Meredith Bryson and Lauren Brown both credit Bridgerton, Julia Quinn’s popular historical romance series, for reviving their reading lives and inspiring them to open bookstores of their own.
“I got back into [reading] as an adult, actually with Bridgerton,” Brown said. “I watched the first season [of the Netflix adaptation], and then I was like, ‘I need more now, not in years.’ I picked up the books, and I read them all so fast. I haven’t stopped reading since.”
Both Bryson and Brown opened mobile romance bookstores in 2025. Bryson runs the mobile Durham-based Peach Basket Books, and Brown runs Rebel Romance Bookstore, a pop-up.
Novels from the Bridgerton saga now fill the shelves of Peach Basket Books—a pandemic-era dream turned reality.
“My fantasy was always to have my own little cozy bookstore,” Bryson explained, “[but] I like having the stability of a full-time job with benefits and just couldn’t see how I could become a small business owner full-time.”
Inspired by romance bookstores she had seen pop up across the country and the Triangle, Bryson found a solution.
“I ended up purchasing a really run-down camper in 2022 and spent several years renovating it,” she said. “I decided to focus on romance, because that’s the genre I love the most.”
Bryson operates her romance camper-turned-bookshop on a pop-up basis in and around Durham. She announces events on her Instagram (@peachbasketbooks), which are often hosted at local community spaces like Common Market and Ponysaurus.
In the time since she opened her camper and held her first pop-up event, in May 2025, Bryson says she’s noticed a shift in the ways that the genre is perceived and the popularity that has followed, with bookstores like Bright Side Books & Wine, the Triangle’s first and only brick-and-mortar romance bookstore, opening for readers.
There have been other big industry shifts: “Romance has come a long way from the original Bridgerton, which was written almost 30 years ago now, about a white family in London,” Bryson observed of the series, which got a cast of multiracial actors when Netflix launched an adaptation in 2020.
That broadening is exactly the kind of change that Brown also hopes to capture with Rebel Romance Bookstore, which she opened in August 2025. With the pop-up, Brown seeks to amplify the voices of marginalized authors and implement business practices that align with her values.
“I put a little business card-sized facts card [in each book], and it lets my shoppers know whether the author is local or part of the BIPOC, LGBTQ+, or disabled communities,” she said. “You see a lot of posts for Pride Month or Black History Month, and those are great,” she said, “and you support those fully, but when next month is Disability Pride Month, you won’t see anything.”
Hosting events around the Triangle, she participates in markets and book fairs like Front Paige Media Book Fair when it’s hosted at Raleigh Iron Works and updates customers on upcoming events on her website.
Like Bryson’s camper, Rebel Romance Bookstore is a pop-up, which, as Brown describes, works well for her lifestyle.
“Because I have multiple chronic illnesses, a traditional nine-to-five doesn’t work well for me,” she said. “Romance novels have just felt more and more like home.”
Brown hopes to grow her pop-up into a permanent brick-and-mortar bookstore one day, with a staff of chronically ill people in her community to “give them an opportunity for a job that is flexible for them,” just as Rebel Romance has been for her.
For both Bryson and Brown, they hope to foster spaces emphasizing the largest draw for readers to the genre: the guarantee of a “happily ever after” or, as Bryson added, a “happy for now.”
To both, this convention and its predictability are what make readers fall in love with romance.
“What’s exciting is the journey that takes you there and the character development,” Bryson said. “How do different characters and even side characters grow and change? How do they learn from each other?” This assurance of stability, especially as “things get more and more chaotic, both politically and economically,” as Brown said, is a draw for readers.
“The guarantee of happiness at the end,” said Brown, “is just a comforting place for people to be.”
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