I finished reading a historical romance last night. It's part one of a series by an author that reportedly has good buzz (though I'd never heard of her until I got one of her books to judge in the RITAS). Since the book I'm judging is later in the series I bought the first one from Amazon and eagerly opened it.
    It was kind of a strange book! It was good, but it never drew me in and took me five days of forced late night readings to finish - just good enough that I didn't want to skim, but not good enough that I actually wanted to read it. I'm not really sure what the problem was either.
    The beginning few chapters were so perfect I was practically oohing and ahhing, even as I had no interest in turning the page. Each page seemed like a set piece, each section ready to be excerpted on a website or chat loop. Then, in the last fifty pages or so, this historical adventure-type romance was suddenly chock-full of humorous dialogue. The exposition, character tags and so forth were completely like the rest of the book, but the dialogue was funny. Yes, funny, but still off-putting because the book hadn't been droll before.
    The bottom line must have been, though, that I never cared about the characters. Still, everything was done right. The sensual scenes happened at appropriate times (intead of being forced too soon), the black moments weren't out of the blue. Maybe the whole prophecy thing that turned out to be not a big deal was a significant part of the problem, especially since there are more books coming. Maybe it was because the hero was a youngest son, not the oldest. Maybe it was because the heroine was in no personal danger for the first part of the book. I don't know. I just didn't want to read it!
    And that's too bad, because I wouldn't want anyone to feel that way about one of my own books.

 

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