Okay so I'm trying to read more romance novels and this isn't helping

[lliira]

 So far we have:

1) Heroine who is down on her luck and knows nothing about the fashionable world, yet explicitly separates men into "gentlemen" and "farmers and etc.," and it never crosses her mind that the latter are people to whom she could be attracted. (Hi, I'd like to introduce you to Robert Martin and Gilbert Blythe, but they're too good for you.)

2) Heroine sleeps the sleep of the dead until she's groped.

3) Hero is a massive grouch who sleeps around with women he explicitly does not respect, and he looks down on women who sleep around.

4) Hero supposedly prefers well-padded women, but cannot stop thinking about how slim the heroine is.

5) Heroine is given a huge amount of money and a personal stylist, but she doesn't want any of those things, oh deary me no, because, as the hero says, she is "not like most girls." 

6) Sentence fragments! They're not my bane usually, but there are SO FUCKING MANY like MORE THAN IN TWILIGHT my kingdom for a complete sentence!

7) Showing, then telling, then explaining what's been told. Okay, she wanted to lengthen the novel, I can dig it. Maybe she should have tried complete sentences; those work pretty well.

8) Everyone in this book, including the side characters, is obnoxious in a way that makes me dislike the author. 

9) Aren't the hero and heroine supposed to be avoiding each other? So why are they not avoiding each other? The hero despises the heroine and said he wanted them to stay out of each other's way, yet he finds her and starts conversations with her. There's no outside force pushing them together. They seem to be talking to each other because they're the hero and heroine of a romance novel, and that's it.

10) I revoke the author's right to use the word "rustic" and any variations thereof.

It's not badly written, exactly, and it's not massively offensive, precisely, and I'm laughing enough at the cliches and absurdity that I think I'll finish it, but argh. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Could I make a recommendation?
I've been reading a lot of Courtney Milan and I've been pleasantly surprised.
She writes historical romances that deal with smart protagonists who respect one another, queer characters (only as background so far, which is admittedly disappointing), contraception and intimacy after trauma, all things that I've been dying to read about and have finally found.

[lliira]

Thanks, I'll have to check her out.

[silveradept]

This sounds like so much of what is the complaint about the genre itself, so much that I wasn't sure if you were detailing one work or many.

[lliira]

The author seems to have tried to cram all the ridiculous cliches she could into this one book. I hadn't read very far when I made that list, but it gets worse. So much worse. The Exceptional Woman junk, slut-shaming, massive history fail, hero being a brooding dickweed with no sense of humor, fat men are evil, short men are grody, women who want sex without love are subhuman but men who do are either damaged woobies or normal dudes (unless they're fat in which case they're sexual predators)...

The one good thing about it is the friendship between the heroine and the hero's cousin. The heroine also thinks in a lot more detail about her friend's body and how sexy it is than about the hero's. I don't even know what the hero looks like besides the traditional tall, buff, and handsome -- I think he's got dark hair, but I couldn't swear to it. I've been told about how the heroine's friend looks in exquisite detail though, from her olive complexion and dark brown hair to her jiggling bosom. Lots about the bosom.

[silveradept]

So, the proper conclusion to draw is that the heroine really wants her friend, but is too reserved to actually get her and instead is settling for the hero.

[lliira]

That's what I'm getting from it. I made the heroine and her friend in Sims 4 so they could be together.