52 pages • 1 hour read
Mercedes RonMy Fault
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Mercedes Ron
Mercedes Ron was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1993 and later moved to Spain, where she studied audiovisual communication at the University of Seville. Ron launched her writing career in 2015 through the social media platform Wattpad, publishing My Fault in March 2017 under the title Culpa Mía. According to biographical information in the source text, Ron gained “more than 50 million readers” via her original publications on Wattpad, and she credits her expansive fan base on Wattpad as the source of the support and success she needed to make “the leap to bookstores in 2017” (408). Penguin Random House bought the rights to Culpa Mía and published it in English as My Fault Shortly thereafter, Ron published the second and third installments in the Culpables series—Culpa Tuya came out in 2017, and Culpa Nuestra came out in 2018. These titles were later translated into English under the titles Your Fault and Our Fault.
Ron is now known as “a benchmark in youth romantic literature with more than a million copies” of her books sold internationally (408). In the source text’s acknowledgments, Ron attributes her authorial success to “everyone who was there with [her] on Wattpad in the beginning” (406). All of Ron’s titles are works of young adult and contemporary romance and incorporate elements of the telenovela tradition. In My Fault, for example, Noah Morgan and Nick Leister have a forbidden romantic relationship that is further affected by unexpected, sensational events including psychological manipulation, kidnapping, and extortion. These narrative elements nuance Ron’s young adult romance stories and complicate her explorations of coming of age and sexual awakening and discovery.
Genre Context: Young Adult Romance
My Fault is a work of young adult romance, although because Nick’s character is older than Noah’s, the novel can also be classified as a traditional work of contemporary romance. The novel features adult themes and scenarios and incorporates complex emotional dynamics inspired by the characters’ blended family and traumatic pasts.
My Fault particularly embodies the romance genre because it relies upon a guaranteed happily ever after for its primary narrative plot line. The novel also embraces several tropes of the romance genre, including enemies to lovers, opposites attract, and forbidden love tropes. When Noah and Nick first meet, they can’t stand each other, a standard beginning status quo for the enemies to lovers trope. Their adversarial dynamic is fueled by their seemingly discordant personalities, but they eventually learn that their differences draw them together and can teach them about themselves. Over time, their enmity evolves into deep love and care.
Bad boy, forced proximity, and fake dating tropes also appear in the narrative. Nick is the proverbial “bad boy” whom Noah helps to soften and reform through love and patience. Meanwhile, the characters are forced to share the same space when their parents get married. Being stuck under the same roof makes them realize their attraction to each other and they begin a secret relationship they fear their friends and parents won’t approve of. At one point in the novel, Noah asks Nick to pretend that they’re together so that they can teach her ex-boyfriend a lesson. Together, these tropes dictate the narrative’s primary plot points and narrative conflicts. Ron relies on these tropes to offer her readers a familiar narrative scaffolding to guide them through an otherwise unpredictable narrative world. With its use of these romance tropes, My Fault is in conversation with other works of contemporary romance including So This Is War by Meghan Quinn, Flock by Kate Stewart, Love Me Sweet by Kate J. Sweet, In Harmony by Emma Scott, and Rules of Attraction by Simone Elkeles.
