By the '80s, the women characters played a more active role and lived more adventurous lives. In the past decade, Chastain says, women have traveled the world, become corporate directors who are wealthy and in a position to choose their lifestyles. Now there's another change taking place. These women now want home and family and traditional values of the kind their grandmothers knew back in the 1940s and '50s. We're back to John Wayne, Mom and apple pie.
Women go 'home' again, searching for their roots and looking for the boy next door.
The heroine returns to her hometown in South Carolina to open a shop and try to solve the murder of a childhood friend. Of course, in the process she falls in love with her dead friend's brother. Subgenres have sprung up as well. In 1994, Kensington started the Arabesque line of books written by and targeted to the African-American female audience. What they discovered is that women between the ages of 18 and 80 loved these stories.