49 pages • 1 hour read
Beautiful Graves
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Background
Author Context: L. J. Shen
L. J. Shen is a highly successful author who is known for writing contemporary, new adult, and young adult romance novels. She is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and #1 Amazon best-selling author whose books have been sold in 20 different countries. Shen is originally from California, and her personal life has influenced much of her writing, helping her to create realistic, three-dimensional characters. Shen is best known for penning the Sinners of Saint series and the All Saints High series, which explore themes of love, redemption, and complex emotional growth. Shen’s works often blend humor, sexually explicit content, and dark themes, and this combination allows her stories to appeal to a broad audience of romance fans. Her particular niche within the romance genre focuses on flawed characters who undergo significant emotional transformation. Similar to the popular romance author Ana Huang, Shen often writes angst-ridden dark romances with near-irredeemable wealthy male anti-heroes and sassy heroines.
As a prolific author, Shen has published over 30 novels. Her most popular works include the Sinners of Saint series, which consists of Defy (2016), Vicious (2016), Ruckus (2017), Scandalous (2017), and Bane (2018). Additionally, the spin-off series, All Saints High, has garnered considerable success and is made up of Pretty Reckless (2019), Broken Knight (2019), Angry God (2020), and Damaged Goods (2024). Shen’s Boston Belles series includes The Hunter (2020), The Villain (2020), The Monster (2021), and The Rake (2022), and she has also written a number of popular stand-alone novels, such as Beautiful Graves (2022) and My Dark Romeo (2023).
Genre Context: Dark Contemporary Romance
Like many of Shen’s other works, Beautiful Graves fall into a niche subcategory of contemporary romance: one that focuses on recovery from trauma, emotional exploration, morally ambiguous male love interests, and darker themes. Popular authors of this genre include Penelope Douglas, Ana Huang, Sierra Simone, Rina Kent, and E. L. James, whose novels feature heavy sexual content, the dark and sometimes violent behavior of male love interests, and an intense exploration of emotional complexity and growth.
Accordingly, Beautiful Graves explores a range of darker themes and mature content, including explicit romance scenes and frank discussions of death and emotional trauma. Other popular elements of the genre include forbidden love, the attraction of opposites, and love triangles, and Beautiful Graves provides these elements in abundance. For example, Ever’s relationship with Joe is considered forbidden because they reconnect after she begins dating his brother, Dom, and the relationship is also haunted by Ever’s belief that she is cursed to bring misfortune upon the people she loves. Her mother and Dom have both died, and she believes that if she gives in to her feelings for Joe, their relationship will also end in tragedy. Additionally, the “opposites attract” trope is explored in Ever’s relationship with Dom, and the two characters’ doomed relationship also illuminates the similarities between Ever and Joe. Ultimately, the love triangle involving Ever, Joe, and Dom is unintentional on her part and entirely coincidental, and this twist represents Shen’s attempt to provide a fresh approach to a trope that is heavily overused throughout the romance genre.
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