Tucson now has an all-romance bookstore

After school … in the basement of her Washington, D.C. home … when she quietly began sampling her mom’s collection of books.

“My mom was a serious reader, and one day, little full-of-myself me decided I would read the same books she did,” Pryde recalled last week. “When she finished a book, I’d take it off the shelf downstairs and start reading it, too.”

The spicy twist?

They were romance novels — Jude Deveraux, Johanna Lindsey, Janelle Taylor novels — which must have led to some interesting conversations during lunch breaks at Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Washington.

“I’m not sure how long it took my mom to notice,” Pryde laughed, “but by the time I was in high school we were talking about our favorites. We were passing books back and forth.”

So began a love affair with romantic fiction that continues unbridled today.

Pryde has written a romance-centric column for Book Riot since 2014. In 2022, she published a collection of essays entitled “Black Loves Matter.” She manages the romance-genre program at the Tucson Festival of Books, and now she sells romance novels, too.

Welcome to Why Choose, Tucson’s first all-romance bookshop, a pop-up store that opened three months ago and is coming soon to a neighborhood street sale near you.

“I have wanted to run a romance-centric bookstore since I read about Ripped Bodice opening in L.A. 10 years ago,” Pryde said. “I even called them to see if they might be interested in franchising. They weren’t, but I never stopped wondering If there might be a way to do something like that here in Tucson.”

Late last year, the stars suddenly seemed to align. Pryde had befriended a number of romance-novel devotees through a book club at Bookmans. She had joined the board of directors of the 4th & 4th Foundation, a group that promotes writing and writers from its location at the corner of North Fourth Avenue and East Fourth Street.

Emboldened by a vocal support group and a location to do weekend sales, Pryde decided to go for it last fall.

The first step: selecting a name for the store.

“My friends and I bounced a few ideas around,” Pryde said, “but in the end we took the same name we’d given our book club at Bookmans. ‘Why Choose’ is a pretty familiar term to romance readers. It’s used when a protagonist decides not to choose between suitors. A second meaning, for us, was why choose just one book when there are so many you might read?”

Pryde developed a business plan and applied for a license. She opened bank accounts, secured her digital presence online, and created an account at Ingram.

Interestingly, fittingly, Pryde’s late mother Dierdre helped with the purchase of books.

“Most of the up-front money came from my mom, who died two years ago,” Pryde said. “We’re going to be partners in this, the way we were with the books we read. I think she’d like that.”

Together, they purchased some 400 books for the Why Choose launch in December.

“Four-hundred books and the best four-wheel dolly I could find at Costco,” Pryde laughed. “Boxes of books are heavy!”

Her inventory now includes 600 new and used books, some of them self-published titles she has agreed to sell on consignment.

“We want to be there for anyone who reads or writes modern romance,” Pryde said. “We want to have books you might not find at the larger bookstores, or even libraries.”

Clearly, she would know. A career-long librarian, Pryde held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, and the University of Arizona before joining the Pima County Public Library in 2015.

Today, she is a key member of the collection development team, the selector who identifies upcoming works of fiction that will become part of the library’s catalog.

Through it all, after all the books she has read and enjoyed, her go-to genre when it’s Jessica time is still romantic fiction.

“I love a good love story,” she said. “I love relatable characters. More than anything, I love fully-contained stories. Romance authors make a contractual agreement, a promise to their readers, that no matter what their characters go through over the course of the book, they’re going to come out the other side happy, in love, and together. As readers, we can go through the challenges with them and know we’ll all be OK at the end.”

She has also come to appreciate the wide range of characters, settings and plot lines now emerging from every corner of the literary world.

Case in point: Heated Rivalry, featuring two Canadian hockey players, is one of the most popular series on television today. It is an adaptation taken from the “Game Changers” romance series by Rachel Reid.

“Since no two authors will ever tell the same story the same way, I have thousands — if not millions — of stories at my fingertips,” Pryde said. “I’ll never run out of good romance novels to read.”

Footnotes

• The next Why Choose book sale will be Sunday, March 29, at the 4th and 4th Foundation: 402 E. Fourth St. This one is billed “Play Ball!” and will feature sports novels. Among them will be “Heated Rivalry” and “Game Changers.” To learn more, visit whychoosetucson.com.
• Make Way for Books has selected Marc Acuña to serve as its new chief executive, board president Anne McLain announced. Acuña is currently the executive director at the Southern Arizona office of the American Heart Association. Before that, he spent 11 years with the University of Arizona Alumni Association. His first day at Make Way will be March 30.
• Poet Zeina Hashem Beck, the author of “O,” will read and reflect this coming Thursday, March 26, at the UA Poetry Center. The program will begin at 7 p.m. To learn more, visit poetry.arizona.edu.