Sappy Romance

Oh, I’m sometimes in phases of the genre I read.  I think that last year, I read an overwhelming larger selection of science fiction than people should (damn Philip K. Dick, for making his books so appealing).  Lately, I’ve been reading some sappy romance novels.  And they’re supposed to be cheap and cheesy.  My main fixes have been the Twilight series (which is wonderful at the cheesy romance) and fictionpress.com stories.  Though I am/was in some mood for the very purple, B-grade writing, I found something that irked me.  Just a bit.  That little irk.

Well, there was an actual sappy romance novel that is a galley, and I was supposed to read it and write a review on it.  I didn’t even finish it, because of the terror it beheld.  Well, not really terror.

Just, I don’t like when the pacing of stories stall.  Really.  I think that the hallmark of a well written story is a rhythm like music.  Some stories can artfully pulled off with a obscure sort of pace (like certain contemporary songs) and the old stories are typically lacy and constant (very Baroque or pre-classical).  I mean.  Unless you are aiming for an artfully-written story, you are better off keeping the pacing really steady and wonderful.

Oh yeah.  The romance story.  The first few chapters were a pleasant introduction.  It started out with a sort of prologue that piqued enough interest.  And then, in the chapters where something terrible happened, and the main character had to go fly out to visit his sister, he basically sits down and that is how they introduce the backstory of his family to you.

So the feeling to me is that the character sat there for an hour just reflecting on how he met his sister or something like that.  And in my mind, which thinks things through in a linear, time-line sort or way, I can just feel the plot train screeching.  It’s unrealistic how these sorts of introductions happen.  I always feel that the author should work in the story or allude to it while still keep the music of the action going.  But she didn’t.  She had the character sit down and performed an info-dump.

Format of the story:

[Male Protagonist] remembers how he met [Female Protagonist].  A few paragraphs of some sort of flashback.  His mother comes in, some awkward wording about his step/half-sister’s father dying.  Random description.  [Male protagonist] remembers how he met his step-sister.  He has always understood her.  He has a few flashbacks about her father.  He thinks about his sister’s trust in him.  Some paragraphs about his mother.  He decides to go visit her.  School is no longer of any importance.  A line break later he has teleported via airplane.

Man.  This is completely innaccurate, if I can judge my memory correctly.  But the book gave me this feeling.  It felt like just jumping and waiting and jumping, and walking.

I must note that the some really good books with strange pacing is Brave New World and A Scanner Darkly.  Mostly Brave New World.