So I picked up a specfic book from my local Barnes & Noble the other night. Had a nice cover, a great blurb, and the inside cover excerpt read really well. I thought, great. It’s been a while since I was able to read for fun. I need to splurge on a book. So I did.
The book started off well enough. The writing is excellent and the author has a firm grasp of the protagonist and the world the story occurs in. I can see little plot building devices all over the place in the first chapter and I’m really enjoying myself.
Then I hit the boulder. I’m not sure if it’s a plot boulder or a character boulder or a “Brandie is the wrong audience for this book” boulder. The story is about a 21 year old woman who is hiding “super powers” because if she reveals them, then her destiny is decided for her. But if she doesn’t reveal her powers by X date and gets caught later on, she gets executed. Okay, I like that premise. As I’m reading along, story goes something like this:
Girl meets super-cute-hot boy that makes her melt (chapter 1. Oh, wait. This is one of THOSE books. Not my favorite kind of relationship, but I can deal.)
Girl is hiding secret powers that only family knows and could get her killed if she doesn’t deal with it properly.
Boy knows she is hiding secret and tries to get her to out herself properly
Boy foists her cousin on her to convince her to come out
Boy continues along this vein, including almost threatening girl’s best friend (also male) because girl’s best friend is trying to help her deal with secret powers.
Boy finally threatens to out her himself.
Girl lets herself get pressured into outing her powers and she’s furious with boy and cousin for this
Boy offers to teach girl and they end up all hot & sweaty in his dorm room.
Wait. WHAT?
At this point in the plot (and I don’t think I’ve made it past chapter 5), I’m totally done with this book. Girl is mad at boy, beyond mad because of what she thinks he did to her, but she still gets all hot-n-heavy with him? I don’t care how attracted to him she is, the author wrote the fury and the buildup to the “outing” so well, there’s no way I can fall in line with the “she now falls into bed with him” plotline. It’s completely implausible to me that something this important to her could be forgiven after a single day.
And the book was actually getting good before this happened. Oh, well. Fourth wall broken. Reader lost. Book getting tossed in the library without being finished. I hate tossing books. I never toss a book, unfinished, unless it’s a “bad writing” book. It just breaks my heart that such a well-written piece of fiction killed the joy I was getting out of it. But this is what happens when good writing goes bad.
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Re: Good Writing Goes Bad
I’ve never read “Fifty Shades” either. I’ve heard a rumor that it was originally a slash “Twilight” fanfic, but I don’t know how true that rumor is. And there is, IMHO, a difference between a guy who is all wrong for a girl and … this. The problem is the protagonist is a strong female character with a mind of her own. And the author kind of crushed my ability to believe that she’d let someone who did this sort of thing get into her pants.
If it was S&M fiction, I might believe it, but it’s not. I found this book in the SF&F section of a mainstream bookstore. So I’m left trying to figure out if I really want to finish it or not.