The bus was white when Katie Mitchell found it on Facebook Marketplace in July 2023, and it smelled, she told Axios, like sweaty kids after recess. She painted it dark green, filled it with romance novels and called it the Green Girl.
Sixteen months later the Green Girl had done well enough to need a building. Trope Bookshop opened its storefront on Lyon Court in Plaza Midwood on March 1, 2025, and it remains the only romance only bookstore in Charlotte.
It started with a reader who stopped
Mitchell grew up in Arkansas and moved to Charlotte in 2014. She loved reading as a child, she told Axios, then got too busy for it. In a Q&A with CLTtoday she put the arc more bluntly: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Gray, and then nothing for ten years. The pandemic brought her back to books, and to romance specifically.
She left a corporate job in logistics and project management in July 2022, according to The Charlotte Ledger, and could not afford a retail space. Friends suggested a mobile bookshop, like the book carts in Central Park. The bus was the answer. Trope’s first pop up was on October 19, 2023, at The Culture Shop in Belmont, where Mitchell was working part time.
The bus limited the stock, which is why the shop focused on one genre from the start. Selling romance was always the intention, Mitchell has said, and the constraint became the identity.
The woman behind it
Mitchell, who was 33 when the Ledger profiled her in 2024, describes what she does as matchmaking, pairing women all over Charlotte with what a sign outside the bus calls their new book boyfriend. She organizes the shelves by trope, the plot structures the genre runs on, and drives the bus to breweries, coffee shops and street markets. A monthly book club, first called Troop Trope and later the Smutty Book Club, meets at a brewery and casts each book with the actors members would want in the film. Henry Cavill, Mitchell told Axios, gets cast a lot.
The move to a storefront came, she told CLTtoday, at an inflection point. The bus had gone well and she had to choose between a second bus and a building. A building meant room for author signings, which the bus could not host, and Mitchell has said hosting is what she loves most. She dreams of landing Sarah J. Maas for a signing.
What you actually find
The store is 1,000 square feet in a former tattoo shop just off Central Avenue, painted dark to match the bus, with what Mitchell calls an English pub style interior. It holds more than 900 individual titles and thousands of books across sixteen sections, including young adult, local authors, romantasy, sports romance and banned books, according to Axios. Stickers and bookish goods sit alongside, and comfortable chairs invite sampling before buying.
The staff will turn one book you loved into five suggestions, which is the service a genre specialist can offer that a general store cannot. The Green Girl still appears at pop ups a few times a month. Trope is closed on Monday and Tuesday.
The bus built its following through partnerships. Trope parked at The Giddy Goat in Plaza Midwood on the last Sunday of every month and one weekday morning, at breweries across South End and NoDa, and at street markets, and the storefront it eventually chose sits a few blocks from the coffee shop that hosted it. Opening weekend in March 2025 ran a coffee pop up, a biscuit pop up and a different local author every hour on the Sunday, including Joy Callaway, Mazey Eddings and Jessica Peterson, according to Axios.
Mitchell has been direct about the business logic. Selling one genre from a bus was a constraint that became a brand, and a romance only store in a city with a library system predicting record romance checkouts turned out to be a market nobody else had claimed. The Ledger’s 2024 profile found her in a dark green bus outside a brewery, and by the following spring the bus had paid for a lease. Business, she said then, was hot.
Why it matters
Romance is the fastest growing category in American publishing, with print sales up more than fifty percent year over year at one point, according to Circana data cited by Axios, and Charlotte’s library system predicted record romance checkouts in 2024. Trope arrived at exactly the moment the genre stopped being something readers hid.
A bookstore that started in a school bus is a good story. A bookstore that started in a school bus because a woman who had not read in a decade fell back in love with reading, and then decided to sell that feeling to strangers, is a better one. The Green Girl is still on the road. The shop is where she comes home.