Jennifer K. Lambert, author of Never The Roses, chats midnight library romance
In Never The Roses by J.K. Lambert, a dream-walking sorceress finds love through books and midnight talks in her enemy's magical library.
Guest post is written by Jennifer K. Lambert, author of Never The Roses.
Ever since book-loving Belle fell in love with the Beast because of his vast and varied library, the lure of the library has been tied to romance and true love. Why? Because any bookworm and bookdragon can tell you that being the opportunity to indulge in reading is one of the greatest gifts of understanding a lover can give. Encouraging their partner to indulge in a pastime that absorbs their attention and diverts them entirely from doting on them instead is selfless in a way that makes it the most loving of acts.
As I was writing NEVER THE ROSES, I know my Sorceress Oneira would find herself restless. In the beginning, she builds herself the perfect, beautiful house in the most remote location she can find, so that she can escape the demands of the world and be left alone. I think we all feel this fantasy!
But she eventually runs out of books. Where can she go to get more but to what’s rumored to be the most extensive library in the world—only incidentally owned by her arch-nemesis, Stearanos. As an oneiromancer—a sorceress able to manipulate dreams—Oneira walks through the Dream to reach the nighttime library assembled by Stearanos. Where she immediately falls in love.
With the library!
There’s a magic to a well-stocked library, the scent of books, the sense of endless possibilities. As Oneira wanders through the shadowed rooms lined with shelves and books collected across centuries, illuminated only by her quiet, magically conjured light, she finds herself also learning a great deal about the man and sorcerer who curated them. Because what a person reads is also what they love, and we learn about the insides of their heads from seeing their shelves. And truly loving someone is knowing about who they are as a person, aside from their physical body.
The library is where Oneira and Stearanos “meet”—discovering each other through the books they select and read, then through notes they exchange, and then finally in midnight conversations there in the silent world of the library, while everyone else is sleeping.
The best kind of romance.
