As BookTok goes, so goes publishing. The community of TikTokers who make videos about their favorite books is one of the only forces actively driving book sales in a contracting market — and right now, BookTok has a new favorite genre. Romantasy, the hybrid genre of romance-focused fantasy novels, has never been hotter. Every second pitch I receive from a publisher describes itself as romantasy. Bookstores are pushing tables of romantasy novels to the front of the shop. Grown-ups and teenagers alike are posting long videos about their favorite romantasy books. Many of them highlight Sarah J. Maas, the genre’s reigning queen.

Maas has been publishing since 2012, when at 26 she published Throne of Glass, the fantasy novel she started working on as a 16-year-old. In 2013, she scored her first New York Times bestseller, and in 2015, she began to pick up adult fans with the wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses. Now, Maas has two YA and one adult romantasy series (Crescent City, the adult series, began in 2020). Between all those titles, she’s sold more than 38 million books worldwide. Her most recent book, House of Flame and Shadow, came out at the end of January and has been on the bestseller list ever since.

Of all Maas’s series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) is her crown jewel. The TikTok tag #acotar has 8.9 billion views. Hulu has been developing a TV adaptation helmed by Ron Moore, although its current status is reportedly “murky.” Among fans, it is her most beloved work, the only Maas series so popular that it’s spawned its own spinoff novels. They say that ACOTAR has reignited their childhood love of reading, that these are the books that make other books feel worthwhile.

Reading through the first three volumes of ACOTAR recently, I began to understand why. These books go down like candy, silly and frothy and compulsively readable. Everyone in ACOTAR is beautiful, everyone is attractively damaged, everyone is pining with love for some inaccessible someone else. I read nearly 2,000 pages in a couple of weeks.

What is liveliest about Maas’s writing, though, is how well she knows her formula. Maas is a genius at cramming her books with the tropes of her hybrid genre — and then subverting those tropes just enough to thrill.

In his 2017 book Hit Makers, journalist Derek Thompson identifies a simple formula for popularity. Human beings, Thompson writes, tend to like things that are pleasingly familiar, with a gentle touch of surprise. That’s part of why romantasy is so popular. It takes two familiar trope-driven formulae — say, an enemies-to-lovers love story plus an epic battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil — and smashes........

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