Meet the Books

Every college friend group has one big crisis that brings them closer together right? Maybe it's someone losing the key to their room and the whole group waits for the locksmith together in solidarity. Maybe it's a bloke that come between two friends and the group has to navigate that particularly gross awkwardness. Or maybe it's just a horrible breakup that reduces one of your beloved friend group to a shadow of their former self.

Such was the case with our gorgeous girls. In semester one of first year of their respective courses, Saoirse's long term boyfriend broke her actual heart and she fell into a depression that really scared the other the girls. Chloe - ever the practical solution genius - stole her Mam's copy of Marian Keyes' Watermelon, deposited it in Sersh's hands and assured her that it would be a welcome escape from her sad, sad, sadness.

Which started the conversation among the group - Can Marian Keyes - properly prescribed - cure heartbreak?

It wasn’t our intention to barrel into a second series straight after the first one. We were gonna take a break, get some rest, figure out what we were gonna say in our second series, all that stuff. But thing is, pretty much immediately after our first series ended we were all entering lockdown as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic. Folks listening had let us know that the show had been a welcome distraction from the sense of impending doom and fact we couldn't find hand sanitizer ANYWHERE - so we decided to do a second series straight away!

Following a Twitter poll we found that folks were most interested in hearing our thoughts on Jane Austen, which was super fun seeing as how most of the girls hadn't read her work. It turns out that once you get through the first chapter of any book you pretty much start thinking in the language used - as evidenced by Chloe's immediate embracing of the word "Fie!"

This one might be our favourite series so far - super fun to write and record, and further proof that LC will never get tired of re-reading these classics

In their third series, the girls wanted to take a look at something a little closer to home - we're all a little weird and it's about time we looked at main characters that are just as odd, awkward and endearing as we are :)

Enter our series on Unusual Heroines - the unusual women that make a story worth reading simply because we want to know them better. What brought Eleanor Oliphant to the outwardly depressing life she lives? What's Keiko's motivation for passionately restocking the shelves of her Tokyo convenience store every day? Why was Lucia in London during the war? What are these women's stories? That's the question we asked and did we ever enjoy finding out!

It wasn't until the girls started doing the show and engaging with the book community online that they realised how devastatingly white their bookshelves were. Saoirse hadn't read anything by an author of colour since she read The Color Purple for the Leaving Cert* (*State exams in Ireland), and Katie hasn't tried since she abandoned Angela Davis's "Freedom is a Constant Struggle" three years ago. (She denies it but the bookmark on page 11 is very telling. The rest of the girls admitted to only readying the excerpt of Chimamanda Ngozi Adhichie's We Should All Be Feminists featured in Flawless buy Beyonce. We have all since agreed that does not count.

Facing our prejudiced buying habits head on, we committed to only reading authors of colour for Series 4 AND maintaining a more balanced approach to which content creators we buy from overall. Why would we want to limit ourselves to the same type of perspectives over and over anyway?!

Obviously, after the girls challenged the overwhelming whiteness of their bookshelves in Series 4, they had no choice but to also examine the downright troubling hetero-ness of their reading habits too. In looking into the experiences of LGBTQ authors writing back during the Stonewall rebellion was happening, the experience of black and brown LGBTQ folks, the point of view that trans authors bring to the conversation and our patriotic duty to include Irish work too - we found some of the most gorgeous romances, absorbing storylines and characters that will stay with us, probably forever. If you haven't welcomed the rainbow into your reading, please, please do so - these stories are unmissable

By the time the girls hit their sixth season they had a couple of authors that have been incredibly kind in sharing the show and introducing a self-made, independent podcast to their readers. We will never not be grateful for that. And it just so happened that some authors in this category - our beloved Kiley Dunbar, our champion Susan Lanigan, our (not-so) secret crush Amita Murray and THE QUEEN HERSELF Ms Marian Keyes - all had books out around this time. I mean, our civic duty was clear, was it not?


Add in LC's biggest author crushes, Deirdre Sullivan and Elaine Feeney (seriously, LC needs to stop fangirling any time she meets them, it's weird) and we had ourselves a full series! Oh it's so much fun to talk about people what you love loads, innit?

We have travelled far in the CL4L universe - we've gone from the eternal question ("Can Marian Keyes single-handedly cure heartbreak?") to the most unusual heroines we could find in an evening's-worth of googling, to our series on authors of colour and LGBTQ authors. And you know what? Returning weary travellers as we are, we wanted to get back to what we started with - basic, simple, tasty, tasty romantic fiction.

Lucky for us, our recent travels have given us a predilection for LGBTQ and non-white viewpoints, not to mention more unusual characters and storylines. Romantic fiction continues to grow more inclusive and interesting, and we get to reap the sexy, sexy benefits