I have, obviously, been investigating Hall’s books completely backwards. Also, I insist (despite an extraordinary amount of evidence to the contrary) that I don’t like contemporary romance.
But I very much like Hall and his approach to romance and his painfully relatable characters and his, along with several other contemporary romance writers, willingness to see romance as a genre uniquely positioned to talk about disability and mental illness. Between the sex, obviously.
And while it’s possible, as with anything, to do it badly and to play into the “I loved them better!” tripe (that was supposed to be trope, but I’ll give autocorrect that one), the authors who do it well really let the internality and focus on feelings that is the hallmark of romance become a reasonable vehicle to explore characters with disability or mental illness without making them either a tragedy or secondary.