Lovestruck in Cambridge: A Romance Bookstore Comes to Harvard Square

At 10 years old on a family vacation, Rachel C. Kanter found herself rummaging through the house’s book collection. The world stopped as Kanter found the new love of her life: a Danielle Steel novel. What began as a romcom-style meet-cute turned into a full on passion.

“It was a pretty steady — I was going to say descent, but really ascent into the romance genre,” she says.

Now, Kanter is taking her relationship with romance to the next level — opening Lovestruck Books, a bookstore in Harvard Square specializing in romance novels.

Lovestruck’s conception started with the loss of Darwin’s, a Cambridge coffee chain. Kanter loved Darwin’s back when she was a student at the Graduate School of Education. After moving back to Cambridge in 2023, she missed the cafe and recalls thinking to herself, “Somebody should really reopen Darwin’s. Maybe I should reopen Darwin’s,” she says. “Maybe I should reopen it as a cafe, bookshop.”

Kanter hopes that Lovestruck Books will go beyond your typical bookstore and act as a greater gathering space in Harvard Square complete with a cafe, writing workshops, and social events. She has always sought out community with her reading experiences.

“Any city I’ve been in, I’ve always started a book club,” Kanter says. In these book clubs, she has always taken it upon herself to encourage her fellow members to read romance books, as a way to “bring some levity and to encourage people to read what they love.”

She also knows that finding books children enjoy can be a challenge. During her time as a teacher, she found romance novels to be a fun way to connect with her students and to push them to read in their spare time.

When it came to developing Lovestruck, Kanter was able to broaden her romance reading community. She saw the genre grow during the pandemic. “People were turning to books and to romance specifically for kind of an escape,” she says. “In romance, you have a guaranteed happy ending. I think people like that predictability and that sort of security of knowing things are going to work out.”

This helps explain the nation-wide rise in indie bookstores specializing in selling romance novels. Kanter says bookstores like The Ripped Bodice were her inspiration. The shop has locations in Los Angeles and New York, reassuring her that romance bookstores are not a fleeting trend.

The process was “incredibly serendipitous.” The perfect storefront happened to be looking for tenants. The prospective cafe partner Kanter had found was “excited to come back to Cambridge.” And the romance genre continued to skyrocket in popularity. Just like in a romance novel, everything was falling into place.

But romance novels are not without their controversies. With regards to rising book bans around the country, Kanter says she does not believe in policing what her students read, despite some parents raising the alarm about students reading romance novels.

“I don’t see the harm in providing free access to material that is exciting and interesting to people,” she says. “I think it is so much more beneficial to give people access to the content they need than harmful. And I think the real harm comes when we start to restrict, when we start to police what people are interested in.”

Kanter knows what it’s like to be a kid interested in romance novels.

“I mean you have 13 year olds reading Colleen Hoover books and, you know, is that appropriate?” she asks. “I don’t know, probably not. But also, who’s to say what’s appropriate? I, as a young child myself, read stuff that was probably not appropriate, and that was really energizing, exciting.”

Even so, Kanter understands that the target audience for romance novels is between the ages of 16 and 45. She still hopes to give kids an entrée into romance, with a section for children at Lovestruck Books to keep them occupied while their guardians shop.

Speaking to Kanter, the joy she feels about this new chapter is palpable. Romance has always been an “escape” for her, and now she is grateful to live out her happily ever after with her beloved books.

“It’s sort of hilarious that my life’s work is to spread smut,” she says. “But honestly, I’m going with it. It’s great. It’s really about spreading joy and building a sense of community, and a space to celebrate community.”

— Magazine writer Alia S. Al-Wir can be reached at alia.alwir@thecirmson.com.

— Staff writer Neeraja S. Kumar can be reached at neeraja.kumar@thecrimson.com.