Before We Were Strangers

Carlino’s Before We Were Strangers is a work of contemporary romantic fiction. It also falls under the new adult fiction classification. True to the tradition of the romance genre, Before We Were Strangers employs tropes to inspire its primary plot line. Readers of romantic fiction rely on such tropes for a sense of literary consistency and comfort. The familiar patterns, plot models, and character conflicts that pervade contemporary romance novels offer readers orderly narrative worlds with resolvable scenarios. No matter the variety of tropes that romance novels might use throughout the plot, one trope that is consistent to all romance titles is the guaranteed happy ending. 

In Before We Were Strangers, Carlino primarily embraces the first love, lost love, and second chance romance tropes. The novel also lightly incorporates the friends-to-lovers and forced proximity tropes. Grace Starr and Matt Shore initially meet and get to know each other because they live in side-by-side dorm rooms in NYU’s Senior House. They start spending all of their time together as their living circumstances compel them into constant contact with each other. Their relationship begins as a friendship, and they spend many months refusing to label their dynamic or act on their sexual attraction to each other.