I read my first romance in the bowels of my grandmother’s Brooklyn brownstone when I was just a child. As I grew, so did my appetite. Seeing the direction my reading was taking, my mother added a few African American romance novels to my collection, hoping, I assume, that I didn’t grow up with only white women as my role models.
It didn’t work. For reasons that I couldn’t put my finger on, at the time, the books didn’t grab me. Plus a number of them were poorly edited, poorly printed, and poorly constructed. There were often glaring typographical errors, repeated pages, and glue that just didn’t stick.
For more than twenty years, I’ve been reading these novels religiously, and I’ve been brand loyal only reading Harlequin and Silhouette. These days my taste is very defined, and up until the beginning of the year, I only read Harlequin Blaze the successor to Harlequin Temptation. I prefer these (they’re a drug like cigarettes) because they have just the right amount of emotional conflict and sex. Now not all of them are good — some plain suck, but they’re more consistently my taste than any others.
At the beginning of this year as I’ve completed my third novel and have strived for publication, I’ve been trying to broaden my romance reading horizons beyond my automatic buys. So far, it hasn’t been fruitful. I’ve discovered that erotica is just porn in a pretty wrapper, that contemporaries are chick lit in less pretty wrappers, and that African American romance have better wrappers than ever, but still doesn’t do it for me.
Today I’m finishing up Love, Lies & Videotape, and I’m just let down. I didn’t feel at all emotionally invested in the characters like I want to when reading a book, and the conflict was almost nonexistent. Two people with lots of emotional baggage (death, betrayal, adultery) thrown together in St. Lucia beach house, fall in love. Could you stop me from yawning? And the dialogue kills me in its unnaturalness. Nothing can pull you out of a story faster than someone using the word ’scrumptious’ in a sentence. Please, people.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice deadpan.
“Making breakfast,” she answered, realizing he must be worried that whatever she was goign to make would cause him to die a slow and painful death. “After our conversation the first night you made a mdeal for me, I know you must think I can’t even boil water. But the scrumptious omelet I’m going to make for you will prove otherwise.”
Aargh. Then there’s the stilted dialog between the protagonists during a kitchen fire:
She charged for the kitchen, her first instinct to reach for the skillet’s handle and grab it off the stove.
“Don’t touch it!” Darien yelled, and frightened, Jasmine looked over her shoulder at him.
“That pot is pure iron. You touch it with your bare hands, and your skin will melt.”
“Right, right,” Jasmine said, then whimpered. She hadn’t even thought of that.
Remind me during my next conflagration and colloquy to discuss the elements of pot construction.
When Harlequin purchased Arabesque and Kimani, I had hopes that they stories would carry the same punch as others in their various lines, but with characters who looked like me or had shared experiences. It has not been the case so far. But I’m reading this as another RWA freebie. I likely wouldn’t have picked it up on my own. It’s going to be a long winter as I make it through the remaining give aways from the conference - but I loaded up on AA romance and am looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
foleydog
Vortigern
