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Jan. 11th, 2013 06:06 pmI am watching The Untouchables. It has the most intrusively, aggressively awful score. It's horrendous. For such a famous movie, and Oscar-nominated score, I cannot believe how bad it is.
Jan. 11th, 2013
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Jan. 11th, 2013 06:15 pmTitle: Rainshadow Road
Author: Lisa Kleypas
Genre: Contemporary romance
Normally, Lisa Kleypas is my girl. I've proofread three of her books, all of which have been fantastic. And in the morass of the crap I normally work on, that is enough to make me a fan for life. I've read both historicals and contemporaries of hers, and what I love is that she writes with and against the romantic tropes. That is, she'll write straight-up Harlequin premises, but always with a twist and a touch of realism.
But then this book was just a complete failure. There was no playing against romantic tropes. It followed them straight down the line. The only thing that made it seem like a Kleypas at all was the attention to description of stained glass and viticulture. She's always been one for well-researched details, but in this book, that was besides the point.
The first chapter of the book is a history of Lucy and her sister Alice's relationship. Alice was always allowed to do whatever she wanted, and Lucy was always responsible for her. This has carried into adulthood, where Lucy's parents expect her to always bail Alice out, and Alice has become a flighty mess. This culminates in Lucy's boyfriend of two years confessing to her that he's been sleeping with Alice. And oh, could you move out by the weekend? She's moving in.
This was the story I was interested in. Too bad it's not the story the book is interested in. At all. Lucy gets over her cheating boyfriend, Kevin, almost immediately. She's upset, but she jumps to he's just a shallow asshole pretty quickly for someone she'd been with for two years. And Alice gets maybe five scenes in the whole book. Every time Alice is brought up, it is with the pop psychology explanation of why she is unhappy--oh, she was spoiled as a child and so cannot stay with anything long enough to make it work. Even Alice spouts this, with a totally unearned amount of insight. Which makes the relationship between Lucy and Alice boil down to this:
Alice: I am a spoiled brat.
Lucy: Yes you are. But I love you anyway.
Alice: You are such a perfect and loving sister. I am wholly unworthy to be in your presence.
It's complete crap. In Smooth-Talking Stranger, one of the high points, to me, was the heroine's relationship with her narcissistic mother. In that book, the mother does not actually stop being narcissistic. The heroine just finds a way to deal with it. Whereas here, the relationship is treated like any number of bad fanfic, where the wronged party waits around for the other person to articulate how wrong they were, and how much better a human being the wronged party is, and that is the end.
Then there's the hero, Sam, who I had zero interest in. He owns a vineyard. We're supposed to believe he's a geek because he wears TARDIS t-shirts, but his geek is only a coat of paint over a bog standard romance archetype. His geekiness does not affect anything about how he thinks or interacts, so it was actually kind of annoying to have people keep saying how geeky he is.
Also, the big obstacle to the romance is that both of his parents were alcoholics, so he doesn't know how to commit. The thing is, this obstacle is only spoken. He acts like an emotionally healthy guy perfectly capable of being loving and caring, and paying lip service to a traumatized past. I would sort of expect a character who is trying to avoid romance for that reason to have some of the emotional scars of, say, Logan Echolls from Veronica Mars. Logan had zero coping skills, and so any minor setback or argument, he went for the nuclear option. That is a character that doesn't know how to be in a relationship. Sam seems perfectly fine.
There are three other things that bothered me in this book:
- Lucy and Sam have magic. This magic serves no purpose at all except to show that since her magic likes his magic, they have to be together. So it's like the book has a faint whiff of soulbonding without committing to it. You could delete about five pages from the book and remove the magic element entirely without affecting the rest of the plot. So I wouldn't even call this "magical realism." It seems to me like Kleypas only threw it in cause it's the "it" thing right now.
- This is kid fic. There is an adorable niece that Sam and his brothers adopted after their sister was killed, and she goes around the first hundred-fifty pages being precocious then disappears from the book almost entirely for the rest. I was annoyed that I was not warned about the presence of a kid in the cover copy.
- About a hundred pages in, Lucy gets hit by the plotbus car. Literally. She gets hit by a random car, whose driver never appears again, so that Sam has to take care of her. Their courting pretty much consists of him carrying her around and giving her painkillers. Sex-ay.
Basically, this is sold as a book about Lucy dealing with her boyfriend cheating on her, but it isn't. Nor is it really a romance, since the development of Sam and Lucy's relationship happens mostly in narrative synopsis, like the montage sequence of a rom com. So basically it ends up being a lazily written hybrid of romance and chick lit that fails at both genres. Which, again, was disappointing since I've always liked Kleypas in the past.
Sigh. Back to Courtney Milan, I think.
Author: Lisa Kleypas
Genre: Contemporary romance
Normally, Lisa Kleypas is my girl. I've proofread three of her books, all of which have been fantastic. And in the morass of the crap I normally work on, that is enough to make me a fan for life. I've read both historicals and contemporaries of hers, and what I love is that she writes with and against the romantic tropes. That is, she'll write straight-up Harlequin premises, but always with a twist and a touch of realism.
But then this book was just a complete failure. There was no playing against romantic tropes. It followed them straight down the line. The only thing that made it seem like a Kleypas at all was the attention to description of stained glass and viticulture. She's always been one for well-researched details, but in this book, that was besides the point.
The first chapter of the book is a history of Lucy and her sister Alice's relationship. Alice was always allowed to do whatever she wanted, and Lucy was always responsible for her. This has carried into adulthood, where Lucy's parents expect her to always bail Alice out, and Alice has become a flighty mess. This culminates in Lucy's boyfriend of two years confessing to her that he's been sleeping with Alice. And oh, could you move out by the weekend? She's moving in.
This was the story I was interested in. Too bad it's not the story the book is interested in. At all. Lucy gets over her cheating boyfriend, Kevin, almost immediately. She's upset, but she jumps to he's just a shallow asshole pretty quickly for someone she'd been with for two years. And Alice gets maybe five scenes in the whole book. Every time Alice is brought up, it is with the pop psychology explanation of why she is unhappy--oh, she was spoiled as a child and so cannot stay with anything long enough to make it work. Even Alice spouts this, with a totally unearned amount of insight. Which makes the relationship between Lucy and Alice boil down to this:
Alice: I am a spoiled brat.
Lucy: Yes you are. But I love you anyway.
Alice: You are such a perfect and loving sister. I am wholly unworthy to be in your presence.
It's complete crap. In Smooth-Talking Stranger, one of the high points, to me, was the heroine's relationship with her narcissistic mother. In that book, the mother does not actually stop being narcissistic. The heroine just finds a way to deal with it. Whereas here, the relationship is treated like any number of bad fanfic, where the wronged party waits around for the other person to articulate how wrong they were, and how much better a human being the wronged party is, and that is the end.
Then there's the hero, Sam, who I had zero interest in. He owns a vineyard. We're supposed to believe he's a geek because he wears TARDIS t-shirts, but his geek is only a coat of paint over a bog standard romance archetype. His geekiness does not affect anything about how he thinks or interacts, so it was actually kind of annoying to have people keep saying how geeky he is.
Also, the big obstacle to the romance is that both of his parents were alcoholics, so he doesn't know how to commit. The thing is, this obstacle is only spoken. He acts like an emotionally healthy guy perfectly capable of being loving and caring, and paying lip service to a traumatized past. I would sort of expect a character who is trying to avoid romance for that reason to have some of the emotional scars of, say, Logan Echolls from Veronica Mars. Logan had zero coping skills, and so any minor setback or argument, he went for the nuclear option. That is a character that doesn't know how to be in a relationship. Sam seems perfectly fine.
There are three other things that bothered me in this book:
- Lucy and Sam have magic. This magic serves no purpose at all except to show that since her magic likes his magic, they have to be together. So it's like the book has a faint whiff of soulbonding without committing to it. You could delete about five pages from the book and remove the magic element entirely without affecting the rest of the plot. So I wouldn't even call this "magical realism." It seems to me like Kleypas only threw it in cause it's the "it" thing right now.
- This is kid fic. There is an adorable niece that Sam and his brothers adopted after their sister was killed, and she goes around the first hundred-fifty pages being precocious then disappears from the book almost entirely for the rest. I was annoyed that I was not warned about the presence of a kid in the cover copy.
- About a hundred pages in, Lucy gets hit by the plot
Basically, this is sold as a book about Lucy dealing with her boyfriend cheating on her, but it isn't. Nor is it really a romance, since the development of Sam and Lucy's relationship happens mostly in narrative synopsis, like the montage sequence of a rom com. So basically it ends up being a lazily written hybrid of romance and chick lit that fails at both genres. Which, again, was disappointing since I've always liked Kleypas in the past.
Sigh. Back to Courtney Milan, I think.