While the world often categorizes women in reductive false binaries—careerist versus mother, feminine versus fierce—romance novels, a unique form of the love story, offer an imaginative space of mingled alternatives for a heroine on her journey to selfhood. In Creating Identity, Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: "Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?" To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal...