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Using Tags to Find Books You Love – Update

What’s going on in the wonderful world of book review tags at All About Romance? I’m so glad you asked!

Updating: Based on commenter feedback, I’ve revised my process for checking and/or updating the tags on new reviews.

For most categories, I don’t search for books which received a grade below B-. This is so that when you, the site users, click through on the tag, you can find books you might actually want to read without having to wade through the Cs, Ds, and Fs. I’m not saying you won’t find lower-scoring books in the tags, but I’m not going to extra effort to add/update them.

The main exception to this is tags for our Diversity and Representation categories. We use those tags for data purposes (such as our annual check on review diversity) so it’s important to have these books recorded even if their grades are low.

Cleanup: I removed duplicate tags and consolidated them. For instance, we had both “Victorian” and “Victorian Period”; those books are now all under Victorian. We had “vampire” and “vampires” and “dragon” and “dragons;” those are now all under the plural. We are working to change Christmas romances from Holiday to Christmas because anything non-Christmas gets lost in the deluge of tinsel and holly.

Adding and Reorganizing tags: New tags can be found in the list below after the bullets. I also, for reasons which I definitely can’t remember, thought it would be a good idea to do a tag for each of the 50 states… are any of you going to use this? (Please say yes). I also took existing tags related to sex and pulled them out into their own category, Sex and Sensuality.

So here are the tags as of June 2021!


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, Mental illness, blindchronic 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, Football, reality tv, suffrage, working-class contemp, adoption, baseball, rugby, motorcycle club romance, mafia, National Parks, PTSD, age gap

Sex and Sensuality Tags:

Plot types:  shipboard romance, road romance, Pygmalion, Jane Austen adaptation, fairy tale, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, amnesia, Cyrano plot, shipwreck, gothic, unplanned pregnancy, Cabin romance, epistolary,

How the protagonists know each other: mail-order bride (or groom), enemies to lovers, childhood friends, childhood sweethearts, troubled relationship/troubled marriage, second chance romance, friends to lovers, roommates, coworkers, bodyguard,

Career and character tags: archaeologist, spy, doctor, nurse, journalist, photographer, actor/actress, law enforcement, artist, Olympian heroine, Olympian, cons and frauds, bakeryveterinarian, royalty, dancer, clergy, thief, thief heroine, designerSTEM heroine, sex worker, immigrant, paleontologist, model, midwife, British navy, wedding planner, athlete, ice skaters, athlete heroine, pilot, firefighter, private investigator, genius, single dad, single mother, writer, teacher, librarian, barbarian, pirate, Viking,

Supernaturals: mermaid/merman, shifter romance, dragons, fairies, vampires, zombies, ghost, gods and goddesses, Angels, demon, witch, medium, alien

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, Russia, Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany

Cities: Chicago, New York City, Toronto, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Venice, Washington D.C., Vancouver, Detroit, Boston, New Orleans

Fifty States So Far: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

US Regions: Southern, Southwest, Appalachia

Canada Settings:  Maritime Canada, Western Canada,

Time Settings: Ancient Rome, Arthurian, The Anarchy Matilda of vs. Stephen, Norman Conquest, Dark Ages, 1100s, 1200s, 1300s, Renaissance Italy, 1400s,1500s, Tudor, Elizabethan, 1600s, English Civil War, Georgian, Colonial US romance, American Revolution, Young United States era (Revolution to Civil War), Napoleonic WarsAmerican 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)

Non-US/Europe Time Settings: Ancient Egypt, Tang Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Australian Historical Romance

AAR tags: DIKlassic, Top 100 Romance, novella, mini review

Have you used our tags? What do you find useful or not useful about the way we’re managing them? Do you have a tag we should add, or books which are missing from the tags that are in place? Please let us know!

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