People wait for author Rebecca Yarros to sign copies of her book Onyx Storm at the at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 29.JENN ACKERMAN/The New York Times News Service
“Do you think Type is selling Onyx Storm?” I had sent this text to a friend – a criterion collection kind of guy who wears his book snob bona fides on his sleeve. Type is an indie book mecca in Toronto, famous for its robust plotless fiction section. Onyx Storm is the book world’s equivalent of Taylor Swift: unavoidable and the subject of a massive fandom. In response, my friend sent a screen grab: A post from the store’s Instagram feed wishing a “Happy ONYX STORM PUB DAY to all who celebrate”.
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Josh Cockerill manages one of Type’s locations in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. When he arrived at work on Onyx Storm’s release date (Jan. 21), customers were waiting at the door and they weren’t there to browse. “They knew exactly what they wanted,” says Cockerill. “They came in, got the book, up to the till and were very much focused on their mission.”
That mission, which 2.5 million global readers chose to accept, is getting their hands on the third installment in Rebecca Yarros’s romantasy series that hit bestsellers lists last August based on pre-orders alone. Onyx Storm sold more than 127,000 print copies in Canada in its first week, topping the same numbers for 2023’s book world blockbuster, Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. It gave Canada’s biggest bookstore chain Indigo its highest first-day sales figures since the 2016 release of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child and as with the Potter books, devotees attended midnight release parties at book stores across the country and called in sick to work to avoid spoilers. But the mega fans are not the full story.
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“Just by sheer volume of sales, we know that Onyx Storm landed with readers outside of the genre fandom – people who may not read much at all and also people who might generally read more classically literary titles,” says Amanda Gauthier, Indigo’s category manager. She believes that the success of this title reflects a post-categorizable moment in book sales. “People are rediscovering the joy of reading. Not reading because it’s eating your vegetables, but books as entertainment and an escape,” Gauthier says.
She and her colleagues are speculating that the excitement around Onyx Storm points to how viewing culture has lost the plot: “You hear it all the time – people are spending more time looking for what they’re going to stream than actually watching something.” Television, she says, may be failing to provide that water cooler chatter: “When’s the last time you went to a dinner party and everyone was watching the same show?”
Yarros’s 2023 release, Fourth Wing, introduced readers to the Empyrean universe and her cast of students at a war college for dragon riders. That book spent 18 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list and Iron Flame (book two) made its debut in that slot six months later. It’s a success story that aligns with broader publishing trends, particularly the explosion and rebranding of genre fiction driven more by BookTok than traditional ivory tower-style criticism.
Yarros’s books have a lot of different entry points to satisfy a lot of different readers: battles and dense histories for the dungeons and dragons crowd (which skews male), a strong protagonist and intrigue for the romance crowd (which skews female), immersive world-building for readers craving a distraction from earthly events, which skews anyone with a pulse.
Author Rebecca Yarros discusses her new book Onyx Storm at The Town Hall in New York, on Jan. 24.CJ Rivera/The Associated Press
K.J. Aiello is a Toronto-based writer and journalist who reads so much that she recently took a course in carpentry to build her own bookshelves. On them you will find everything from the latest literary fiction (she just finished Tremor by Teju Cole) to Yarros’s catalogue. “I think there is a lot of appeal, particularly for women, in this protagonist who is strong and very much the driver of her own story,” Aiello says – so much more than that “nothing burger” Bella Swan (from Twilight). “Violet is wielding the swords, getting dirty on the battlefield and getting the hottie on the side. She is a 20-year-old female character who consistently refers to herself as a woman as opposed to a girl and I realize that should not feel subversive, but it does,” Aiello says.
Subversion, she explains, is happening off the page too, in terms of certain well-worn stereotypes that position genre fiction as inherently lacking in depth: “Yarros is writing about the erasure of history to retain power, oppression, suppression,” which makes for both a rewarding read and spicy book club chats.
Serena Goodchild co-founded Hopeless Romantic Books six months ago, an indie shop dedicated to a genre that has, she jokes, “gone so far beyond Fabio on the cover and all of that thinking about romance and its readers.” Goodchild will often ask customers about recent reads before making a recommendation and has found that her customers are fans of everything from self-help to historical biographies to the latest literary darlings.
Josh Cockerill at Type makes a similar observation. Pub day super-keeners notwithstanding, “there’s not some huge demarcation between the people who come in to buy the Yarros books versus the ones who buy the latest literary fiction like James or Sally Rooney.” Book snobs, he says, definitely have their guilty pleasures.
But I’m pretty sure even those terms (“book snob”, “guilty pleasure”) are descriptors fast approaching their expiration date. That’s not to say that certain prejudices aren’t alive and well: Terms such as “fairy porn” and the obsessive focus on sex in Yarros’s books feel designed to deride. One reviewer in a major newspaper went so far as to theorize that the romantasy boom was because the cohort that came up on Harry Potter “did not make that transition to more challenging literature.” But this kind of haute humbuggery feels off the mark – not just cringe, but a misdiagnosis.
“Those original Potter fans are in their thirties now,” says Indigo’s Amanda Gauthier, “and Rebecca Yarros’s books remind them of why they fell in love with reading in the first place.”
