Memory Lane ~ Mar. 18/25
I’m not sure if you noticed, but dark romance is having a bit of a moment right now. And as an awkward aging millennial, there is nothing that I want more than to be one of the girlies. Yet I’ve finally met the book that is making me admit defeat and confront the undeniable truth: I’m just not a dark romance girlie.
You might think that this is a lead up to a dramatic takedown of “tHe WoRsT bOoK I’Ve EvEr ReAd,” but quite the opposite. This book was objectively fantastic. The plot? Dense, twisty, and intriguing. The characters? Complex, flawed, and compelling. The spice? Spicing. And yet the whole thing didn’t work for me.
As readers, I think it’s important for us to recognize the difference between something bad and something that you didn’t like. One suggests issues with the technical aspects of the book—plot, characters, and pacing. But even the most well-crafted book can’t be for everyone. I’m not a big non-fiction person, and it would be utterly bananas for me to continually force myself to read history and then try to say it all sucks. It doesn’t. It’s just not for me.
In my quest to be a dark romance girlie, I had some bad luck with a string of books that I would consider to be bad in the technical incompetence sense. Surely, that was the thing that kept putting me off and when I found the right author, I would get it. Well, I found the right author. If anyone was going to make me get dark romance, this was the person. And I still don’t get it.
That’s fine.
Until next time, travellers,
Gael Romer
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