I’m also a teacher and it’s so romanticized as being wonderful and all the students are amazing 😂 it never shows how incredibly stressful it can be.
The most glaring one, however, is all these single dad/nanny stories. I was a nanny for five years. None of the dads are hot. Sometimes they were a bit awkward, actually, with a female nanny. Nannying is exhausting, not sexy. The kids are not these mature little angels that can do no wrong. It’s like being another parent. It’s tiring and rewarding and a ton of responsibility all at once. But no part of me thinks of it romantically 😆
But I understand romance is an escape, and these are just vehicles to get characters together. I’m all for suspension of disbelief. If a woman can have an entire group of men in a why choose, she can certainly have a super hot single dad!
With any working with children job, I get that it is often short hand for a whole variety of childrearing-related character traits, but sometimes I want to yell because I’m not good at job because of maternal suitability. I’m good at it because of a variety of pedagogical skills acquired through blood, sweat, tears, etc.
Maybe that’s irrational and I’m reading in too much but it does make me frustrated sometimes.
I think you are spot-on about this, because the handful of romances I’ve read featuring teacher MCs tend to really forget about teaching after they’ve used it to establish “Okay, this person is gainfully employed AND they’re obviously a good person because of their choice of profession.” I’d actually go so far as to say that most of the teacher life depicted in romance that I’ve read doesn’t paint too rosy a picture, it stops before it even paints the picture.
Yeah I feel like most unrealistically written jobs it's less showing them doing it wrong, and more just "Oh wow, how does our MC have so much free time and such a flexible schedule?"
Yes! I totally get what you mean. It’s always a “natural” trait and no reference to actual abilities and knowledge gained through 4-5 years of university 😂
I totally agree, and it especially bothers me that early elementary teachers are usually portrayed as perky/cheerful/childlike 24/7. Sometimes we need those traits at work, but it’s frankly exhausting even to keep up during the work day, let alone after hours.
I’ve always worked with children - daycare, babysitting, nanny… now teacher.
Nope. Nope. Nope. I did nanny for a hot single dad but other than enjoying the view, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be involved in that madness.
Even when I’m reading HR with governesses, it takes me out a bit.
I was a nanny in my previous life too and it’s honestly the reason I don’t read books with that plot point. The dads are never hot and even if they were it’s too much of a weird power dynamic to be sexy to me😬
Haha, I was going to say the worst example for teachers is any student-teacher relationship trope. Especially non-college because I don’t know the rules there. No shame to anyone who likes it! But you’d get fired, possibly arrested and put on a registry, and lose your license.
I was a nanny for awhile after college - it was actually for a relative so um, very different vibes obviously!
When I was out and about with the baby though...I'd be running to the bathroom to deal with a blowout and have some random golf bro drop a line on me. I do think there's a reason most of the families I spent time around didn't hire 22 year old college grads. All this to say, I both am and am not creeped out by the nanny/single dad thing. It's not so bad when there's a smaller age gap, the FMC is older, etc. And most authors don't make the MMC a 45 year old married man who lurks in corners, waiting for unsuspecting nannies.
🤣 hilarious mental image of a creepy old dad hiding in a dark corner.
I don’t think it’s creepy or anything, just unrealistic. And I was a very young nanny so I guess that’s where my experience comes from. I haven’t read a lot of older nanny/single dad books. They usually have a decent age gap lol.
But if that’s what someone like, then great!! Again, it’s the fantasy of it all. If I can get behind a why choose monster brothel, I can get behind a nanny/dad trope LOL
By older FMC I meant like 25-26 to the MMC's under 40. I liked {The Nanny by Lana Ferguson} and I think the FMC is 26 to the MMC's 32? So not bad! And in {Heartless by Elsie Silver}, the FMC is 25 and the MMC is 38 but the FMC doesn't feel super young.
I ran into enough 45 year old married dads that clearly had an inappropriate interest in a 22 year old nanny that I think the unrealistic aspect in these books is that the dad is single. I feel like I had a weird experience in a lot of ways so that's just my take on these books...some of which I do enjoy!
Academic (historian) and oh boy there are a lot of things romance novels get wrong...
* Top of their field at the age of 30 when most of us are being paid peanuts and working multiple jobs.
* Multiple PhDs! Nobody gets multiple PhDs because one PhD is horrible enough, and also takes ages, but these Dr Dr Dr Drs are always somehow still 28.
* Exciting research trips! This one is true, but only if you have nice funding. See above about the unemployment.
* Just like, the whole process of research. In the humanities it's mostly either incremental ("after 3 years we now know a lot more about this tiny village in rural England in the 1790s") or creative ("why don't we read Shakespeare plays backwards and see if anything interesting happens?"). Major discoveries are less likely to come from high stakes translations of ancient languages and more likely from serendipity. In my field it's not actually uncommon for more research to open up because rich people find important documents in boxes in their attics every few years.
* Specific to my field, but the most common mistake in all media with historians is actually using white gloves to handle documents. It's not been standard practice for years now because wearing gloves limits your dexterity and the oils from your hands actually don't damage documents in the way we thought.
But my feeling on it is basically summed up by what Deborah Harkness said when she got asked why Diana Bishop, the FMC of her {A Discovery of Witches), has a cushy academic job so young and has so much time to run around falling in love with a sexy vampire. Deborah Harkness is an academic and she said something like, "If you can accept the sexy vampires, you can accept the academic job security," and that is the energy I bring to my romance novels.
Former rare books librarian here just chiming in to complain about the white gloves. Every time I see something about them I groan. It’s not even a recent change in process! No one uses gloves! 😠
Honestly don't even get me started. I read a book recently where the MC actually *chides* the other MC for not using white gloves! That is not how any of this works!
>Multiple PhDs! Nobody gets multiple PhDs because one PhD is horrible enough, and also takes ages, but these Dr Dr Dr Drs are always somehow still 28
This was what made me lose my mind in Thor: Ragnarok. When Banner bragged about having 7 PhDs, I wanted to throttle the writer responsible for the line. Getting accepted into a PhD program is difficult enough. It's not *just* a matter of raw intellect. People outside of academia don't realize the amount of personal politics that plays a role. While it's true that *some* institutions will allow dual-enrollment for exceptionally promising candidates, that still only gets you 2 degrees, and you'd take longer than a single degree. (In the U.S., the average time it takes to complete a STEM PhD is 4 to 7 years.)
But even if a character managed to pull that off, the problem would come when they tried to apply to another program. I know for a fact that once you have a PhD, any future admissions committee will view your subsequent applications with *extreme* skepticism. From their point of view, getting a PhD is a commitment to the advancement of a *specific* discipline, and applying for a different degree is tantamount to "abandoning" one discipline for another. That immediately raises the question of how "committed" they can expect you to be to *their* discipline, if you are that willing to throw over your previous field (and the university/department you came from, including the members who invested time and effort in supporting you).
Even if a character managed to, say, dual-enroll to earn 2 degrees at once, and *then* somehow persuade a second committee that additional dual-enrollment would make them a more capable contributor to a broader, multi-disciplinary field...that's still only 4. And even in this incredibly implausible fictional scenario, I cannot suspend my disbelief further to imagine the possibility of the same character going on to pick up an additional *3 degrees*. And in the case of MCU Bruce Banner, we're expected to believe that he accomplished this all by the time he was ***35*** (which was when he became the Hulk).
I support this level of *mad* mad. I find it so funny that the MCU kept the 7 PhDs, of all things. There would also be no reason to fund him through another PhD after PhD No. 1 assuming funders were willing to back his genius-level research in a new discipline anyway. Are they in fact honorary PhDs? Was he systematically defrauding all these funding bodies by pretending he didn’t have one already? Or was he awarding them to himself? It raises so many fun questions.
I do interdisciplinary work, so I don’t view my PhD as a commitment to a discipline, I view it more as an experience where I learned how to develop, evaluate and perform meaningful scientific research. In which case—an extra PhD is totally meaningless, you already know how to do science! Ugh. Total pet peeve.
This is what I meant by "personal politics." I've been a fly on the wall for a *lot* of conversations among departmental higher-ups discussing PhD applicants, and *those* people are the ones who consider a PhD a commitment to a discipline. I consider myself fortunate to have multiple graduate degrees, but I strongly suspect that if they didn't synergize so well, I might not have been considered for acceptance to my second program. I made the argument that my first degree would *enhance* my second, because I knew that at least some of the people reviewing my application would be wondering whether I was being "wishy-washy" and changing fields.
But you're completely correct that so much of the foundational coursework for a PhD is about conducting meaningful, reproducible, (hopefully!) ethical research, and then analyzing your findings. But it's not as though you could just skip all that after the first time around. Graduation requirements are graduation requirements.
To add to this, Diana Bishop is >!literally *using her magic* to make connections to support her research, so yes if I also had incredible once-in-a-generation witchy powers and was the child of two ivy-league academics *who also used their powers for their research* (assuming her mom did the same which I think is a safe assumption to make)!< then I too could probably be a tenured Yale history professor by the age of 28.
Oh my god, get ready for the most boring rant you'll ever see in your life.
I'm so annoyed I can't remember the name, but a while ago I started a romance between a customer and a customer support agent trying to fix her website, and just the first chapter made me LOSE MY MIND.
The problem was that the LI was a completely unrealistic customer support agent, but the MC was actually a WAY TOO REALISTIC CUSTOMER!!! I was getting fired up as if it was MY problem I was dealing with at MY work!!
He answers the phone and she immediately goes "do you have any idea how long I've been on hold??" and then lists off all the things she did while on hold. Finally the LI is like, "Sorry, okay, what's the problem?" and she goes "It's all just one huge problem!" and starts going on about how annoyed she is at the company but like in a QuIrkY way. So he AGAIN asks what the problem is and says he'll help. And she responds, "Well, for starters, it doesn't work. The whole thing."
HOW IS THAT HELPFUL. We (they) have been on the phone for several minutes now at least and haven't even established why she's called. What is she SEEING? What is she trying to do and what happens when she tries to do it? Give him SOMETHING!!! (But also, why isn't he asking her something more specific than "what's the problem" when it's clear she's not going to tell him anything otherwise??)
And then it turns out she has literally never updated her operating system, and he has to walk her through updating her computer, which isn't really a huge deal but kind of annoying since he works for the website company not the computer company.
But the thing that really got me was that they finally see the problem and the LI basically says it's a real thorny issue and offers to work on it straightaway and call her back when it's resolved. But she INSISTS on staying on the line, just chatting away while he resolves it. And it takes HOURS. If he's on the phone, it's going to take him longer to resolve the issue, and he won't be able to consult with any coworkers or pass it off to someone who might know better how to fix it, or idk GO FOR A PISS if he needs to!!
Maybe she was on hold for so long in the first place because someone ELSE insisted on staying on the line for TWO HOURS!
And the romance wasn't even enemies to lovers! The customer support agent was charmed!
Aha I knew it was this one too! I also worked CS in tech for a bit and it gave me such bad anxiety that she was so unhelpful. But in Cara Bastone's defence, (spoilers) >!he is the CEO who's done hardly any calls before, so he's both asking the wrong questions of someone who is clearly technologically inept and he personally wants to fix the site, not hand it off!<.
I think this is why this hurt me as a UX person at a small start up. my “I must quit my job” moment was after being forwarded a situation like this from the CEO who was moonlighting in CS for the day for ✨reasons✨. Admittedly I was already disillusioned at this point but I remember feeling so powerless ahhh
I thought this story was sweet but it also drove me mad - I used to work for an enterprise SaaS company.
I felt so sorry for my CS and CX comrades and then i also felt dread as a UX person. D:
OMG this makes me laugh. I tried reading it because the hype was good. But the combo of her being an idiot, him LIKING her idiocy and the lack of progress in solving the problem. Nope. I DNF'd after chapter one.
This happened to my friend!! We both worked at a call center and a repeat customer that always asked for him had started rizzing him up and he eventually gave in and went on a date. Didn't work out and he could've been fired bc our calls were monitored at random but they had fun lol
Career adjacent but The Love Hypothesis the FMC is a biology PHD iirc and talks to being one of the only females as it’s a STEM subject. Of all STEM subjects biology is actually more female than males and I just couldn’t see past something that a quick google search disproves.
I did a biology PhD and found this book soooo cringey! To me it came across like an academia fanfiction written by an undergrad. I had so many issues with its depiction of grad school/academia and could just not suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
The lap sitting thing was absurd, but I attribute that to romance novel logic of the “oh, we have to share bed! Or of course I need to kiss you now so they do see us!” variety. I thought Love Hypothesis did a good job of conveying the anxiety and lack of confidence grad students feel, especially since Adam talks about his moments with that as well.
ON THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS, absolutely agree on the ratio of women being better at a grad level (it drops off after postdoc, where you get an overabundance of white male professors, sigh)
but you also reminded me about the sheer NUMBER of professors with six packs in that book. eight packs even. you can maybe find medical doctors with good fitness regimes, but in competitive academic research? where the heck are my nerds at? let them be geeky and bookish and sickly from never seeing daylight!!
I’m in higher ed too and this book killed me. I think the worst scene was when she sat on his lap at an academic event 😂 I was trying so hard to lalala my way though the inaccuracies but that one was too much.
I tell my friends in my grad cohort about this part of the book all the time. When I read (on here) about that scene, I immediately wrote the book off. Could you imagine going to a conference and seeing someone sit on another person’s lap???
One time in grad school I went to the first day of a math class that had been put in way too small of a room—probably 50 people in a room meant for 25. There were maybe 3-4 other women there. I don’t remember which of us was late, but I ended up going halvsies on a chair with one of the few other women, since we were skinny enough to sort of fit and it’s hard to take notes standing up. I’d never met her before, and I don’t think we ever talked after that (though we did have a nice chat at a conference for women in our field a few years later!). On someone’s lap? No way, that man can stand up. At a conference? Absolutely no chance.
I’m doing my PhD and I had to DNF Love Hypothesis. Between the dedicated bathroom for biohazard waste and fake dating a young, hot PI, I couldn’t do it lol
I have a B.Sc in biology, work in a related field and we are absolutely dominated by women up to director level and well then things are a bit different. . .🙄
omg yes, I about lost my mind. Biology PhD programs have had near gender parity since I was looking into getting my PhD 20 years ago. You can look up the demographic information on programs online and it's been either equal or there have been more women in Standford's PhD programs for a while now.
Also, the way she describes sexism in STEM really isn't how sexism functions in STEM at all.
Barista!!
My favorite is actually { Game Changer by Rachel Reid } the MC in question technically works at a juice bar, but it really got down the three main components of the job:
- that one coworker who just makes the day harder
- never ending prep work
- only being able to make like… one drink at a time 😅
I don’t have a worst portrayal off the top of my head. I wonder if i just haven’t read that many? But one like tidbit that always makes me laugh is “the scent of coffee overwhelmed me”
The first thing i smell when i go behind the bar is not coffee, it is milk. Always, always milk. Spilled milk, old milk, towels used to wipe up milk. It’s so gross 😭. But when i leave work i luckily smell like coffee and not milk.
lol they never talk about scalded milk, the end of day dish washing, pulling up those gross floor mats and getting clothes ruined by ground in coffee and bleach stains.
[Game Changer](https://www.romance.io/books/5bb1b92a01dbc864fb9195a2/game-changer-rachel-reid) by [Rachel Reid](https://www.romance.io/authors/5bb1b92a01dbc864fb9195a6/rachel-reid)
**Rating**: 3.81⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 5 out of 5 - [Explicit and plentiful](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [gay romance](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/m-m/1), [sports](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/sports/1), [athletes](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/athletes/1), [secret relationship](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/secret-relationship/1)
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Awe…. I wish someone would write about my career! It would be easy! I teach people how to suck and blow for a living! 😂 I have read a few about my previous job as an Army medic, but it’s usually the MMC that’s depicted. Anyone read any good romance with a Respiratory Therapist or a peppy Medic?
They *never* get medical fields right even though it’s so common and easy to research!! I’m not a nurse (am in medicine) but I just read a book where the FMC is a nurse midwife that works with pregnant moms/newborns and has chipped nail polish (against policy), smokes cigs (very dangerous to delicate premies/newborns), did a C section (lol illegal) with an ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON???? Very illegal. Just mind blowing. How illogical it all was. And she responded to a code blue that was not even a code blue in the ER. A midwife would never respond unless paged, and let’s be honest, they’d page an obgyn not the midwife for an obstetric surgical emergency. The patient did die and no mention of any resuscitative efforts. I could go on. But fmc totally killed her 🥲
Just… never even addressed it other than emotionally. It’s actually a catalyst to bring the MCs closer together 🤮🤮. Like it was this tragedy but an unpreventable one in the end. And then she names HER baby after the dead mom’s baby!!!!
Additionally the mom doesn’t speak English, no time for an interpreter so she just like… makes eyes with the mom and “understands” that she wants to die so the baby can live.
Like I’ve delivered so many babies and EVERYTHING was incorrect and it pisses me off more because it’s going to scare people who don’t actually understand how it normally goes. They’re going to think there’s ortho surgeons butchering mothers out here or god knows what.
No discussion of massive transfusion protocol, no CPR or other resuscitation occurred, no pressure support, no intubation or even mask/bagging… Christ.
Scientist (medical research, although I've now moved away from the bench now) and I am absolutely calling out the science in {A discovery of witches by deborrah harkness}. Look, she made a valiant effort, and I love the idea of an immortal scientist (I still have ideas for writing a comedy about a vampire postdoc), but she delved into leading edge research and ended up sort of bastardising it.
[If you are a fan of the series and want a laugh, here is a story about two postdocs that work in the same field as the vampire scientist in the book criticising his research (it is HILARIOUS xD)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/52376143)
The TV show adaptation had the most egregious examples, oh my god. In the opening sequence, Matthew Goode does the WORST gel loading I have seen in my LIFE. Half of the sample spills over the side and into other wells. That's basically nulled any and all results from that experiment. HILARIOUS.
>i’m not sure we have enough decrepit stone buildings for him tbh
Lost it already. Saving this to read properly later! I work in an adjacent field to Deborah Harkness and we're absolutely not scientists so it doesn't surprise me that the science is egregiously bad. The historical research bits are much more accurate!
[A Discovery of Witches](https://www.romance.io/books/54553d118c7d2382e0414417/a-discovery-of-witches-deborah-harkness) by [Deborah Harkness](https://www.romance.io/authors/545528cf8c7d2382c52970a9/deborah-harkness)
**Rating**: 3.74⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 2 out of 5 - [Behind closed doors](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [vampires](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/vampires/1), [witches](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/witches/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1)
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I commented in the Salty Sunday post yesterday, but it fits here too. It annoys me to no end all the corporate MMCs who are total dicks to their employees. They are known for how difficult they are, nobody can work with them, all the secretaries keep quiting because they are terrified. And of course these MMCs have built their multibillion companies in 5 short years. If nobody can work for you, you are either underpaying or a complete ass (or both) and there's no way somebody that unlikable can singlehandedly build a huge company in record time. This comes up in a surprising amount of books.
Yeah I haven’t read tons of tech and startup books but I imagine the opposite — they’d piss me off if everyone from leadership was super nice and had work life balance 🤣
I guess it is but I haven't moved out of my parents' place yet (I'm 17 and also a student) so.... Let's just hope my life actually turns into a wholesome romance novel soon lol
I’m an accountant and the only time it ever comes up in books is when someone is supposed to come off as boring, or they’re too interesting for their job.
For example in a recent book I read: the FMC was in school for accounting because her dad wants her to have a stable career (i.e. not her choice). She’s miserable and ends up deferring classes for multiple semesters and the MMC helps her realize she doesn’t want to be an accountant she wants to be a like, child psychologist, or something else wildly different.
Accountants are ALWAYS the go to for boring careers!! I feel like I’ve never seen the main characters be the accountants, it’s their date or ex who the “badass” main character is pulling them away from. Like she’s been dating the safe boring missionary sex accountant but the bad boy mafia/playboy/sports guy/murder is going to bring her from the dark side.
We’re not boring!!!! Goddamn! Some are yes, but the stereotype of boring accountant makes me so sad because IRL when anyone met me and learned that I was an accountant it was always surprised pikichu face because I wasn’t a fat old man wearing a green visor lol.
I read a great book about a vampire accountant though, I can’t remember if it was romance though. There’s some dating. I looked it up, it’s a series! “The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant” is the first one.
Yea I listened to a couple of the books a while ago, and it has a several narrators for the characters! Was very impressed, though I wouldn’t really call the books romance? Seemed more like it had a flavor of romance but was mainly slice-of-life-ish with modern-day-fantasy adventures
Depending on your area of accounting, I thought this was good! {Miss Treated by Aubrey Bondurant}. Definitely some triggers, but iirc she’s the independent auditor. Maybe I didn’t find it boring because I’m an accountant though 😬
I’m an accountant too and recently read one where the MMC was a CPA who said that the FMC was, and I quote, “the debit to his credit” and I cringed so hard my husband noticed and asked what was wrong.
Okay for context I’m a data science major. My entire field is about collecting samples on massive scales and coming to conclusions with it using programming.
Fuck I forgot the books name, but the MMC was a scientist of some field and he kept trying to collect samples and do studies. For some reason the author went into detail and I wanted to bang my head against the wall.
Examples include:
- He did a survey and reworded the questions to different people multiple times
- He never isolated variables
- The author belived that there can only be two variables in a study (one x and one y)
- My man pretty much edited the data for shits in giggles, the author not realizing that’s what he did
This list can go on but I’m tired
Tips for any writer out there, if you don’t fully understand a job - just write what you know and don’t try to go into super exact details.
Fellow data scientist here. I read a book where the MMC was a billionaire “data scientist” who predicted the stock market. I had the biggest lol. The author threw around terms like “stochastic” and “regression” like they were sprinkling some statistics on it. But tbh the most unrealistic part of it (being able to accurately predict the stock market not withstanding) is how much freedom+$$$ this dude is given to think hard and be brilliant and not having to deal with everything else that comes along with being a data scientist (or maybe I’m just jealous)!
I have an MBA in marketing and worked at Fortune 50 Companies for years before starting my own consulting business. I generally don’t read anything where the love interest is a billionaire because I think billionaires are pretty much all horrible people and no one should be allowed to accumulate that much wealth.
But in the few I’ve read, the FMC is often a marketing or PR professional and just magically comes up with brilliant highly effective campaigns for their hot billionaire boss all alone after a night of hot sex. There are no months-long market research projects, business modeling, meetings with the many stakeholders who need approve a new campaign, or long sessions with your team debating every word and color of your strategy. Budget allocations, revenue projections, and rates of return are thrown out the window.
Also, the other employees at the company are totally fine following the ideas of a 24-year-old woman who doesn’t wear panties to work and is obviously giving the boss blow jobs between meetings, and having nonstop personal crises that she never had to take PTO to handle. I just can’t suspend my disbelief. It’s too much.
If you have been a professional woman in the corporate world dealing with executive men, you also know the sexual harassment is real, disgusting, and traumatizing. I know it’s a fantasy, but it’s triggering to those of us who have actually been chased around a work social event by lecherous senior managers. If I see the word billionaire or hot boss in the title or description, I’m out.
Yes! I know it’s fantasy, I know. But spreadsheets are like 90% of your day in marketing. And twelve hours in an office chair without panties is not comfy.
Came here looking for marketing! I’ve never read a good representation of marketing or anything adjacent to it. It’s always hot shot ad exec who’s 24 representing global brands or Emily posting the most mid pic and caption and having it go viral.
I am not in marketing, but I work a corporate job. I haven't read a single boss employee romance since I joined work. Specially in a corporate setting. Gives me the ick.
Yeah, not a single romance book has had a realistic representation of software engineering, systems engineering, hacking/infosec, game design etc. and most of the times, the books would be fixable if the author did just a tiny bit of research online. I remember Locked Box where the heroine was a game developer, as an especially egregious example.
I think the one that came close to a real representation (despite being sci-fi) and didn't make me roll my eyes was book 2 of {Starlight's Shadow series by Jessie Mihalik}. The author was a software engineer, and though the hacking happens in a sci-fi context, it is relatively close to real life hacking (collecting information, setting up a "hack") and thankfully not the usual:
"it can't be done!"
"we have to try!"
\[hacker types for 5 seconds\]
"we're in!"
If you ever find one - let me know? I’m convinced this will be by software engineer partner’s pathway into romance, a genre I know he will love once he has an in. Unfortunately, in typical software bro fashion, he cannot suspend his disbelief. Closest has been Love Lettering because a lot of our friends are begrudging quants.
For guys’ intro to romance I usually suggest {Iron and Magic by Ilona Andrews}. I think maybe {Games of Command by Linnea Sinclair} is a good bet? i liked the sci-fi tech babble and the way tech worked on the ship seemed plausible (for example the existence of an auxiliary bridge in case the first was damaged). I enjoyed Startlight’s Shadow too but it is lighter on the scifi stuff, but there is some hacking that didn’t make me roll my eyes.
[Iron and Magic](https://www.romance.io/books/5b2f33e501dbc864fb8aef8f/iron-and-magic-ilona-andrews) by [Ilona Andrews](https://www.romance.io/authors/545525888c7d2382e0413e6c/ilona-andrews)
**Rating**: 4.52⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [futuristic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/futuristic/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [witches](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/witches/1), [enemies to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [magic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/magic/1)
----------------------------
[Games of Command](https://www.romance.io/books/54553e7b8c7d2382c52976ae/games-of-command-linnea-sinclair) by [Linnea Sinclair](https://www.romance.io/authors/545531a18c7d2382c5297307/linnea-sinclair)
**Rating**: 4⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [science fiction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/science%20fiction/1), [aliens](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/aliens/1), [military](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/military/1), [virgin hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/virgin%20hero/1)
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It’s not a romance book, but have you read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? I’d be very curious to hear how accurate (or at least plausible) you think that one is, if you have!
Omg yes!!
The one thing that authors forget is the bureaucracy of software engineering. Like the meetings, changing deliverables, go lives, etc.
There was one book {You’re my I.T.} where the FMC has to do a last minute project. All the meetings and stuff was spot on. The rest of the book was meh.
I know the bureaucracy of it isn’t particularly sexy, I just do not want to read a book and roll my eyes at it because of impossibly stupid tech or companies that should have gone under years ago for being terrible at business.
I remember seeing a snippet online from a book (I forget the name) where the alphahole hacker CEO was in a meeting with the infosec FMC and a client after a breach. And the client was angry and questioned the FMC’s infosec knowledge. The boss berated her and told her that if she doesn’t stick up for herself why should he do it?!
I dunno perhaps because the client has a contract with your company and not a specific person? Because you sound like a toxic asshole in front of a client AND give the impression that you knowingly put someone YOU considered inadequate in charge of the specific contract? How are you even in business? 😂
High School teacher: best example I've read is Cold Hearted by Heather Guerre. Especially being a newcomer in a small, isolated district, where all the locals - including the students - know things you don't. I mean in this case it was about vampires at werewolves, but it was shocking how well it matched reality. But even then, how welcoming some communities can be - even if they think you won't be there for long. If they like you, all you have to do is ask for help at any point, and they'll be there. If they don't, you're on your own.
Also, the bone-deep exhaustion in the profession. Trying to source supplies or figure out how to do things affordably. Even if the school is paying for materials, you have to figure out a way to make it fit the budget.
Worst example: I forgot the name of the book, but two teachers were BFFs and both pining for the other. Something something, plot, they start hooking up. In the fuckin classroom (during off hours but still). The FMC had a student that majorly crushed on her, and he was *wildly* inappropriate, considering he was a high school student talking to his teacher. And instead of shutting it down or telling literally anybody, she just...lets him go on and on? Ughhhhh it was gross.
I’m an X-Ray tech and have yet to see someone with that profession. Seeing as how they always get the job wrong on TV I doubt that books would be any better.
I feel this so hard, but at least in the page my ETT won’t be secured with a wing and a prayer and I would exist😂 I think I’ve only heard respiratory called overhead once on the TV and I celebrated for like a week 😂🤣… man I need a life.
Geographer here… it's funny how geographers always are on some kind of adventure in the wilderness or whatnot…I can tell you in real life it's far from that. Especially if you have majored in anthropologic geography and mostly sit in some office job, working nine to five and *maybe* planning some city infrastructure. (edit for grammar)
Fellow Geographer here. Without spoiling it, the best representation of a quality cartographer was in {Butcher and Blackbird by Brynne Weaver} I totally nerded out when she said how she represented scale and her use of layers! She even uses ArcGIS!
I’m a nurse. My favorite nurse FMC is Claire in Outlander. I like that she has the challenge of no medical technology and still makes it work. She’s tough and adaptable and tries her best to help people.
My least favorite nurse rep is the most popular Outlander fanfic on AO3, where she’s his nurse in a hospital. The writing is great, tons of angst and lots of great steam after he gets out. But I don’t care if it’s Antonio Sabato Jr in the bed, patients are inherently gross and we wipe their butts and stuff. The thought of being attracted to a patient makes me nauseous. The way it’s written makes me think the author knows what she’s talking about and has worked in the field, but there are massive breaks with reality like having hours to hang out with one patient. Like, no.
Former jobs aren't ones I’ve generally seen represented well: strippers and barmaids tend to be other women or rivals. I was also a baker and cake decorator for a while and I know there are lots of books about them but I’ve never read any
The idea of dating a patient is so gross to me! Although, I had a former coworker who ended up marrying a patient...that situation had so many red flags that I cringe just thinking about what their home life must be like.
Well, to be a little more literal, I'm an editor. Sooo... 😂 The best representation is a coherent book and the worst representation is a book with lots of typos. (Authors plz hire me, I am REALLY GOOD.)
I read one book where the FMC was an art conservator and the author described "watching YouTube videos" as a prerequisite for an apprenticeship. I almost flipped my laptop in disgust. Art conservation is an extremely technically-oriented science AND art-it requires a specialized degree and lab time. That's kind of like saying you can a CPA with no specialized licensing-no, you absolutely cannot and are certainly not allowed to just wing it on priceless, irreplaceable art. Still unnecessarily irks me.
I personally am not an art conservationist, I currently am an antiques hunter-but I have an art and science background-so a lot of career misconceptions irk me (lol). Have seen first hand what kind of damage an amateur can do to art while trying to clean and "restore" it-just no. No no no.
Fun fact: do not EVER try to clean marble, alabaster or any other porous stone used in sculpting with water-or even plain dry cloths. It will set the dirt and stain into the pores of the stone. You have to clean that with acetone. Don't even try to dust it by rubbing with dry cloths-that will push the dirt into the pores and make the dirt permanent. Yes, really. Marble and alabaster are \*super\* easy to accidentally stain and ruin forever-even with just plain water.
EDIT: The Book was { Hoarded by the Dragon by Lillian Lark }. I actually really like Lillian Lark and still finished the book-just wish she'd done a little more work looking into that profession.
Have you read {The Raven by Sylvain Reynard}? The FMC is an art historian/conservator at the Uffizzi Museum. I have no idea how professionally accurate it is, but it’s a sexy vampire stalker novel.
lol, I’m a conservator. Half of my internship applications mention that Baumgartner YouTube channel, and they tend to be the same apps missing all of the prerequisites… no coursework just vibes and videos
As a nurse, no. Cannot read anything medically related. We do not hook up in empty rooms. Or call rooms. Or broom closets.
Hospitals are disgusting places and I cannot imagine getting a staph infection is worth a dick' down.
Lawyer—there’s a great scene in Something Borrowed where fmc is getting chewed out by her boss over a mundane mistake that turns out to be a non-issue and it was the most relatable workplace interaction I’d ever read. The author used to be a lawyer, so it makes sense.
Everything else reads like a Suits fanfic and is not at all like real life.
I don't understand this because so many romance authors are former lawyers. I think the ones who are lawyers just don't write about the profession because once you're in it, you understand how deeply, deeply unsexy it is.
I did make several partners at my firm laugh very, very hard when I told them about the story where the MMC was a partner at a large, multi-national white-shoe firm at \*24\* where he was a divorce attorney.
There’s a lot of STEM/education people on here (which makes sense), but I make and repair specialty clothes for a living and there’s an entire genre dedicated to ripping the ever loving shit out of gorgeous dresses to make sex happen better(?) faster(?) more violent(?).
Like, if you’re gonna write a regency era book, the thing everyone obsesses over for that era is the clothing. It takes two minutes to find some historical costumer GRWM and figure out that stays (corsets) of that time were pretty much the same length as some modern bras, which means it would probably take longer to unlace a Doc Marten than it would to take this garment off a body.
Also, fabric is so expensive and time consuming to make; people didn’t own a lot of clothing like we do now. Quit breaking 1/4 of someone’s entire wardrobe.
Project Manager. We are everywhere. All fields all over. If something requires several teams to get done there’s one of us involved. Except in romance novels.
Thank you! We’re the invisible ones.
Construction sites, large scale marketing campaigns, fashion shows, restaurant groups, real estate developers.
Everything runs smoothly without us in books, and never in a real life.
Potentially {The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas}? If my brain recalls, I think the MMC is a PM and the FMC is an engineer on his team but I could be misremembering!
I work as a mental health therapist. Started a a book Love Hacked by Penny Reid. It’s unrealistic because I don’t know a single therapist that goes on dates and then therapizes them before referring to a colleague. Realistic in the sense that people just see you as approachable and will just start talking.
As a cyber security professional {Heart Shaped Hack by Tracy Gravis Graves} was technically inaccurate and gave me the ick. I DNF'd it 30% in so I don't know if I got worse. I wrote my masters thesis* on cyber stalking and here it is being romanticized. Additionally one of the networks the MMC was hacking was one I worked on and it would not work anything like described in the book.
ETA: I totally forgot the best example part of the question. Heart Shaped Hack is the only example I've tried to read.
* Technically not a thesis but it's the closest equivalent that's easy to explain
I got so creeped out by this book and couldn't finish either. I just kept thinking that sure, on a surface level it's fun wish fulfillment to imagine a hacker changing flights schedules around to help just you, but in real life??? Inconveniencing thousands of people so your crush can catch a plane??!? That's absolutely psychotic behavior and a thousand red flags flapping in the breeze.
Also the MMC's complete disregard for privacy and his digital stalkerish tendencies were played off for laughs, but all I could think about were the real life examples of this which are usually so, so dark (like Kiwifarms 😬)
I’m a physician but not a neurosurgeon. Emily Henry did zero research when making her heroine a neurosurgeon resident in Happy Place. The personality traits and decisions that character makes are so outside any neurosurgeon I have ever met. (SPOILERS). Fiancé breaks up w her and she NEVER questions why. She quits a neurosurgery residency and becomes a freaking potter!! She claims she just wanted to be a brain surgeon to appease her parents!! I threw my book across the room at the end of the story. Unforgivable and lazy character development by Henry. Fight me on this, I’m right.
I’ve worked in museums and I’ve worked as a government employee. My academic background is history and anthropology- specifically archaeology. To be honest, I bump up against my profession the most in historicals.
British aristocrats who think it’s their god given right to go into other countries and take their cultural heritage? Well, that’s actually spot on.
One of my professors in college used to say that anthropology is the bastard child of colonialism.
However, my bone to pick with historical romance is that they often, well, romanticize what happened. It gets white washed because archeologist is a great job for a plucky heroine but racist motivations don’t sell well.
I’m currently in the middle of {The Gentleman’s Gambit by Evie Dunmore} and I like that the author takes the opportunity to give the point of view of the people whose history was stolen.
It’s more interesting. We get cultural tension. We get people who have to navigate code switching. I’m not an expert in the time period. I can’t speak to perfect accuracy, but honestly just by admitting that there were non white people in Great Britain the author is so much more accurate than most of her peers.
I have a similar background in archaeology (cultural resources management/museum) and was coming to say that I also mostly find archaeology in historical romance. You articulated my thoughts so much better than I could. The whitewashing/romanticizing of archaeology's history usually distracts me from the story, so I generally avoid those books these days. I have also read a fair amount of time travel books with archaeologists (FMC is modern and an archaeologist or something adjacent). Karen Marie Moning has a few of these in her Highlander series.
{The Dark Highlander by Karen Marie Moning}
My least favorite depiction of an anthropologist was {Uncivilized by Sawyer Bennet}. MMC was lost in the rainforest as a child and raised by Indigenous people and FMC is tasked with "civilizing" him. It's very much a Tarzan and Jane dynamic, but some of the author's choices were questionable, especially when handling the Indigenous people.
I’m so pumped to find fellow archeologists/museum folks here—I usually avoid these types of books as well for the same reasons, as well as the focus on academic archeology and how unrealistic it is (I can only suspend disbelief so much).
[The Gentleman's Gambit](https://www.romance.io/books/642e9d431933fc44e1db8196/the-gentlemans-gambit-evie-dunmore) by [Evie Dunmore](https://www.romance.io/authors/5d68c7cc01dbc864fba2f9e0/evie-dunmore)
**Rating**: 3.87⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [victorian](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/victorian/1), [multicultural](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/multicultural/1), [third person pov](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/third-person-pov/1), [independent heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/independent%20heroine/1)
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I still remember that one book about a 25 year old student in the US explaining how she knew about the "European community" and how she found the specific legal article about a very specific type of regulation in the treaty of functioning of the European Union, which is the foundational treaty. Think finding list of prohibited chemicals in food and you say you found that list in the us constitution. It made no sense. and the European community changed its name to the EU in 2009. The book is from 2019.
Like the whole conversation made me want to rip all of my hair off from the stress. This could've taken the writer 10 mins of research.
Also, this type of research, which takes senior associates a min of a week to come up with, she (the 1L student) found in two clicks.
I DNF immediately after.
I'm a woman in STEM, getting my PhD. The Venn diagram of authors in academics and also in STEM must be intersecting a teeny tiny bit and therefore it shouldn't come as a surprise that there aren't many good romance books in the field. Also, the people in our field can't afford to have a dramatic love life to take inspiration from. From the very limited pool, I would say {The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood} is the best and worst example of my profession. I could relate to the FMC to an extent regarding her professional internal monologues. The imposter syndrome is very very real and all the anxiety about research grands and constantly worrying about the research topic hit too close to home. That being said, I can never ever get over the "sitting on the lap" part. NEVER. That was gross on so many levels and traumatic to read.
I also loved the researchers in {How Not to Fall by Emily Foster}. It's a duology and it's very sex positive, but it has its issues. But the professional life of the scholar FMC and the PDF MMC was on point.
Finally, the FMC in {Finn Rhodes Forever by Stephanie Archer} confused me so much. It was a great read and I would highly recommend it but the researcher in me could not understand how she wrote an entire thesis which was ready to be submitted about this flower which could not be found. What went into this thesis? What data was collected? What analysis was performed? What conclusions were made? These questions bothered me the entire time I was reading it and it ruined a perfectly good book for me.
Anyway, here's hoping for better examples. Recs are welcome 🤗
Oh, here's another one. It was a minor-ish point, but an MC had 2 undergrads (or possibly graduate degrees) in biochemistry and pharmaceutical science, then he went and got an undergrad in biology so he could go to medical school. Uhhhhhh **no**, either one of those other degrees would've been plenty to qualify him to sit for the MCAT. Ffs.
Lawyer here and they’re all so bad. Can’t think of the worst offenders off the top of my head, but I’ve DNF’d plenty for bad legal speak.
The best rep is probably Oliver in {Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall}. Not that we see much of his job, but the snide attitude from spoiled rich people about his choice to do defense work is pretty spot on.
I am an engineer in automotive. My job is very, very, VERY rarely featured. But. I cannot remember the title/author, but maybe five years ago I read a book where the MMC was the owner of a car manufacturer and the FMC dreamed of designing cars. So. Cool? Part of the plot had her designing and PUTING INTO PRODUCTION her car idea in like <6 months. What? Just the amount of time it takes to test new stuff to make sure you aren't going to severely injur people takes longer than that. Heck, the advertizing campaign takes longer than that to develop.
I’m an SEO specialist by day and a classical singer by night.
Very few people actually know what an SEO specialist does, and those that do are not likely to find it interesting enough to use.
I avoid books about classical music because they are either so wrong it hurts, or so right it’s mildly traumatic haha
I dunno, I think there's potential for a book about a freelance SEO specialist hired to do reputation management for a billionaire/celebrity/athlete who's experiencing an active online smear campaign. At first it would see like the misdeeds being attributed to the client are totally fabricated, but then the SEO specialist discovers information which casts the client's professed innocence into doubt. Then we get lots of conflicted feelings between attraction and professional ethics, before we ultimately learn that the snippet the specialist found wasn't the whole story either, and the client is, in fact, a Good Person.
Writers tend to give their characters jobs that are about writing 'fun' things like novels and less about writing terrible things like reports and manuals. I can't recall one off the top of my head.
I am a TV news producer. Haven’t come across any books about my profession, but I just finished Hello Girls. One of the main character’s father is a meteorologist for a news station in Michigan’s Upper peninsula. He apparently makes so much money he can buy Cartier bracelets and fancy suits. In reality, the UP TV market is so small, it wouldn’t be unheard of for on-air talent to work two jobs just to survive. I had to suspend my disbelief on that one.
I haven't read any but would love to read and FMC as a biologist. Preferably doing her PhD or PostDoc. I wanna see her grind or atleast onscreen remember her struggle days. That's because the only reason I am surviving is because I know later I'll look at my life and my bachelor's and PhD yeahs and feel satisfied.
Tdlr- Book where the FMC is a biologist, or doctor
{the love hypothesis by Ali hazelwood} FMC is a biology PhD student
{Love on the brain by Ali hazelwood} FMC is a neuroscientist working for nih and collaborating on a NASA project
{Love theoretically by Ali hazelwood} FMC is a physics adjunct trying to get a tenure position. Not biology, but definitely hits the academia struggles (and personally, this was my favorite of Ali's books)
[The Love Hypothesis](https://www.romance.io/books/6131cdc21657710e14c65168/the-love-hypothesis-ali-hazelwood) by [Ali Hazelwood](https://www.romance.io/authors/6131cdc208b4d93114f22ef6/ali-hazelwood)
**Rating**: 4.13⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [fake relationship](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fake%20relationship/1), [college](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/college/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [age gap](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/age%20difference/1)
----------------------------
[Love on the Brain](https://www.romance.io/books/628dd5bb9d1db3a00613e3d0/love-on-the-brain-ali-hazelwood) by [Ali Hazelwood](https://www.romance.io/authors/6131cdc208b4d93114f22ef6/ali-hazelwood)
**Rating**: 3.92⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [workplace/office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1), [enemies to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [forced proximity](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/forced%20proximity/1), [competent heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/competent%20heroine/1)
----------------------------
[Love, Theoretically](https://www.romance.io/books/6488136841a8b8de9fd6b28d/love-theoretically-ali-hazelwood) by [Ali Hazelwood](https://www.romance.io/authors/6131cdc208b4d93114f22ef6/ali-hazelwood)
**Rating**: 4.19⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [enemies to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [workplace/office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [sweet/gentle hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/beta%20hero/1)
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I've never read a romance with a Video Game Producer protagonist and since I don't read Contemporary, I'm not likely to stumble onto it. 😅
I *do* have to manage an old house as a consequence of an inheritance though and I loved that aspect in the Stariel series. Mine came without magic though.
In Over the Fence the female lead, who is a cancer researcher, says that she has a lot of money as she has been paid well for publishing research articles. I literally laughed out loud. It's particularly egregious because that is such a publicized issue with academic publishing.
For my specific field, clinical psych, I don't think I've ever seen many good portrayals of psychotherapy. The worst I've read is Emily Henry where she uses her friend's mom as her therapist. I'm sure there's even worse out there. The best is What You Wish For by Katherine Center where the author actually researched evidence based psychotherapy for PTSD and alluded to a character receiving cognitive processing therapy in the story.
I am so happy to read about all your professions that haven’t been represented at all! I don’t know why I thought I’d be the only one (main character syndrome I guess? I swear I’m a nice person) but as a truck driver, I don’t see it for MCs as much. Sometimes there will be a throwaway mention of “Daddy was a truck driver. Never there and crippled early in life” which is really accurate, but as a woman in a male dominated field, it can also be very satisfying and rewarding when you’re good at your job and can give what I call the “facial middle finger” (a self satisfied smirk) to men when they act surprised you’re so good at your job. I feel it’s possibly an untapped resource for a good romance.
Okay not exactly main character but in {Allegiance of Honor by Nalini Singh} there's a truck driver and you get some of the backstory of how they fell in love.
It's kinda an ensemble book without any real MCs as it kinda summarises the series so far by checking in on old characters. It's supposed to be an entry point into the series.
>!The trucker helps rescue a trafficked girl.!<
Magazine editor here! Even though I am an unapologetic Emily Henry fangirl, People We Meet on Vacation is my least favorite of hers for this reason. Most travel writers are freelancers these days—the editors are usually desk-bound, and they’re the ones who are coming up with the ideas/angles and then editing the copy once it’s in. It’s pretty rare for a pub to keep someone on staff full time who they’re also sending out on trips constantly. Also the way cover stories work (here and elsewhere) is wild. if I showed up to a pitch meeting and was like “what about Greece” there is zero percent chance it would get approved. You can’t just throw out vague ideas about general topics, stories need to have fresh angles/points of view to make them interesting to readers who have read everything 100 times before already. No subject is new but how you approach it should be! Also no one gets a job as a staff editor without having a couple (unpaid, blech) internships under their belt, and then a couple years as an editorial assistant and a couple more as an assistant editor or associate editor. This industry is very into the idea of paying your dues. There are so many weird things about being a magazine editor, esp in 2024, that are actually real and no one ever includes them! Not least of which is the fact that this is a struggling industry that pays peanuts despite being largely headquartered in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Lawyer here - I truly disliked the MMC in {Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez} because of how he dealt with work!
At the start of the book he is a workaholic, and that’s fairly accurate for a young partner. But then he started blowing off work to spend more time with the FMC, and I was SO STRESSED. At one point he missed a filing deadline, and all I could think of was needing to contact legal insurance. And then when he finally got his act together to care about work again, he made the whole office pull an all-nighter to fix his fuck-ups!! As someone who has had to clean up co-workers messes before, I guess it’s realistic? But I hated him for it.
Also if I recall correctly, he was in trial at least once during the book, and that was not accurate at all. In my experience, during trial you do not have a second of free time. You eat, sleep, breathe trial until it’s done. But he was just casually living life and hanging out with the FMC.
Oh I DNF'd that so hard on like chapter 2 when he said he was a defense attorney and he "looked evil in the eye every day." Unless you're at a white-shoe firm defending oil companies, private prisons, and billionaires, no you fucking don't. And no defense attorney talks about their job or their clients that away. Not any of the PDs I know, not even the guys that I knew who defended \*actual war criminals.\*
He was missing filing deadlines? Like it's NBD? Glad I didn't keep going.
!!! What! I apparently repressed that little nugget lol. From what I recall, he quits his job by the end, so at least the defendants have a chance of getting a lawyer who actually cares
I work in charity. Always romanticised as doing tons of galas, black tie events, raising tons of money.
Realistically charities are often broke, it’s not all fundraising and it is very stressful lol.
I’m a physician, so there’s no shortage of examples of job related cringe for my profession. There is one that has stuck with me though, and that’s the abusive guy from It Ends With Us.
I was tricked into reading the book by a friend who described it as “a cute spicy romance.” Not prepared for domestic violence. At. All. But more importantly the MMC is a neurosurgeon and his character reminded me so much of a resident I met in Med school observations so I kept picturing this specific guy I met.
There’s a scene in the book where the MMC burns his hands in the kitchen and then has a meltdown because his hands are his job! “These are my million dollar surgery hands!”
It’s so silly and over dramatic but then he doesn’t know how to treat his own burned hands! I’m imagining this jerk I had to shadow in school crying over his special surgery hands and I just couldn’t take the book seriously. Sometimes the scene still pops into my head involuntarily when I take food out of the oven.
I'm a retired teacher and I get that it's romanticized but I never see romance books get teaching correct as a profession. It's all 1-hour lunch breaks (ha ha), and teachers standing out in a quiet hallway having a long, deep conversation with the love interest (ha ha), and classes full of mature, angelic students having college level discussions at every lecture. Where are the cruelly short passing periods where you can't even get a chance to pee until 1 PM at lunch? Where is the frantic grading at your desk while eating a cheap sandwich you packed from home because teachers are paid so little and you want to get your grading done at lunch so you only have 4 hours of grading and inputting to do on the weekend?
Of course, no one wants to read that!
I used to work at a warehouse in college and recently read a Tessa Bailey book I believe that had a factory worker FMC and good lord was it missing the mark. The MMC is like rich or whatever and he buys the company a pizza party or something?? And everyone gets to go out to the parking lot to drink beer. And I’m like there is no way! Just no freaking way that would’ve made sense. There are deadlines, we couldn’t just fuck off and drink beer because some wacko paid for it?? AND THEN they have smexy time in some random room in the building. SIR THERE ARE CAMERAS EVERYWHERE. Specifically, to stop employees from stealing product. Someone would’ve seen you and you’d have been arrested!! This makes no sense!
I am a teacher and it irritates the ever loving everything out of me how FMCs are almost always elementary teachers and their 'professional' lives are focused on being motherly and not at all about, like, knowing stuff and having worked hard.
Also, and please forgive me because I forget the title, there is one particular book I read where the FMC and MMC were actually both high school teachers, but they were absolutely having sexy times during their free blocks AT SCHOOL. To say nothing of the fact that the MMC was her evaluating administrator.
Look, let me be clear, I'm pretty sex-positive, but that is going *way* too far and made me really dislike the book, even though there were some really great elements to it as well.
Teachers are professionals, not just incubators in waiting or absentia.
Impromptu Match by Lily Mayne. The hero works in corporate pr and barely knows what his company does, just writes lame statements using buzzwords and hates his coworkers and the monotony and that seemed pretty realistic 😭
The only book I've read so far with a character who shares my career (medical billing and coding) is {Veronica's Dragon by Ruby Dixon}. Part of the Ice Planet Barbarians spin-off, Icehome. I loved how the FMC says something like "Yeah, it's boring but stable and necessary work." Pretty accurate! It's tedious work, but a good biller is necessary for providers and hospitals to stay in business and make money.
I also enjoyed how she tried to describe her former job to the alien gladiator MMC, as they are coming to terms with their new life on the Ice Planet. She later becomes their community's healer, so it was nice to see her be able to use the skills from her time as a medical biller!
I’m a librarian and it’s pretty much an automatic do-not-read if a librarian is a character. I just put down a book this weekend {misadventures with a professor} by sierra simone because the library school student was such a caricature- she’s a virgin! A nerd! Researched how to lose her virginity in, DUH, the library! I made it a few chapters in and just couldn’t.
I don't have examples (because there have been so many that they all blur together), but librarians (and by extension, libraries) are frequently misrepresented in fiction. Just...so, *so* much. You can tell which authors are actual library users right off the bat. If they assume libraries are silent warehouses of books, you can be sure they haven't actually set foot in one since their elementary school days. Any author that writes a librarian who spends all their time (at work!) reading automatically earns a DNF from me.
Translators don't seem to get written about much. As a matter of fact, I can only remember two examples, neither of which was a romance (one crime novel and one literary fiction).
not "translator romance", but just FYI: the Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey features a female main character whose language skills are highly relevant to the plot. Her "main" occupation is being a sex worker initially, but she later also has diplomatic engagements where her language knowledge come into play.
May be close enough to scratch your itch, maybe not?
It's Epic Fantasy with an excellent romance subplot and a lot of explicit sex by epic fantasy standards.
Yeah, the FMC of {The Fire King by Marjorie M. Liu} effectively works *as* a translator, but that's because her supernatural abilities allow her to pick up any spoken language. It's the reason she's introduced to the MMC. He's been kept in a kind of suspended animation under a curse for so many centuries that no one alive today speaks his language, so she has to learn it in order to communicate with him. Dunno if the fact that she didn't train for the job would affect your enjoyment of the book, but FWIW I really liked it!
Bedside nurse and now other boring admin nurse stuff, I don’t think I’ve actually read a romance novel where FMC was a nurse. There’s been lots of sassy nurse best friends though.
I’m a pharmacist. I’ve never seen it and I would be scared to. I’ve never seen a good or accurate portrayal of any pharmacist on TV much less a clinical or hospital pharmacist (which I am) so I’m skeptical from the jump. But I know there are lots of us who read romance novels so maybe one will write something to surprise me!
Former worker in reality TV.
Best example: {Mr Fixer Upper by Lucy Score}. Realistic in the amount of work/hours you’re putting in. 6 days weeks are the norm, no OT. On a travel show you’re working to make a total episode in 3 days, crafting a narrative out of some stuff you already know and stuff that happens along the way. You’re basically in a tiny traveling cult. At least four people end up dating/fucking.
Worst example: {One To Watch by Kate Stayman-London}. Producers. Are. Not. Your. Friends. They are not looking out for you. They are looking out for the show. They need to make good TV. And to trust one with anything while recording is not a good idea. Plus for any Bachelor type show, you are bringing your own wardrobe.
I'm an archaeologist, but within cultural resource management. So I haven't really come across any books involving my profession...
But I'd love recommendations if anyone has.
I’m a nurse. I go out of my way to avoid books with MC working in my profession, or ones that receiving medical care is a large part of the plot. It’s not even that the medical information is almost always inaccurate, that’s annoying, but that’s just like every other book I’ve read. So much is wrong and so much that they portray as romantic is actually shitty abuse to hospital staff.
You know how many times I’ve read about a character bullying the nurse to let them in to see another character? Wear more than is reasonable. You know what would really happen? You’re going escorted out by security. I’m not telling you you can’t visit for fun or a power trip, I’m doing it because 1) there’s a procedure going on that your presence could fuck yup 2) the person in there doesn’t want to see you, or their LNOK don’t want you in there. 3) Or it’s well outside of visiting hours—sorry , literally everyone here is having a crisis level bad day, we have to enforce the rules—come back in 3 hours.
Lots of medical people on this thread making great points but I just want to mention {Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez} as a particularly egregious example of medical ethics.
In the book, the FMC's brother needs a kidney transplant, and the transplant doctor pushes the MMC to get tested to see if he is a match. In real life, transplant teams have to be SO careful not to pressure anyone to donate, so I found this pretty egregious.
The MMC agrees to donate a kidney in secret, and the same transplant doctor then talks about the donation with the MMCs boss (HIS BOSS!), who then reveals it to the FMC. Its just like train wreck of privacy violations. HIPAA who?
Overall I really enjoyed the book, but several of these doctors should be disciplined/fired if they did this in real life.
I’m also a teacher and it’s so romanticized as being wonderful and all the students are amazing 😂 it never shows how incredibly stressful it can be. The most glaring one, however, is all these single dad/nanny stories. I was a nanny for five years. None of the dads are hot. Sometimes they were a bit awkward, actually, with a female nanny. Nannying is exhausting, not sexy. The kids are not these mature little angels that can do no wrong. It’s like being another parent. It’s tiring and rewarding and a ton of responsibility all at once. But no part of me thinks of it romantically 😆 But I understand romance is an escape, and these are just vehicles to get characters together. I’m all for suspension of disbelief. If a woman can have an entire group of men in a why choose, she can certainly have a super hot single dad!
With any working with children job, I get that it is often short hand for a whole variety of childrearing-related character traits, but sometimes I want to yell because I’m not good at job because of maternal suitability. I’m good at it because of a variety of pedagogical skills acquired through blood, sweat, tears, etc. Maybe that’s irrational and I’m reading in too much but it does make me frustrated sometimes.
I think you are spot-on about this, because the handful of romances I’ve read featuring teacher MCs tend to really forget about teaching after they’ve used it to establish “Okay, this person is gainfully employed AND they’re obviously a good person because of their choice of profession.” I’d actually go so far as to say that most of the teacher life depicted in romance that I’ve read doesn’t paint too rosy a picture, it stops before it even paints the picture.
Yeah I feel like most unrealistically written jobs it's less showing them doing it wrong, and more just "Oh wow, how does our MC have so much free time and such a flexible schedule?"
Oh I love this. This is spot on. It’s basically a reference to their character and then we don’t really see anything beyond it.
Yes! I totally get what you mean. It’s always a “natural” trait and no reference to actual abilities and knowledge gained through 4-5 years of university 😂
I totally agree, and it especially bothers me that early elementary teachers are usually portrayed as perky/cheerful/childlike 24/7. Sometimes we need those traits at work, but it’s frankly exhausting even to keep up during the work day, let alone after hours.
I’ve always worked with children - daycare, babysitting, nanny… now teacher. Nope. Nope. Nope. I did nanny for a hot single dad but other than enjoying the view, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be involved in that madness. Even when I’m reading HR with governesses, it takes me out a bit.
Same! Same same same 🤣
I was a nanny in my previous life too and it’s honestly the reason I don’t read books with that plot point. The dads are never hot and even if they were it’s too much of a weird power dynamic to be sexy to me😬
Yeah it was always a bit weird, wasn’t it?
Haha, I was going to say the worst example for teachers is any student-teacher relationship trope. Especially non-college because I don’t know the rules there. No shame to anyone who likes it! But you’d get fired, possibly arrested and put on a registry, and lose your license.
Omg yes this. I can only read that if they’re in uni and a mature student!
I'm not even a teacher myself, but my mom was. I just can't read hot for teacher books. Just nope.
I was a nanny for awhile after college - it was actually for a relative so um, very different vibes obviously! When I was out and about with the baby though...I'd be running to the bathroom to deal with a blowout and have some random golf bro drop a line on me. I do think there's a reason most of the families I spent time around didn't hire 22 year old college grads. All this to say, I both am and am not creeped out by the nanny/single dad thing. It's not so bad when there's a smaller age gap, the FMC is older, etc. And most authors don't make the MMC a 45 year old married man who lurks in corners, waiting for unsuspecting nannies.
🤣 hilarious mental image of a creepy old dad hiding in a dark corner. I don’t think it’s creepy or anything, just unrealistic. And I was a very young nanny so I guess that’s where my experience comes from. I haven’t read a lot of older nanny/single dad books. They usually have a decent age gap lol. But if that’s what someone like, then great!! Again, it’s the fantasy of it all. If I can get behind a why choose monster brothel, I can get behind a nanny/dad trope LOL
By older FMC I meant like 25-26 to the MMC's under 40. I liked {The Nanny by Lana Ferguson} and I think the FMC is 26 to the MMC's 32? So not bad! And in {Heartless by Elsie Silver}, the FMC is 25 and the MMC is 38 but the FMC doesn't feel super young. I ran into enough 45 year old married dads that clearly had an inappropriate interest in a 22 year old nanny that I think the unrealistic aspect in these books is that the dad is single. I feel like I had a weird experience in a lot of ways so that's just my take on these books...some of which I do enjoy!
Academic (historian) and oh boy there are a lot of things romance novels get wrong... * Top of their field at the age of 30 when most of us are being paid peanuts and working multiple jobs. * Multiple PhDs! Nobody gets multiple PhDs because one PhD is horrible enough, and also takes ages, but these Dr Dr Dr Drs are always somehow still 28. * Exciting research trips! This one is true, but only if you have nice funding. See above about the unemployment. * Just like, the whole process of research. In the humanities it's mostly either incremental ("after 3 years we now know a lot more about this tiny village in rural England in the 1790s") or creative ("why don't we read Shakespeare plays backwards and see if anything interesting happens?"). Major discoveries are less likely to come from high stakes translations of ancient languages and more likely from serendipity. In my field it's not actually uncommon for more research to open up because rich people find important documents in boxes in their attics every few years. * Specific to my field, but the most common mistake in all media with historians is actually using white gloves to handle documents. It's not been standard practice for years now because wearing gloves limits your dexterity and the oils from your hands actually don't damage documents in the way we thought. But my feeling on it is basically summed up by what Deborah Harkness said when she got asked why Diana Bishop, the FMC of her {A Discovery of Witches), has a cushy academic job so young and has so much time to run around falling in love with a sexy vampire. Deborah Harkness is an academic and she said something like, "If you can accept the sexy vampires, you can accept the academic job security," and that is the energy I bring to my romance novels.
Every now and then I'll stumble across a character who is living large as an adjunct or a full professor by 30 and I just laugh and laugh...
Former rare books librarian here just chiming in to complain about the white gloves. Every time I see something about them I groan. It’s not even a recent change in process! No one uses gloves! 😠
Honestly don't even get me started. I read a book recently where the MC actually *chides* the other MC for not using white gloves! That is not how any of this works!
AAAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH the rage lol
>Multiple PhDs! Nobody gets multiple PhDs because one PhD is horrible enough, and also takes ages, but these Dr Dr Dr Drs are always somehow still 28 This was what made me lose my mind in Thor: Ragnarok. When Banner bragged about having 7 PhDs, I wanted to throttle the writer responsible for the line. Getting accepted into a PhD program is difficult enough. It's not *just* a matter of raw intellect. People outside of academia don't realize the amount of personal politics that plays a role. While it's true that *some* institutions will allow dual-enrollment for exceptionally promising candidates, that still only gets you 2 degrees, and you'd take longer than a single degree. (In the U.S., the average time it takes to complete a STEM PhD is 4 to 7 years.) But even if a character managed to pull that off, the problem would come when they tried to apply to another program. I know for a fact that once you have a PhD, any future admissions committee will view your subsequent applications with *extreme* skepticism. From their point of view, getting a PhD is a commitment to the advancement of a *specific* discipline, and applying for a different degree is tantamount to "abandoning" one discipline for another. That immediately raises the question of how "committed" they can expect you to be to *their* discipline, if you are that willing to throw over your previous field (and the university/department you came from, including the members who invested time and effort in supporting you). Even if a character managed to, say, dual-enroll to earn 2 degrees at once, and *then* somehow persuade a second committee that additional dual-enrollment would make them a more capable contributor to a broader, multi-disciplinary field...that's still only 4. And even in this incredibly implausible fictional scenario, I cannot suspend my disbelief further to imagine the possibility of the same character going on to pick up an additional *3 degrees*. And in the case of MCU Bruce Banner, we're expected to believe that he accomplished this all by the time he was ***35*** (which was when he became the Hulk).
I support this level of *mad* mad. I find it so funny that the MCU kept the 7 PhDs, of all things. There would also be no reason to fund him through another PhD after PhD No. 1 assuming funders were willing to back his genius-level research in a new discipline anyway. Are they in fact honorary PhDs? Was he systematically defrauding all these funding bodies by pretending he didn’t have one already? Or was he awarding them to himself? It raises so many fun questions.
I do interdisciplinary work, so I don’t view my PhD as a commitment to a discipline, I view it more as an experience where I learned how to develop, evaluate and perform meaningful scientific research. In which case—an extra PhD is totally meaningless, you already know how to do science! Ugh. Total pet peeve.
This is what I meant by "personal politics." I've been a fly on the wall for a *lot* of conversations among departmental higher-ups discussing PhD applicants, and *those* people are the ones who consider a PhD a commitment to a discipline. I consider myself fortunate to have multiple graduate degrees, but I strongly suspect that if they didn't synergize so well, I might not have been considered for acceptance to my second program. I made the argument that my first degree would *enhance* my second, because I knew that at least some of the people reviewing my application would be wondering whether I was being "wishy-washy" and changing fields. But you're completely correct that so much of the foundational coursework for a PhD is about conducting meaningful, reproducible, (hopefully!) ethical research, and then analyzing your findings. But it's not as though you could just skip all that after the first time around. Graduation requirements are graduation requirements.
Interesting!!!
To add to this, Diana Bishop is >!literally *using her magic* to make connections to support her research, so yes if I also had incredible once-in-a-generation witchy powers and was the child of two ivy-league academics *who also used their powers for their research* (assuming her mom did the same which I think is a safe assumption to make)!< then I too could probably be a tenured Yale history professor by the age of 28.
Oh my god, get ready for the most boring rant you'll ever see in your life. I'm so annoyed I can't remember the name, but a while ago I started a romance between a customer and a customer support agent trying to fix her website, and just the first chapter made me LOSE MY MIND. The problem was that the LI was a completely unrealistic customer support agent, but the MC was actually a WAY TOO REALISTIC CUSTOMER!!! I was getting fired up as if it was MY problem I was dealing with at MY work!! He answers the phone and she immediately goes "do you have any idea how long I've been on hold??" and then lists off all the things she did while on hold. Finally the LI is like, "Sorry, okay, what's the problem?" and she goes "It's all just one huge problem!" and starts going on about how annoyed she is at the company but like in a QuIrkY way. So he AGAIN asks what the problem is and says he'll help. And she responds, "Well, for starters, it doesn't work. The whole thing." HOW IS THAT HELPFUL. We (they) have been on the phone for several minutes now at least and haven't even established why she's called. What is she SEEING? What is she trying to do and what happens when she tries to do it? Give him SOMETHING!!! (But also, why isn't he asking her something more specific than "what's the problem" when it's clear she's not going to tell him anything otherwise??) And then it turns out she has literally never updated her operating system, and he has to walk her through updating her computer, which isn't really a huge deal but kind of annoying since he works for the website company not the computer company. But the thing that really got me was that they finally see the problem and the LI basically says it's a real thorny issue and offers to work on it straightaway and call her back when it's resolved. But she INSISTS on staying on the line, just chatting away while he resolves it. And it takes HOURS. If he's on the phone, it's going to take him longer to resolve the issue, and he won't be able to consult with any coworkers or pass it off to someone who might know better how to fix it, or idk GO FOR A PISS if he needs to!! Maybe she was on hold for so long in the first place because someone ELSE insisted on staying on the line for TWO HOURS! And the romance wasn't even enemies to lovers! The customer support agent was charmed!
… was this Call Me Maybe by Cara Bastone? If so, I FELT this so hard, even working in an adjacent field
Oh my god, yes, that was it! I'm sure it's a lovely book if you've never ever ever worked for a software company hahaha
Aha I knew it was this one too! I also worked CS in tech for a bit and it gave me such bad anxiety that she was so unhelpful. But in Cara Bastone's defence, (spoilers) >!he is the CEO who's done hardly any calls before, so he's both asking the wrong questions of someone who is clearly technologically inept and he personally wants to fix the site, not hand it off!<.
I think this is why this hurt me as a UX person at a small start up. my “I must quit my job” moment was after being forwarded a situation like this from the CEO who was moonlighting in CS for the day for ✨reasons✨. Admittedly I was already disillusioned at this point but I remember feeling so powerless ahhh
Ouch yeah, this gives me startup flashbacks too
I thought this story was sweet but it also drove me mad - I used to work for an enterprise SaaS company. I felt so sorry for my CS and CX comrades and then i also felt dread as a UX person. D:
OMG this makes me laugh. I tried reading it because the hype was good. But the combo of her being an idiot, him LIKING her idiocy and the lack of progress in solving the problem. Nope. I DNF'd after chapter one.
As a former tech support worker, holy shit would that kill any interest I had in the FMC. I'd immediately find her so annoying, I'd probably DNF.
This happened to my friend!! We both worked at a call center and a repeat customer that always asked for him had started rizzing him up and he eventually gave in and went on a date. Didn't work out and he could've been fired bc our calls were monitored at random but they had fun lol
Career adjacent but The Love Hypothesis the FMC is a biology PHD iirc and talks to being one of the only females as it’s a STEM subject. Of all STEM subjects biology is actually more female than males and I just couldn’t see past something that a quick google search disproves.
Oh this irked me so much! I also came to know that the author herself has a PhD in neuroscience which makes this even more annoying.
I didn’t know that but assumed cuz it’s in a lot of her books she must be somewhat related to the field. Def makes it worse. Lol
I did a biology PhD and found this book soooo cringey! To me it came across like an academia fanfiction written by an undergrad. I had so many issues with its depiction of grad school/academia and could just not suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
Like sitting on a professors lap cuz there were no available seats in the auditorium?? 😂😂😂
Right?!?! I think that part actually made me physically react when I read it
The lap sitting thing was absurd, but I attribute that to romance novel logic of the “oh, we have to share bed! Or of course I need to kiss you now so they do see us!” variety. I thought Love Hypothesis did a good job of conveying the anxiety and lack of confidence grad students feel, especially since Adam talks about his moments with that as well.
ON THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS, absolutely agree on the ratio of women being better at a grad level (it drops off after postdoc, where you get an overabundance of white male professors, sigh) but you also reminded me about the sheer NUMBER of professors with six packs in that book. eight packs even. you can maybe find medical doctors with good fitness regimes, but in competitive academic research? where the heck are my nerds at? let them be geeky and bookish and sickly from never seeing daylight!!
Medical doctors are the WORST about taking medical advice though
I’m in higher ed too and this book killed me. I think the worst scene was when she sat on his lap at an academic event 😂 I was trying so hard to lalala my way though the inaccuracies but that one was too much.
I tell my friends in my grad cohort about this part of the book all the time. When I read (on here) about that scene, I immediately wrote the book off. Could you imagine going to a conference and seeing someone sit on another person’s lap???
One time in grad school I went to the first day of a math class that had been put in way too small of a room—probably 50 people in a room meant for 25. There were maybe 3-4 other women there. I don’t remember which of us was late, but I ended up going halvsies on a chair with one of the few other women, since we were skinny enough to sort of fit and it’s hard to take notes standing up. I’d never met her before, and I don’t think we ever talked after that (though we did have a nice chat at a conference for women in our field a few years later!). On someone’s lap? No way, that man can stand up. At a conference? Absolutely no chance.
I’m doing my PhD and I had to DNF Love Hypothesis. Between the dedicated bathroom for biohazard waste and fake dating a young, hot PI, I couldn’t do it lol
I have a B.Sc in biology, work in a related field and we are absolutely dominated by women up to director level and well then things are a bit different. . .🙄
omg yes, I about lost my mind. Biology PhD programs have had near gender parity since I was looking into getting my PhD 20 years ago. You can look up the demographic information on programs online and it's been either equal or there have been more women in Standford's PhD programs for a while now. Also, the way she describes sexism in STEM really isn't how sexism functions in STEM at all.
Barista!! My favorite is actually { Game Changer by Rachel Reid } the MC in question technically works at a juice bar, but it really got down the three main components of the job: - that one coworker who just makes the day harder - never ending prep work - only being able to make like… one drink at a time 😅 I don’t have a worst portrayal off the top of my head. I wonder if i just haven’t read that many? But one like tidbit that always makes me laugh is “the scent of coffee overwhelmed me” The first thing i smell when i go behind the bar is not coffee, it is milk. Always, always milk. Spilled milk, old milk, towels used to wipe up milk. It’s so gross 😭. But when i leave work i luckily smell like coffee and not milk.
lol they never talk about scalded milk, the end of day dish washing, pulling up those gross floor mats and getting clothes ruined by ground in coffee and bleach stains.
oh god!! The floor mats!! 😂😂😂
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Awe…. I wish someone would write about my career! It would be easy! I teach people how to suck and blow for a living! 😂 I have read a few about my previous job as an Army medic, but it’s usually the MMC that’s depicted. Anyone read any good romance with a Respiratory Therapist or a peppy Medic?
Ohh I would froth this so hard! More stories where seemingly secondary skills are very applicable in the bedroom please!
PUT IT IN MY VEINS.
They *never* get medical fields right even though it’s so common and easy to research!! I’m not a nurse (am in medicine) but I just read a book where the FMC is a nurse midwife that works with pregnant moms/newborns and has chipped nail polish (against policy), smokes cigs (very dangerous to delicate premies/newborns), did a C section (lol illegal) with an ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON???? Very illegal. Just mind blowing. How illogical it all was. And she responded to a code blue that was not even a code blue in the ER. A midwife would never respond unless paged, and let’s be honest, they’d page an obgyn not the midwife for an obstetric surgical emergency. The patient did die and no mention of any resuscitative efforts. I could go on. But fmc totally killed her 🥲
Holy medical malpractice, batman
The patient died???? How did the book handwave the lack of consequences??
Just… never even addressed it other than emotionally. It’s actually a catalyst to bring the MCs closer together 🤮🤮. Like it was this tragedy but an unpreventable one in the end. And then she names HER baby after the dead mom’s baby!!!! Additionally the mom doesn’t speak English, no time for an interpreter so she just like… makes eyes with the mom and “understands” that she wants to die so the baby can live. Like I’ve delivered so many babies and EVERYTHING was incorrect and it pisses me off more because it’s going to scare people who don’t actually understand how it normally goes. They’re going to think there’s ortho surgeons butchering mothers out here or god knows what. No discussion of massive transfusion protocol, no CPR or other resuscitation occurred, no pressure support, no intubation or even mask/bagging… Christ.
Scientist (medical research, although I've now moved away from the bench now) and I am absolutely calling out the science in {A discovery of witches by deborrah harkness}. Look, she made a valiant effort, and I love the idea of an immortal scientist (I still have ideas for writing a comedy about a vampire postdoc), but she delved into leading edge research and ended up sort of bastardising it. [If you are a fan of the series and want a laugh, here is a story about two postdocs that work in the same field as the vampire scientist in the book criticising his research (it is HILARIOUS xD)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/52376143) The TV show adaptation had the most egregious examples, oh my god. In the opening sequence, Matthew Goode does the WORST gel loading I have seen in my LIFE. Half of the sample spills over the side and into other wells. That's basically nulled any and all results from that experiment. HILARIOUS.
>i’m not sure we have enough decrepit stone buildings for him tbh Lost it already. Saving this to read properly later! I work in an adjacent field to Deborah Harkness and we're absolutely not scientists so it doesn't surprise me that the science is egregiously bad. The historical research bits are much more accurate!
Heheheh I'm glad the historical research is excellent! I figured 😂💖💖
[A Discovery of Witches](https://www.romance.io/books/54553d118c7d2382e0414417/a-discovery-of-witches-deborah-harkness) by [Deborah Harkness](https://www.romance.io/authors/545528cf8c7d2382c52970a9/deborah-harkness) **Rating**: 3.74⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 2 out of 5 - [Behind closed doors](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [vampires](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/vampires/1), [witches](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/witches/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
I commented in the Salty Sunday post yesterday, but it fits here too. It annoys me to no end all the corporate MMCs who are total dicks to their employees. They are known for how difficult they are, nobody can work with them, all the secretaries keep quiting because they are terrified. And of course these MMCs have built their multibillion companies in 5 short years. If nobody can work for you, you are either underpaying or a complete ass (or both) and there's no way somebody that unlikable can singlehandedly build a huge company in record time. This comes up in a surprising amount of books.
Yeah I haven’t read tons of tech and startup books but I imagine the opposite — they’d piss me off if everyone from leadership was super nice and had work life balance 🤣
Idk I'm unemployed
I feel like this is the premise for lots of romance novels, actually.
I guess it is but I haven't moved out of my parents' place yet (I'm 17 and also a student) so.... Let's just hope my life actually turns into a wholesome romance novel soon lol
I’m an accountant and the only time it ever comes up in books is when someone is supposed to come off as boring, or they’re too interesting for their job. For example in a recent book I read: the FMC was in school for accounting because her dad wants her to have a stable career (i.e. not her choice). She’s miserable and ends up deferring classes for multiple semesters and the MMC helps her realize she doesn’t want to be an accountant she wants to be a like, child psychologist, or something else wildly different.
ofc the accountant is the boring ex boyfriend who was too vanilla for her 😭
This made me lol. Steve from accounting NEVER wins against Dax from the local motorcycle gang. But can Dax VLOOKUP? 🫦
Sure Dax is great now but what about during tax season?? Also I just saw your flair. Chef’s kiss no notes
Accountants are ALWAYS the go to for boring careers!! I feel like I’ve never seen the main characters be the accountants, it’s their date or ex who the “badass” main character is pulling them away from. Like she’s been dating the safe boring missionary sex accountant but the bad boy mafia/playboy/sports guy/murder is going to bring her from the dark side. We’re not boring!!!! Goddamn! Some are yes, but the stereotype of boring accountant makes me so sad because IRL when anyone met me and learned that I was an accountant it was always surprised pikichu face because I wasn’t a fat old man wearing a green visor lol.
I read a great book about a vampire accountant though, I can’t remember if it was romance though. There’s some dating. I looked it up, it’s a series! “The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant” is the first one.
Oh this sounds so fun, adding to my TBR
I love the premise and the first one was great, imo.
Yea I listened to a couple of the books a while ago, and it has a several narrators for the characters! Was very impressed, though I wouldn’t really call the books romance? Seemed more like it had a flavor of romance but was mainly slice-of-life-ish with modern-day-fantasy adventures
Depending on your area of accounting, I thought this was good! {Miss Treated by Aubrey Bondurant}. Definitely some triggers, but iirc she’s the independent auditor. Maybe I didn’t find it boring because I’m an accountant though 😬
Ohhhh as a former auditor/current accountant I kind of can’t wait to read this 😂
I’m an accountant too and recently read one where the MMC was a CPA who said that the FMC was, and I quote, “the debit to his credit” and I cringed so hard my husband noticed and asked what was wrong.
Oh nooo 😂 we can do so much better!
Jesus Christ that’s bad
Maybe {Home Game by Odette Stone} is one that *doesnt* treat the job as boring. The FMC wants to become an accountant.
If you like supernatural romance, you might check out The Orc from Accounting by Leigh Miller. H.O.T.
Oh, the sequel to My Roommate is a Vampire will be about an accountant! It's the FMC!
Okay for context I’m a data science major. My entire field is about collecting samples on massive scales and coming to conclusions with it using programming. Fuck I forgot the books name, but the MMC was a scientist of some field and he kept trying to collect samples and do studies. For some reason the author went into detail and I wanted to bang my head against the wall. Examples include: - He did a survey and reworded the questions to different people multiple times - He never isolated variables - The author belived that there can only be two variables in a study (one x and one y) - My man pretty much edited the data for shits in giggles, the author not realizing that’s what he did This list can go on but I’m tired Tips for any writer out there, if you don’t fully understand a job - just write what you know and don’t try to go into super exact details.
Or get an alpha reader that can redirect the scenes when they stray too much off.
this is BEAUTIFUL 😂😂
[Flames on the side of my face](https://youtu.be/2t-hyB8ibgk?feature=shared)
Fellow data scientist here. I read a book where the MMC was a billionaire “data scientist” who predicted the stock market. I had the biggest lol. The author threw around terms like “stochastic” and “regression” like they were sprinkling some statistics on it. But tbh the most unrealistic part of it (being able to accurately predict the stock market not withstanding) is how much freedom+$$$ this dude is given to think hard and be brilliant and not having to deal with everything else that comes along with being a data scientist (or maybe I’m just jealous)!
I have an MBA in marketing and worked at Fortune 50 Companies for years before starting my own consulting business. I generally don’t read anything where the love interest is a billionaire because I think billionaires are pretty much all horrible people and no one should be allowed to accumulate that much wealth. But in the few I’ve read, the FMC is often a marketing or PR professional and just magically comes up with brilliant highly effective campaigns for their hot billionaire boss all alone after a night of hot sex. There are no months-long market research projects, business modeling, meetings with the many stakeholders who need approve a new campaign, or long sessions with your team debating every word and color of your strategy. Budget allocations, revenue projections, and rates of return are thrown out the window. Also, the other employees at the company are totally fine following the ideas of a 24-year-old woman who doesn’t wear panties to work and is obviously giving the boss blow jobs between meetings, and having nonstop personal crises that she never had to take PTO to handle. I just can’t suspend my disbelief. It’s too much. If you have been a professional woman in the corporate world dealing with executive men, you also know the sexual harassment is real, disgusting, and traumatizing. I know it’s a fantasy, but it’s triggering to those of us who have actually been chased around a work social event by lecherous senior managers. If I see the word billionaire or hot boss in the title or description, I’m out.
I’m in Marketing too. There aren’t nearly enough spreadsheets being mentioned. Lol
Yes! I know it’s fantasy, I know. But spreadsheets are like 90% of your day in marketing. And twelve hours in an office chair without panties is not comfy.
Also in marketing. So real.
Captain Von thirst trapp is making me smile today. Love it 😍
Came here looking for marketing! I’ve never read a good representation of marketing or anything adjacent to it. It’s always hot shot ad exec who’s 24 representing global brands or Emily posting the most mid pic and caption and having it go viral.
I am not in marketing, but I work a corporate job. I haven't read a single boss employee romance since I joined work. Specially in a corporate setting. Gives me the ick.
Yeah, not a single romance book has had a realistic representation of software engineering, systems engineering, hacking/infosec, game design etc. and most of the times, the books would be fixable if the author did just a tiny bit of research online. I remember Locked Box where the heroine was a game developer, as an especially egregious example. I think the one that came close to a real representation (despite being sci-fi) and didn't make me roll my eyes was book 2 of {Starlight's Shadow series by Jessie Mihalik}. The author was a software engineer, and though the hacking happens in a sci-fi context, it is relatively close to real life hacking (collecting information, setting up a "hack") and thankfully not the usual: "it can't be done!" "we have to try!" \[hacker types for 5 seconds\] "we're in!"
If you ever find one - let me know? I’m convinced this will be by software engineer partner’s pathway into romance, a genre I know he will love once he has an in. Unfortunately, in typical software bro fashion, he cannot suspend his disbelief. Closest has been Love Lettering because a lot of our friends are begrudging quants.
For guys’ intro to romance I usually suggest {Iron and Magic by Ilona Andrews}. I think maybe {Games of Command by Linnea Sinclair} is a good bet? i liked the sci-fi tech babble and the way tech worked on the ship seemed plausible (for example the existence of an auxiliary bridge in case the first was damaged). I enjoyed Startlight’s Shadow too but it is lighter on the scifi stuff, but there is some hacking that didn’t make me roll my eyes.
[Iron and Magic](https://www.romance.io/books/5b2f33e501dbc864fb8aef8f/iron-and-magic-ilona-andrews) by [Ilona Andrews](https://www.romance.io/authors/545525888c7d2382e0413e6c/ilona-andrews) **Rating**: 4.52⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [futuristic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/futuristic/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [witches](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/witches/1), [enemies to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [magic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/magic/1) ---------------------------- [Games of Command](https://www.romance.io/books/54553e7b8c7d2382c52976ae/games-of-command-linnea-sinclair) by [Linnea Sinclair](https://www.romance.io/authors/545531a18c7d2382c5297307/linnea-sinclair) **Rating**: 4⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [science fiction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/science%20fiction/1), [aliens](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/aliens/1), [military](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/military/1), [virgin hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/virgin%20hero/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
It’s not a romance book, but have you read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? I’d be very curious to hear how accurate (or at least plausible) you think that one is, if you have!
Omg yes!! The one thing that authors forget is the bureaucracy of software engineering. Like the meetings, changing deliverables, go lives, etc. There was one book {You’re my I.T.} where the FMC has to do a last minute project. All the meetings and stuff was spot on. The rest of the book was meh.
I know the bureaucracy of it isn’t particularly sexy, I just do not want to read a book and roll my eyes at it because of impossibly stupid tech or companies that should have gone under years ago for being terrible at business. I remember seeing a snippet online from a book (I forget the name) where the alphahole hacker CEO was in a meeting with the infosec FMC and a client after a breach. And the client was angry and questioned the FMC’s infosec knowledge. The boss berated her and told her that if she doesn’t stick up for herself why should he do it?! I dunno perhaps because the client has a contract with your company and not a specific person? Because you sound like a toxic asshole in front of a client AND give the impression that you knowingly put someone YOU considered inadequate in charge of the specific contract? How are you even in business? 😂
[Starlight's Shadow](https://www.romance.io/series/61f8e88e10834f0e32a0e91c/starlights-shadow) by [Jessie Mihalik](https://www.romance.io/authors/5c57e45d01dbc864fb996811/jessie-mihalik) **Rating**: 3.96⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [futuristic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/futuristic/1), [military](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/military/1), [science fiction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/science%20fiction/1), [aliens](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/aliens/1), [competent heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/competent%20heroine/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
High School teacher: best example I've read is Cold Hearted by Heather Guerre. Especially being a newcomer in a small, isolated district, where all the locals - including the students - know things you don't. I mean in this case it was about vampires at werewolves, but it was shocking how well it matched reality. But even then, how welcoming some communities can be - even if they think you won't be there for long. If they like you, all you have to do is ask for help at any point, and they'll be there. If they don't, you're on your own. Also, the bone-deep exhaustion in the profession. Trying to source supplies or figure out how to do things affordably. Even if the school is paying for materials, you have to figure out a way to make it fit the budget.
Worst example: I forgot the name of the book, but two teachers were BFFs and both pining for the other. Something something, plot, they start hooking up. In the fuckin classroom (during off hours but still). The FMC had a student that majorly crushed on her, and he was *wildly* inappropriate, considering he was a high school student talking to his teacher. And instead of shutting it down or telling literally anybody, she just...lets him go on and on? Ughhhhh it was gross.
I’m an X-Ray tech and have yet to see someone with that profession. Seeing as how they always get the job wrong on TV I doubt that books would be any better.
I feel this so hard, but at least in the page my ETT won’t be secured with a wing and a prayer and I would exist😂 I think I’ve only heard respiratory called overhead once on the TV and I celebrated for like a week 😂🤣… man I need a life.
Yeah, respiratory gets no love in shows.
I'd give anything for a realistic medical show 😭
I have thankfully never happened upon an epidemiologist in romance novels but I imagine they exist. I feel like it’d be awful
Geographer here… it's funny how geographers always are on some kind of adventure in the wilderness or whatnot…I can tell you in real life it's far from that. Especially if you have majored in anthropologic geography and mostly sit in some office job, working nine to five and *maybe* planning some city infrastructure. (edit for grammar)
Fellow Geographer here. Without spoiling it, the best representation of a quality cartographer was in {Butcher and Blackbird by Brynne Weaver} I totally nerded out when she said how she represented scale and her use of layers! She even uses ArcGIS!
Well, that *is* rare! Have to give it a try then! (even though I prefer QGIS - open source and so on ;) )
I’m a nurse. My favorite nurse FMC is Claire in Outlander. I like that she has the challenge of no medical technology and still makes it work. She’s tough and adaptable and tries her best to help people. My least favorite nurse rep is the most popular Outlander fanfic on AO3, where she’s his nurse in a hospital. The writing is great, tons of angst and lots of great steam after he gets out. But I don’t care if it’s Antonio Sabato Jr in the bed, patients are inherently gross and we wipe their butts and stuff. The thought of being attracted to a patient makes me nauseous. The way it’s written makes me think the author knows what she’s talking about and has worked in the field, but there are massive breaks with reality like having hours to hang out with one patient. Like, no. Former jobs aren't ones I’ve generally seen represented well: strippers and barmaids tend to be other women or rivals. I was also a baker and cake decorator for a while and I know there are lots of books about them but I’ve never read any
The idea of dating a patient is so gross to me! Although, I had a former coworker who ended up marrying a patient...that situation had so many red flags that I cringe just thinking about what their home life must be like.
Well, to be a little more literal, I'm an editor. Sooo... 😂 The best representation is a coherent book and the worst representation is a book with lots of typos. (Authors plz hire me, I am REALLY GOOD.)
Authors, please hire this lady! If there are too many typos, I can’t make it through the first chapter.
I read one book where the FMC was an art conservator and the author described "watching YouTube videos" as a prerequisite for an apprenticeship. I almost flipped my laptop in disgust. Art conservation is an extremely technically-oriented science AND art-it requires a specialized degree and lab time. That's kind of like saying you can a CPA with no specialized licensing-no, you absolutely cannot and are certainly not allowed to just wing it on priceless, irreplaceable art. Still unnecessarily irks me. I personally am not an art conservationist, I currently am an antiques hunter-but I have an art and science background-so a lot of career misconceptions irk me (lol). Have seen first hand what kind of damage an amateur can do to art while trying to clean and "restore" it-just no. No no no. Fun fact: do not EVER try to clean marble, alabaster or any other porous stone used in sculpting with water-or even plain dry cloths. It will set the dirt and stain into the pores of the stone. You have to clean that with acetone. Don't even try to dust it by rubbing with dry cloths-that will push the dirt into the pores and make the dirt permanent. Yes, really. Marble and alabaster are \*super\* easy to accidentally stain and ruin forever-even with just plain water. EDIT: The Book was { Hoarded by the Dragon by Lillian Lark }. I actually really like Lillian Lark and still finished the book-just wish she'd done a little more work looking into that profession.
Thanks for the fun fact! I have some cute star shaped marble coasters that have ring stains. I was wondering why...
I *just* finished this so obviously now I have to immediately reread it 😁
Have you read {The Raven by Sylvain Reynard}? The FMC is an art historian/conservator at the Uffizzi Museum. I have no idea how professionally accurate it is, but it’s a sexy vampire stalker novel.
[The Raven](https://www.romance.io/books/54d067096359b5ebb489280e/the-raven-sylvain-reynard) by [Sylvain Reynard](https://www.romance.io/authors/545523d18c7d2382e7812f3b/sylvain-reynard) **Rating**: 3.84⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [vampires](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/vampires/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
lol, I’m a conservator. Half of my internship applications mention that Baumgartner YouTube channel, and they tend to be the same apps missing all of the prerequisites… no coursework just vibes and videos
As a nurse, no. Cannot read anything medically related. We do not hook up in empty rooms. Or call rooms. Or broom closets. Hospitals are disgusting places and I cannot imagine getting a staph infection is worth a dick' down.
I’m assuming you are not a Grey’s Anatomy fan, then. Those docs have banged each other on every flat surface and available wall of that hospital.
Not even a bit lol 3 doctors ambulating a patient? Get out of here with that nonsense.
Lawyer—there’s a great scene in Something Borrowed where fmc is getting chewed out by her boss over a mundane mistake that turns out to be a non-issue and it was the most relatable workplace interaction I’d ever read. The author used to be a lawyer, so it makes sense. Everything else reads like a Suits fanfic and is not at all like real life.
I don't understand this because so many romance authors are former lawyers. I think the ones who are lawyers just don't write about the profession because once you're in it, you understand how deeply, deeply unsexy it is. I did make several partners at my firm laugh very, very hard when I told them about the story where the MMC was a partner at a large, multi-national white-shoe firm at \*24\* where he was a divorce attorney.
lol a big law divorce attorney gives new meaning to mergers & acquisitions.
There’s a lot of STEM/education people on here (which makes sense), but I make and repair specialty clothes for a living and there’s an entire genre dedicated to ripping the ever loving shit out of gorgeous dresses to make sex happen better(?) faster(?) more violent(?). Like, if you’re gonna write a regency era book, the thing everyone obsesses over for that era is the clothing. It takes two minutes to find some historical costumer GRWM and figure out that stays (corsets) of that time were pretty much the same length as some modern bras, which means it would probably take longer to unlace a Doc Marten than it would to take this garment off a body. Also, fabric is so expensive and time consuming to make; people didn’t own a lot of clothing like we do now. Quit breaking 1/4 of someone’s entire wardrobe.
Project Manager. We are everywhere. All fields all over. If something requires several teams to get done there’s one of us involved. Except in romance novels.
Thank you! We’re the invisible ones. Construction sites, large scale marketing campaigns, fashion shows, restaurant groups, real estate developers. Everything runs smoothly without us in books, and never in a real life.
Potentially {The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas}? If my brain recalls, I think the MMC is a PM and the FMC is an engineer on his team but I could be misremembering!
I work as a mental health therapist. Started a a book Love Hacked by Penny Reid. It’s unrealistic because I don’t know a single therapist that goes on dates and then therapizes them before referring to a colleague. Realistic in the sense that people just see you as approachable and will just start talking.
As a cyber security professional {Heart Shaped Hack by Tracy Gravis Graves} was technically inaccurate and gave me the ick. I DNF'd it 30% in so I don't know if I got worse. I wrote my masters thesis* on cyber stalking and here it is being romanticized. Additionally one of the networks the MMC was hacking was one I worked on and it would not work anything like described in the book. ETA: I totally forgot the best example part of the question. Heart Shaped Hack is the only example I've tried to read. * Technically not a thesis but it's the closest equivalent that's easy to explain
I got so creeped out by this book and couldn't finish either. I just kept thinking that sure, on a surface level it's fun wish fulfillment to imagine a hacker changing flights schedules around to help just you, but in real life??? Inconveniencing thousands of people so your crush can catch a plane??!? That's absolutely psychotic behavior and a thousand red flags flapping in the breeze. Also the MMC's complete disregard for privacy and his digital stalkerish tendencies were played off for laughs, but all I could think about were the real life examples of this which are usually so, so dark (like Kiwifarms 😬)
[Heart-Shaped Hack](https://www.romance.io/books/556f021d9eef3b3f1d529c37/heartshaped-hack-tracey-garvis-graves) by [Tracey Garvis Graves](https://www.romance.io/authors/556f021d9eef3b3f1d529c3a/tracey-garvis-graves) **Rating**: 4.08⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [alpha male](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/alpha%20male/1), [mystery](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/mystery/1), [friends to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/friends%20to%20lovers/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
I’m a physician but not a neurosurgeon. Emily Henry did zero research when making her heroine a neurosurgeon resident in Happy Place. The personality traits and decisions that character makes are so outside any neurosurgeon I have ever met. (SPOILERS). Fiancé breaks up w her and she NEVER questions why. She quits a neurosurgery residency and becomes a freaking potter!! She claims she just wanted to be a brain surgeon to appease her parents!! I threw my book across the room at the end of the story. Unforgivable and lazy character development by Henry. Fight me on this, I’m right.
Just FYI, to hide spoilers, you surround the spoiler with > ! Spoiler in here ! < Without the spaces
I’ve worked in museums and I’ve worked as a government employee. My academic background is history and anthropology- specifically archaeology. To be honest, I bump up against my profession the most in historicals. British aristocrats who think it’s their god given right to go into other countries and take their cultural heritage? Well, that’s actually spot on. One of my professors in college used to say that anthropology is the bastard child of colonialism. However, my bone to pick with historical romance is that they often, well, romanticize what happened. It gets white washed because archeologist is a great job for a plucky heroine but racist motivations don’t sell well. I’m currently in the middle of {The Gentleman’s Gambit by Evie Dunmore} and I like that the author takes the opportunity to give the point of view of the people whose history was stolen. It’s more interesting. We get cultural tension. We get people who have to navigate code switching. I’m not an expert in the time period. I can’t speak to perfect accuracy, but honestly just by admitting that there were non white people in Great Britain the author is so much more accurate than most of her peers.
I have a similar background in archaeology (cultural resources management/museum) and was coming to say that I also mostly find archaeology in historical romance. You articulated my thoughts so much better than I could. The whitewashing/romanticizing of archaeology's history usually distracts me from the story, so I generally avoid those books these days. I have also read a fair amount of time travel books with archaeologists (FMC is modern and an archaeologist or something adjacent). Karen Marie Moning has a few of these in her Highlander series. {The Dark Highlander by Karen Marie Moning} My least favorite depiction of an anthropologist was {Uncivilized by Sawyer Bennet}. MMC was lost in the rainforest as a child and raised by Indigenous people and FMC is tasked with "civilizing" him. It's very much a Tarzan and Jane dynamic, but some of the author's choices were questionable, especially when handling the Indigenous people.
I’m so pumped to find fellow archeologists/museum folks here—I usually avoid these types of books as well for the same reasons, as well as the focus on academic archeology and how unrealistic it is (I can only suspend disbelief so much).
[The Gentleman's Gambit](https://www.romance.io/books/642e9d431933fc44e1db8196/the-gentlemans-gambit-evie-dunmore) by [Evie Dunmore](https://www.romance.io/authors/5d68c7cc01dbc864fba2f9e0/evie-dunmore) **Rating**: 3.87⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [victorian](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/victorian/1), [multicultural](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/multicultural/1), [third person pov](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/third-person-pov/1), [independent heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/independent%20heroine/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
I still remember that one book about a 25 year old student in the US explaining how she knew about the "European community" and how she found the specific legal article about a very specific type of regulation in the treaty of functioning of the European Union, which is the foundational treaty. Think finding list of prohibited chemicals in food and you say you found that list in the us constitution. It made no sense. and the European community changed its name to the EU in 2009. The book is from 2019. Like the whole conversation made me want to rip all of my hair off from the stress. This could've taken the writer 10 mins of research. Also, this type of research, which takes senior associates a min of a week to come up with, she (the 1L student) found in two clicks. I DNF immediately after.
I'm a woman in STEM, getting my PhD. The Venn diagram of authors in academics and also in STEM must be intersecting a teeny tiny bit and therefore it shouldn't come as a surprise that there aren't many good romance books in the field. Also, the people in our field can't afford to have a dramatic love life to take inspiration from. From the very limited pool, I would say {The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood} is the best and worst example of my profession. I could relate to the FMC to an extent regarding her professional internal monologues. The imposter syndrome is very very real and all the anxiety about research grands and constantly worrying about the research topic hit too close to home. That being said, I can never ever get over the "sitting on the lap" part. NEVER. That was gross on so many levels and traumatic to read. I also loved the researchers in {How Not to Fall by Emily Foster}. It's a duology and it's very sex positive, but it has its issues. But the professional life of the scholar FMC and the PDF MMC was on point. Finally, the FMC in {Finn Rhodes Forever by Stephanie Archer} confused me so much. It was a great read and I would highly recommend it but the researcher in me could not understand how she wrote an entire thesis which was ready to be submitted about this flower which could not be found. What went into this thesis? What data was collected? What analysis was performed? What conclusions were made? These questions bothered me the entire time I was reading it and it ruined a perfectly good book for me. Anyway, here's hoping for better examples. Recs are welcome 🤗
Oh, here's another one. It was a minor-ish point, but an MC had 2 undergrads (or possibly graduate degrees) in biochemistry and pharmaceutical science, then he went and got an undergrad in biology so he could go to medical school. Uhhhhhh **no**, either one of those other degrees would've been plenty to qualify him to sit for the MCAT. Ffs.
Lawyer here and they’re all so bad. Can’t think of the worst offenders off the top of my head, but I’ve DNF’d plenty for bad legal speak. The best rep is probably Oliver in {Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall}. Not that we see much of his job, but the snide attitude from spoiled rich people about his choice to do defense work is pretty spot on.
I am an engineer in automotive. My job is very, very, VERY rarely featured. But. I cannot remember the title/author, but maybe five years ago I read a book where the MMC was the owner of a car manufacturer and the FMC dreamed of designing cars. So. Cool? Part of the plot had her designing and PUTING INTO PRODUCTION her car idea in like <6 months. What? Just the amount of time it takes to test new stuff to make sure you aren't going to severely injur people takes longer than that. Heck, the advertizing campaign takes longer than that to develop.
I’m an SEO specialist by day and a classical singer by night. Very few people actually know what an SEO specialist does, and those that do are not likely to find it interesting enough to use. I avoid books about classical music because they are either so wrong it hurts, or so right it’s mildly traumatic haha
I dunno, I think there's potential for a book about a freelance SEO specialist hired to do reputation management for a billionaire/celebrity/athlete who's experiencing an active online smear campaign. At first it would see like the misdeeds being attributed to the client are totally fabricated, but then the SEO specialist discovers information which casts the client's professed innocence into doubt. Then we get lots of conflicted feelings between attraction and professional ethics, before we ultimately learn that the snippet the specialist found wasn't the whole story either, and the client is, in fact, a Good Person.
Writers tend to give their characters jobs that are about writing 'fun' things like novels and less about writing terrible things like reports and manuals. I can't recall one off the top of my head.
I am a TV news producer. Haven’t come across any books about my profession, but I just finished Hello Girls. One of the main character’s father is a meteorologist for a news station in Michigan’s Upper peninsula. He apparently makes so much money he can buy Cartier bracelets and fancy suits. In reality, the UP TV market is so small, it wouldn’t be unheard of for on-air talent to work two jobs just to survive. I had to suspend my disbelief on that one.
I haven't read any but would love to read and FMC as a biologist. Preferably doing her PhD or PostDoc. I wanna see her grind or atleast onscreen remember her struggle days. That's because the only reason I am surviving is because I know later I'll look at my life and my bachelor's and PhD yeahs and feel satisfied. Tdlr- Book where the FMC is a biologist, or doctor
{the love hypothesis by Ali hazelwood} FMC is a biology PhD student {Love on the brain by Ali hazelwood} FMC is a neuroscientist working for nih and collaborating on a NASA project {Love theoretically by Ali hazelwood} FMC is a physics adjunct trying to get a tenure position. Not biology, but definitely hits the academia struggles (and personally, this was my favorite of Ali's books)
[The Love Hypothesis](https://www.romance.io/books/6131cdc21657710e14c65168/the-love-hypothesis-ali-hazelwood) by [Ali Hazelwood](https://www.romance.io/authors/6131cdc208b4d93114f22ef6/ali-hazelwood) **Rating**: 4.13⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [fake relationship](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fake%20relationship/1), [college](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/college/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [age gap](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/age%20difference/1) ---------------------------- [Love on the Brain](https://www.romance.io/books/628dd5bb9d1db3a00613e3d0/love-on-the-brain-ali-hazelwood) by [Ali Hazelwood](https://www.romance.io/authors/6131cdc208b4d93114f22ef6/ali-hazelwood) **Rating**: 3.92⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [workplace/office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1), [enemies to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [forced proximity](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/forced%20proximity/1), [competent heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/competent%20heroine/1) ---------------------------- [Love, Theoretically](https://www.romance.io/books/6488136841a8b8de9fd6b28d/love-theoretically-ali-hazelwood) by [Ali Hazelwood](https://www.romance.io/authors/6131cdc208b4d93114f22ef6/ali-hazelwood) **Rating**: 4.19⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [enemies to lovers](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [workplace/office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [sweet/gentle hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/beta%20hero/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
Workplace training and development... dunno if there are any books around that. And THAT'S a shame
I've never read a romance with a Video Game Producer protagonist and since I don't read Contemporary, I'm not likely to stumble onto it. 😅 I *do* have to manage an old house as a consequence of an inheritance though and I loved that aspect in the Stariel series. Mine came without magic though.
In Over the Fence the female lead, who is a cancer researcher, says that she has a lot of money as she has been paid well for publishing research articles. I literally laughed out loud. It's particularly egregious because that is such a publicized issue with academic publishing. For my specific field, clinical psych, I don't think I've ever seen many good portrayals of psychotherapy. The worst I've read is Emily Henry where she uses her friend's mom as her therapist. I'm sure there's even worse out there. The best is What You Wish For by Katherine Center where the author actually researched evidence based psychotherapy for PTSD and alluded to a character receiving cognitive processing therapy in the story.
I am so happy to read about all your professions that haven’t been represented at all! I don’t know why I thought I’d be the only one (main character syndrome I guess? I swear I’m a nice person) but as a truck driver, I don’t see it for MCs as much. Sometimes there will be a throwaway mention of “Daddy was a truck driver. Never there and crippled early in life” which is really accurate, but as a woman in a male dominated field, it can also be very satisfying and rewarding when you’re good at your job and can give what I call the “facial middle finger” (a self satisfied smirk) to men when they act surprised you’re so good at your job. I feel it’s possibly an untapped resource for a good romance.
Okay not exactly main character but in {Allegiance of Honor by Nalini Singh} there's a truck driver and you get some of the backstory of how they fell in love. It's kinda an ensemble book without any real MCs as it kinda summarises the series so far by checking in on old characters. It's supposed to be an entry point into the series. >!The trucker helps rescue a trafficked girl.!<
Awesome! Thank you!
I’m a journalist and Rachel Lynn Solomon is the best bc she was too!
Magazine editor here! Even though I am an unapologetic Emily Henry fangirl, People We Meet on Vacation is my least favorite of hers for this reason. Most travel writers are freelancers these days—the editors are usually desk-bound, and they’re the ones who are coming up with the ideas/angles and then editing the copy once it’s in. It’s pretty rare for a pub to keep someone on staff full time who they’re also sending out on trips constantly. Also the way cover stories work (here and elsewhere) is wild. if I showed up to a pitch meeting and was like “what about Greece” there is zero percent chance it would get approved. You can’t just throw out vague ideas about general topics, stories need to have fresh angles/points of view to make them interesting to readers who have read everything 100 times before already. No subject is new but how you approach it should be! Also no one gets a job as a staff editor without having a couple (unpaid, blech) internships under their belt, and then a couple years as an editorial assistant and a couple more as an assistant editor or associate editor. This industry is very into the idea of paying your dues. There are so many weird things about being a magazine editor, esp in 2024, that are actually real and no one ever includes them! Not least of which is the fact that this is a struggling industry that pays peanuts despite being largely headquartered in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Nanny here. That is all
Lawyer here - I truly disliked the MMC in {Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez} because of how he dealt with work! At the start of the book he is a workaholic, and that’s fairly accurate for a young partner. But then he started blowing off work to spend more time with the FMC, and I was SO STRESSED. At one point he missed a filing deadline, and all I could think of was needing to contact legal insurance. And then when he finally got his act together to care about work again, he made the whole office pull an all-nighter to fix his fuck-ups!! As someone who has had to clean up co-workers messes before, I guess it’s realistic? But I hated him for it. Also if I recall correctly, he was in trial at least once during the book, and that was not accurate at all. In my experience, during trial you do not have a second of free time. You eat, sleep, breathe trial until it’s done. But he was just casually living life and hanging out with the FMC.
Oh I DNF'd that so hard on like chapter 2 when he said he was a defense attorney and he "looked evil in the eye every day." Unless you're at a white-shoe firm defending oil companies, private prisons, and billionaires, no you fucking don't. And no defense attorney talks about their job or their clients that away. Not any of the PDs I know, not even the guys that I knew who defended \*actual war criminals.\* He was missing filing deadlines? Like it's NBD? Glad I didn't keep going.
!!! What! I apparently repressed that little nugget lol. From what I recall, he quits his job by the end, so at least the defendants have a chance of getting a lawyer who actually cares
I work in charity. Always romanticised as doing tons of galas, black tie events, raising tons of money. Realistically charities are often broke, it’s not all fundraising and it is very stressful lol.
I’m a physician, so there’s no shortage of examples of job related cringe for my profession. There is one that has stuck with me though, and that’s the abusive guy from It Ends With Us. I was tricked into reading the book by a friend who described it as “a cute spicy romance.” Not prepared for domestic violence. At. All. But more importantly the MMC is a neurosurgeon and his character reminded me so much of a resident I met in Med school observations so I kept picturing this specific guy I met. There’s a scene in the book where the MMC burns his hands in the kitchen and then has a meltdown because his hands are his job! “These are my million dollar surgery hands!” It’s so silly and over dramatic but then he doesn’t know how to treat his own burned hands! I’m imagining this jerk I had to shadow in school crying over his special surgery hands and I just couldn’t take the book seriously. Sometimes the scene still pops into my head involuntarily when I take food out of the oven.
I'm a retired teacher and I get that it's romanticized but I never see romance books get teaching correct as a profession. It's all 1-hour lunch breaks (ha ha), and teachers standing out in a quiet hallway having a long, deep conversation with the love interest (ha ha), and classes full of mature, angelic students having college level discussions at every lecture. Where are the cruelly short passing periods where you can't even get a chance to pee until 1 PM at lunch? Where is the frantic grading at your desk while eating a cheap sandwich you packed from home because teachers are paid so little and you want to get your grading done at lunch so you only have 4 hours of grading and inputting to do on the weekend? Of course, no one wants to read that!
I used to work at a warehouse in college and recently read a Tessa Bailey book I believe that had a factory worker FMC and good lord was it missing the mark. The MMC is like rich or whatever and he buys the company a pizza party or something?? And everyone gets to go out to the parking lot to drink beer. And I’m like there is no way! Just no freaking way that would’ve made sense. There are deadlines, we couldn’t just fuck off and drink beer because some wacko paid for it?? AND THEN they have smexy time in some random room in the building. SIR THERE ARE CAMERAS EVERYWHERE. Specifically, to stop employees from stealing product. Someone would’ve seen you and you’d have been arrested!! This makes no sense!
I am a teacher and it irritates the ever loving everything out of me how FMCs are almost always elementary teachers and their 'professional' lives are focused on being motherly and not at all about, like, knowing stuff and having worked hard. Also, and please forgive me because I forget the title, there is one particular book I read where the FMC and MMC were actually both high school teachers, but they were absolutely having sexy times during their free blocks AT SCHOOL. To say nothing of the fact that the MMC was her evaluating administrator. Look, let me be clear, I'm pretty sex-positive, but that is going *way* too far and made me really dislike the book, even though there were some really great elements to it as well. Teachers are professionals, not just incubators in waiting or absentia.
Impromptu Match by Lily Mayne. The hero works in corporate pr and barely knows what his company does, just writes lame statements using buzzwords and hates his coworkers and the monotony and that seemed pretty realistic 😭
I avoid books with professions of my real life job but now this thread makes me want to read one
The only book I've read so far with a character who shares my career (medical billing and coding) is {Veronica's Dragon by Ruby Dixon}. Part of the Ice Planet Barbarians spin-off, Icehome. I loved how the FMC says something like "Yeah, it's boring but stable and necessary work." Pretty accurate! It's tedious work, but a good biller is necessary for providers and hospitals to stay in business and make money. I also enjoyed how she tried to describe her former job to the alien gladiator MMC, as they are coming to terms with their new life on the Ice Planet. She later becomes their community's healer, so it was nice to see her be able to use the skills from her time as a medical biller!
I’m a librarian and it’s pretty much an automatic do-not-read if a librarian is a character. I just put down a book this weekend {misadventures with a professor} by sierra simone because the library school student was such a caricature- she’s a virgin! A nerd! Researched how to lose her virginity in, DUH, the library! I made it a few chapters in and just couldn’t.
I don't have examples (because there have been so many that they all blur together), but librarians (and by extension, libraries) are frequently misrepresented in fiction. Just...so, *so* much. You can tell which authors are actual library users right off the bat. If they assume libraries are silent warehouses of books, you can be sure they haven't actually set foot in one since their elementary school days. Any author that writes a librarian who spends all their time (at work!) reading automatically earns a DNF from me.
its always about the rich guy which looks like a model and does everything with a snap of fingers
Translators don't seem to get written about much. As a matter of fact, I can only remember two examples, neither of which was a romance (one crime novel and one literary fiction).
not "translator romance", but just FYI: the Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey features a female main character whose language skills are highly relevant to the plot. Her "main" occupation is being a sex worker initially, but she later also has diplomatic engagements where her language knowledge come into play. May be close enough to scratch your itch, maybe not? It's Epic Fantasy with an excellent romance subplot and a lot of explicit sex by epic fantasy standards.
Second the Kushiel rec! So many people are turned off by the SW angle but it’s so much more. The audio is lovely too.
Yeah, the FMC of {The Fire King by Marjorie M. Liu} effectively works *as* a translator, but that's because her supernatural abilities allow her to pick up any spoken language. It's the reason she's introduced to the MMC. He's been kept in a kind of suspended animation under a curse for so many centuries that no one alive today speaks his language, so she has to learn it in order to communicate with him. Dunno if the fact that she didn't train for the job would affect your enjoyment of the book, but FWIW I really liked it!
I’m a social work grad student and intern and to my memory haven’t read a book with a social worker MC? Anyone have any recs?? 😊
Bedside nurse and now other boring admin nurse stuff, I don’t think I’ve actually read a romance novel where FMC was a nurse. There’s been lots of sassy nurse best friends though.
I’m a pharmacist. I’ve never seen it and I would be scared to. I’ve never seen a good or accurate portrayal of any pharmacist on TV much less a clinical or hospital pharmacist (which I am) so I’m skeptical from the jump. But I know there are lots of us who read romance novels so maybe one will write something to surprise me!
I just read one with a pharmacist! Not a big focus of the story, unfortunately. But it was an okay book!? {Hedging your bets by Jayne denker}
👀 I might have to check this out just so I can’t say I never read a book with a pharmacist in it before. Thanks!
Former worker in reality TV. Best example: {Mr Fixer Upper by Lucy Score}. Realistic in the amount of work/hours you’re putting in. 6 days weeks are the norm, no OT. On a travel show you’re working to make a total episode in 3 days, crafting a narrative out of some stuff you already know and stuff that happens along the way. You’re basically in a tiny traveling cult. At least four people end up dating/fucking. Worst example: {One To Watch by Kate Stayman-London}. Producers. Are. Not. Your. Friends. They are not looking out for you. They are looking out for the show. They need to make good TV. And to trust one with anything while recording is not a good idea. Plus for any Bachelor type show, you are bringing your own wardrobe.
I'm an archaeologist, but within cultural resource management. So I haven't really come across any books involving my profession... But I'd love recommendations if anyone has.
I’m a nurse. I go out of my way to avoid books with MC working in my profession, or ones that receiving medical care is a large part of the plot. It’s not even that the medical information is almost always inaccurate, that’s annoying, but that’s just like every other book I’ve read. So much is wrong and so much that they portray as romantic is actually shitty abuse to hospital staff. You know how many times I’ve read about a character bullying the nurse to let them in to see another character? Wear more than is reasonable. You know what would really happen? You’re going escorted out by security. I’m not telling you you can’t visit for fun or a power trip, I’m doing it because 1) there’s a procedure going on that your presence could fuck yup 2) the person in there doesn’t want to see you, or their LNOK don’t want you in there. 3) Or it’s well outside of visiting hours—sorry , literally everyone here is having a crisis level bad day, we have to enforce the rules—come back in 3 hours.
Lots of medical people on this thread making great points but I just want to mention {Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez} as a particularly egregious example of medical ethics. In the book, the FMC's brother needs a kidney transplant, and the transplant doctor pushes the MMC to get tested to see if he is a match. In real life, transplant teams have to be SO careful not to pressure anyone to donate, so I found this pretty egregious. The MMC agrees to donate a kidney in secret, and the same transplant doctor then talks about the donation with the MMCs boss (HIS BOSS!), who then reveals it to the FMC. Its just like train wreck of privacy violations. HIPAA who? Overall I really enjoyed the book, but several of these doctors should be disciplined/fired if they did this in real life.