Every bookworm has a go-to guilty pleasure genre or trope they love reading, and mine is hands down sports romance. Which is ironic if you know me in real life, because I’m one of the least sporty people known to man. The only time you’ll see me tuning into a game is if there’s food around to scavenge. In fact, if you asked any of my friends or family they’d probably tell you the only athletic bone in my body is my ability to run my mouth—usually about the books I’ve been reading.
It’s no surprise, then, that I was met with both surprise and skepticism when I announced I was writing a sports romance called Dare You to Hate Me that focused on a moody college football player and his long-time childhood best friend. And because I’m not the only one obsessed with sports-themed romances, the book took off and went from being a singular standalone to the making of a five-book series called Lindon U—five individual stories that feature twentysomethings navigating life, love, and loss at a small university in upstate New York.
If you’re unfamiliar with the trope, sports romance novels typically feature either the hero or heroine (or sometimes both characters) playing on a sports team, whether in college, or professionally. I’d say the rising popularity in the new adult sports romance genre—college-aged characters in a school setting—can probably be traced back to Elle Kennedy’s Off-Campus series about a group of hockey players on a university team. Kennedy’s first book in the series, The Deal, is actually the novel that introduced me to the genre and made me fall in love with the world of alpha athletes and the women (or sometimes men) who tame them amidst their idolized popularity. My love for reading sports romance is what inspired me to write a book set on a college campus based on my own experiences at university.
Writing Lindon U has been nothing short of therapeutic, and I’ve learned after the release of both Dare You to Hate Me and Beg You to Trust Me that expressing myself through the characters allows me to connect with readers who feel heard and seen through their trials and tribulations. If there’s one thing I’ve learned while writing books, it’s that the stories that push the limits by featuring raw topics, like the discussions on mental health, assault on college campuses, self-harm, and more that you read about in Lindon U, that are the ones people will remember for a long time because they go beyond the characters conquering the sports they play, and instead highlight their journey to conquering the demons they face in day-to-day life.
Text copyright © 2023 by B. Celeste. Reprinted by permission of Bloom Books, an imprint of Sourcebooks. All Rights Reserved.
Dare You to Hate Me is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Beg You to Trust Me is available from Amazon and Bookshop.