Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?
January 10, 2025 at 01:33AM
In recent years, the “Romantasy” genre has taken the book world by storm. Combining the worlds of romance and fantasy, books such as Sarah J. Maas’s novel “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” about a nineteen-year-old girl who falls in love with a fae high lord, have sold in their milllions. It’s a formula that works, but is it one that can be copyrighted? Katy Waldman explores a world full of trobes and subgenres in her investigation of Lynne Freeman’s case against Tracy Wolff’s “Crave” series, which she claims stole ideas from her manuscript “Blue Moon Rising.”
Freeman immediately spotted similarities to her own unpublished book. The main character was named Grace, not Anna, and her love interest was a vampire, not a werewolf, but in both stories the heroine moves from San Diego to Alaska after members of her family are killed in an accident. She lives with the only two relatives she believes she has left, both of whom are witches. A female rival slips her drugs. There’s an intimate moment under the northern lights. In a climactic scene, an evil vampire kidnaps her, and she ends up accidentally freeing a different vampire, whose return is said to herald the end of the world. (In Freeman’s planned sequel and Wolff’s actual ones, this vampire replaces the previous hero as the main character’s primary love interest.)
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/09/did-a-best-selling-romantasy-novelist-steal-another-writers-story/
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