Jennifer Prokop 4/10/24 Jennifer Prokop 4/10/24

06.31: Romance Novels and Film Adaptation with Yulin Kuang

This week, we’re talking about film adaptation and romance novels with Yulin Kuang, filmmaker and romance novelist. We discuss her work as both a screenwriter and director (she’s writing and directing the adaptation of Emily Henry’s Beach Read), and her debut romance novel, How to End a Love Story, set inside the writers room on a television show between the author of the books the show is adapting (the heroine) and one of the writers in the room (the hero). We talk about why romance adaptations are so difficult to find, why they don’t often hit quite like we expect, and we pitch a few books we’d like to see Hollywood take a crack at.

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Show Notes

Mr. Sunshine is the name of the K-Drama that Jen’s friend Sunhee recommended, but also everyone loves Crash Landing on You.

If you’re in New York City, you can see Sarah and Yulin together in conversation Thursday, April 11, at The Ripped Bodice in Brooklyn. Get tickets here.

Find and follow Yulin Kuang at her website.

Books Mentioned This Episode

Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

S05.04: What to Read If You Liked The Love Hypothesis...

Today we start one of our new features for Season Five: If You Liked…Read This! We begin with Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, a book that took romance and BookTok by storm last year when it burst onto the NYT best seller list and hung out there for nearly a year, bringing so many new readers (and Reylos!) to romance.

This one is full of tropes romance loves, and we take them topic by topic, recommending read alikes for everything from grumpy/sunshine, to academic romance, to STEM heroines, to that spicy sex scene that was a delightfully unexpected surprise! That, and we’ve got a bunch of Reylo fic recommended from Ali herself (check the end of show notes)!

Notes

Tattoos are expensive!
ReyLo is the ship name for Kylo Ren and Rey from the Star Wars movies. And the actor who plays Kylo Ren is Adam Driver.
All about Pansexuality.
Censorship on TikTok is so widespread is has its own wikipedia page, which makes it rife for misinformation about sex and sex education.
Small point of order, Jen was at the LPI (Lunar and Planetary Institute), which is close to the Johnson NASA Space Center in Houston. Obviously, she wasn’t at the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), because that’s in California.