries in them? Well, so be it.

It strikes me that this is the actual draw of these groups. It’s why book clubs have been around forever. Before there was fairy porn, before Twilight, before Reese and Jenna and Oprah, there was Ben Franklin, who founded the Junto Club, a discussion group for avid readers, in 1727. Didn’t he know better than anyone the value of a group of disparate people coming together over a shared experience?

Anyway, we emerge from Cynthia’s basement around 12:30 in the morning. Kim has run to her house next door to find her copy of Fourth Wing, another romantasy book by a different author. This one has dragons. She returns a few minutes later and presses the book into my hands as if she’s handing me a rare artifact.

“I’m so jealous you get to experience this for the first time,” she says.

I take the book with immense hope, eager to immerse myself in this new world, to escape just like Kim and Cynthia and Bryce Harper. Maybe I’ll also be obsessed with this book and thus develop a stronger connection with this smart, successful, funny group of women. Maybe I’ll stay up all night to finish it. Maybe I’ll be buying candles, too! And maybe I’ll even be invited back to book club.

Alas, I read the book — it takes me a month to finally get through it; for some reason I can’t connect with the writing or find my footing in this fantastical world. And I realize this: For some of us, these books are windows to community and friendship and self-discovery. For others, well, they’re still just fairy porn.

Published as “The Moms Are Reading Smut” in the August 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.