Sparks Fly, a romantic comedy novel written by American bi author Zakiya N. Jamal, is one of the most “classical” yet modern bi romance novels I’ve ever read. Published in 2025, the novel has the atmosphere of a classic rom-com in which two strangers fall in love — only this time, it is a story about two modern bi people in modern-day New York City.
When I was a kid, I liked the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, a famous film with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan about two bookshop owners who fall in love with each other through online messages — without knowing that they are business rivals in real life. Sparks Fly has that same vibe, if You’ve Got Mail had two black bi leads. In this story, both protagonists are openly bi, and openly so to their friends and co-workers, which dispels a lot of anti-bi stereotypes.
Now, beware of SPOILERS, since we are going to get into details of the plot and the bi representation in this novel.
Stella and Max meet in a club, it turns out that Max is the older brother of Stella’s boss, Miles. Max is also an IT tycoon and the creator of an AI program for his brother — the same program that Stella thinks could steal her work as a journalist. When Stella learns who Max is, their relationship takes an unexpected twist, but Stella and Max decide to continue dating and, at the end of the story, end up together. It is an office romantic comedy with a lot of typical rom-com elements in a new digital-world setting, and plenty of spicy scenes that, of course, are related to the bi identities of the characters. It is a male/female romance that is still explicitly bi.
Both Max and Stella are very atypical bi characters.
Maximo “Max” Martinez Williams is one of the rare bi characters — especially bi characters of color — who is portrayed as a wealthy, well-educated, and successful man who, at the same time, is not shy about his bisexuality. Max was born in the Dominican Republic and has a younger brother, Miles. When their mother died, both Max and Miles were adopted by a wealthy white American family. Max never struggled with telling his family that he’s bi — both his adoptive parents and Miles knew about it — and his only hang-up about coming out is that his brother sometimes made jokes about the LGBT community. In most stories about bi men that I’ve read, there is usually something about shame and struggles with acceptance, which Max definitely does not have. He has queer friends and is open about his experiences as a queer person. He’s also frequently irritated by the stereotypes attached to bi men and doesn’t shy away from asserting his bisexuality.
Max liked men, but he also liked wearing suits and watching basketball games and RuPaul’s Drag Race. It was especially irritating when he was dating a woman, because he often felt like he was cosplaying as a straight person, but he found it difficult to say, ‘I know what this looks like, but I’m actually bi’ in regular conversation.
This helped him find common ground with Stella, who’s also quite an unusual bi character, and not just because she is half-Cuban and half-Jamaican. Stella is almost thirty years old, but she’s a virgin. Despite being a late bloomer, she has no doubts about being bi — she is attracted to men, women, and non-binary people — but she never had relationships before she met Max. It’s one of the best challenges to the common stereotype about promiscuous bi people that I’ve personally seen in mass media culture.
Despite never having had a relationship, Stella is very aware of her orientation — another unusual trope, because in romantic comedies such as Pity Party by Daisy Buchanan, Double Booked by Lily Lindon, Dream On, Ramona Riley by Ashley Herring Blake, and many others, bi characters realize that they are not straight only after they fall in love with a person of the same gender. Stella is not like that. She’s confident in her identity.
Just like Max, she hates common stereotypes about bi people. However, unlike Max, due to the scrutiny of them, she doesn’t often say out loud that she’s bi, even if all the close people in her life know it.
When dating, Stella didn’t often tell people right out the gate that she was bi. Guys could be weird about it…Women could be weird about it…
Maybe this is what makes her so open and accepting of other people’s identities and the mistakes people can make while discovering themselves. When noticing that a lot of black women view bisexual men as gay men on the “down low”, Stella assured that she didn’t feel that way:
If someone, no matter their gender, told her they were bi, she believed them.
Stella believes that sexuality is fluid and,
…even if someone said they were bi and then later realized they were gay, she wouldn’t hold it against them, as long as they were honest about it.
Those are just some of the many bi-centered quotes from the novel. The book is full of honest and open conversations between Max and Stella about their bi experiences, the different labels people under the bi umbrella use to describe themselves — from pansexual to queer — and the role racial stereotypes play in conversations about bisexuality.
I couldn’t say there were any major problems with the bi representation, except that, for me personally, there were perhaps too many spicy scenes, which could reinforce the stereotype that all bi people are overly horny. However, this is a question of taste.
But overall, the novel’s representation of bi characters is pretty decent — Zakiya N. Jamal creates believable and modern bi characters. Sparks Fly will especially appeal to readers looking for Black bi leads, a bi romance that does not erase bisexuality, and characters whose sexuality is explicit without becoming their main source of conflict.