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I started my research by using the hunter library OneSearch to search for romance in Parable of the Sower, there were very few articles written about this topic. So, I expanded my search and decided to start with why authors included romance in cli-fi and searched for romance in cli-fi and found this article that talks about cli-fi as a form of romance. Then I went back to narrowing my research question to focus on the books we have read. Since I couldn’t find much about romance in the Parable of the Sower, I changed the keyword romance to love and found more articles, still less but manageable. I then moved on to find romance or love in The Hungry Tide, and compared to the Parable of the Sower, I was able to find more articles. I found nothing written about romance or love in 10:04 yet, so I plan on just discussing examples from the book. Overall, it was difficult to research, and I had to tweak my research question to make it much easier to find sources.
As we discussed briefly today, this is an ambitious approach and is pointing to a sophisticated argument about the way the romance-oriented genre of the novel might use depictions of love to thematize aspects of the climate crisis we face. I love the argument and think that it has legs. I also think that all three texts have useful things to say. I do think it’s hard to fit three close readings into a 15 pp essay, so you might consider dropping one or more texts. I think your approach of looking at synonyms (“love” for “romance”) is right: you might also look at cognate terms, like sex/uality, attraction, marriage, desire, etc.