More conversations on what drives us batty about romance novels:
Sarah: I am in the middle of glomming all the Balogh and Putney backlist I can get from Booksfree.
Candy: Good luck with the glom. I personally can’t read too many Putneys in a row, though when spaced apart she’s usually quite reliably good. Her Fallen Angels series is especially entertaining, but when they stage group get-togethers in the later novels and you see the massive conglomeration of gorgeous, wonderful people who have found other gorgeous, wonderful people to spend forever with, it gets a bit much.
Sarah: Oh my GOD yes, when the gorgeous and well-matched love couples collect in one place, it is a bit over the top. I mean, for an era of arranged matches, where are all these love matches coming from? I’d love to see a series written about a deb who enters after a Putney/Balogh/Quinn/Kleypas season where every freaking girl made a love match, and how on earth do you compete with that?!
The worst is the Quinn Bridgerton family. I love the family dynamic and I love that she has characters who behave like real siblings and aren’t just caricatures meant to drive the plot as the “jealous brother” or the “harpy sister” but gosh, get the whole clan in a novel together and you want to hurl from the full-sugar-Kool-Aid sweetness.
Candy: Yes, it’s one thing to suspend disbelief for novels that you read separately, but then to pack the results of several novels in a small space is totally gag-a-riffic. Also, when I look at all the couples and realize the extremely wacky circumstances they were involved in when they met (this ESPECIALLY applies to the Fallen Angels series, and any other series involving a group of friends who are also spies or crimefighters or whatever) I’m, like, “Doesn’t anyone fall in love with somebody introduced by a mutual friend any more?” Jesus.
The Karen Ranney series I’m reading right now, The Highland Lords (gag me with a spoon, that’s such a horrible series title) is actually somewhat refreshing because the first two books had high drama, but the third just has one of the MacRae brothers falling in love with a woman who happens to be engaged. The book was kind of padded out unnecessarily (I mean, I figured out the solution about 200 pages before it finally occurred to the main characters), but after reading two convoluted stories that involved high drama and protagonists who initially hated each other, I thought a quiet story about two genuinely nice, honorable people falling in love was a nice break.
Sarah: I totally agree with the group recollecting of past heroes and heroines – what really bugs me is that they are so wishy washy! Even if they were hell on wheels in their own stories, once they are settled into domesticated, loving wedded bliss, they are BORING. I mean, I understand not wanting a past character to overshadow your new heroine, especially if the past character was just better all around, but still, there’s no way that some of these hell raising women are now genteel images of perfection for crying out loud.
Uck, I totally agree. That’s one reason I tend to dislike the books at an end of a connected group by an author. Not only are the couples all nauseatingly in love, they also all LOVE everyone in their group. There’s never one wife who simply doesn’t get along with the wife of her husband’s old school chums. The firebrands who set the town on fire in their own books are universally loved when they show up in later novels. I’d love it if for once the heroine of a current novel would find at least one of previous heroines annoying. I’d even settle for heroines deciding they didn’t have much in common with each other and that they wouldn’t be bosom buddies.
That was one good thing about Marion Chesney’s regency romances. Her heroines were frequently imperfect, and even better, although they found the men right for them, they stayed imperfect in follow-up books and didn’t necessarily spread perfection in their wake. I was really sad when Marion Chesney stopped writing regencies, she was one of my absolute favorite authors when I was looking for something humorous and sparkling.