A few weeks ago, I selected a book to review that admitted it was a novella, but pretended it was a stand-alone. When I opened it up, the book was fifty seven pages and was about the farthest thing from a stand-alone I could think of. Instead, I think it’s a few chapters the author cut from another book and just… embellished. There was no time to invest in the characters, and instead I was expected to believe they were obsessed enough with each other to go from dreaming of having sex with one another to marriage – in fifty seven pages.
My pet peeve radar went off.
I loathe this. First of all, fifty seven pages is not a novella. It isn’t even a short story. It’s a plot bunny that needs further unpacking. 13,000 words may sound like a lot, and writing that much is arduous, do not get me wrong, but it’s also not a story. It’s the start of one, the middle of one, or the end of one, but no. NO. I am not a crackpot, but novellas should be long enough that I at least remember the characters’ names by the time I reach the HEA. 120 pages sounds good. Shall we pass a Romancelandia law?
This got me thinking. I know this might not bother other folks like it bothers me, but I also know I’m not alone. I’m not talking about trope violations or overtly awful and offensive things. I’m more talking about the book equivalent of someone loading the dishwasher wrong. So, I’m curious, what are your pet peeves?!
Do you loathe when previews are stuffed into the back of a Kindle book and there’s no notice ahead of time? What about when the book tells you it’s a standalone, but then expects you to know an entire house-party-worth of people? Does your ire get up when a book calls itself Regency but then refers to Queen Victoria? How do you feel when people call things erotica that are actually just romance with a lot of sex? Let it allllllll out, folks. Vent away!
~ Kristen Donnelly
Switching gears from the “baby or not baby” question, one of my pet peeves is when a character–typically male–is delightfully obnoxious/arrogant/rakish/priggish/ in the initial books in a series, so that you positively cannot wait until he gets his own book (in which he will surely get taken down a peg or two, one way or the other).
And then the character gets his book, and within the first chapter or two, the obnoxiousness/insufferable arrogance or priggishness/rakish behavior seem to be resolved or at least toned way down–if it even makes an appearance to begin with. And we have a rather different character instead, often someone a little more sympathetic or understandable or likable.
This is why I loved Hoyt’s Duke of Sin. I felt the author gave us the same unscrupulous, rather morals-free Valentine that we’d seen in the books leading up to DoS. IMO, Hoyt didn’t suddenly turn Val into a kinder, gentler person to make him more palatable in his own story. I appreciated that.
Other peeve: Stop using “proscribed” when you mean “prescribed”. Seriously, they are not synonyms.
I just came about another petpeeve: the ubiquitous Duke. They live like Barons or in the best of cases like Earls, sometimes even like commoners. Mostly they are rich, they never give you the feel of a real duke, not like Wulfric Bedwyn, the Duke of Bewcastle by Mary Balogh . The reason I was reminded was an older book by Louise Allen, written as Francesca Shaw in 1997. The old title was The Unconventional Miss Dane. The hero was a ‘simple’ Marcus Lord Allington. The new release from 2018 now has the title Miss Dane and the Duke. Now the hero is Marcus Renshaw, Duke of Allington.
Are we readers truly so stupid to need a duke in a book? I’ve read books with dukes in the title sell better. But have the publishers not tried if readers would buy them without the dukes after so many years of dukes everywhere? I myself meanwhile try to steer cleer of them.
I know of authors who have pretty much been instructed to make their heroes dukes because they sell. It’s ridiculous – many of these ducal heroes don’t need to be dukes at all; I could reel off loads of titles – as I’m sure you could, too – citing examples where the hero doesn’t need to be such an exalted figure, where actually, the story would work better if he wasn’t – and yet someone, somewhere has a bee in their bonnet that the majority of HR heroes have to be dukes. *shakes fist*
I once queried an agent with a historical romance where the hero worked as an architect, and the agent asked if I could make him the heir to a fortune (which didn’t really fit my plot, where it was important that he had only a limited amount of money).
I was just surprised I wasn’t asked to make him a duke. Now that might have sold the book.
Duets or trilogies based around one couple, when they would be better off resolved in one larger or pared down book. They are often filled with contrived drama or “filler” just to fill out the pages. I’ve stopped buying them. I’d rather read a stand alone, or an interconnected series of stand alone with a new couple per book.
Another pet peeve: Boner led romance. Or gushing pussies or tingling nipples at first meet-cute. (Eye roll).
The alpha hero, I think has had its day, hasn’t it? Pushy, jealous assholery? Over them. I’ve just finished a Nora Robert’s book with a fierce female leader, and the beta male who encouraged her in all the things – sublime. And a Victoria Dahl book with a male (beta) librarian who was a bit of a nerd, sexiest thing ever.
This is a fascinating (and brutally honest) thread. I’m enjoying it and I hesitate to pitch in my two cents but I’m interested in the baby part of this discussion. I write historical romance and I have on a few occasions had the heroine in a job type setting. Generally though, they are anticipating a family by the end of my books. In this thread there are readers who are taken out of a story because something is glaringly inaccurate for the period it is written, while others feel that a baby conclusion does not feel right for a variety of reasons. I’ll never please all readers and this reminds me of that fact, because it’s tricky to be historically and culturally correct in Virginia in 1873, if the characters think like me in Pennsylvania in 2018.
My setting is America in the latter half of the 1800s and while some women were attending college, rallying for the right to vote, and were innovators, the vast majority of women were still managing a household which was considerably more time consuming than today’s household. They were making clothes, sometimes the fabric for the clothes, and depending on the wealth of the family, still making soap, tending a large garden, canning foods and educating their children. Those working in commerce at that time were often domestics and unmarried. I am not saying that women did not have aspirations outside of the home, they certainly did, and some chose not to have children or were not able to conceive, but managing a household and children was challenging whether you were wealthy or poor.
The sewing machine is integral to one of my stories and that is because I’ve always believed that when they became available for household use, it changed the life of many women in a powerful way, and was maybe the earliest sign of women’s liberation. I am happy that I live in an era where I can be a doctor, a senator or a stay at home parent with vacuums and dishwashers and disposable diapers and cars and antibiotics but that was not the case in the year my books are set. Thankfully, there are books that suit each of us, and in the romance genre, tell a love story. My favorite kind.
I am reminded that in 1940 nearly half of houses in the US lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, or a flush toilet.
I struggle mightily with the expectation that books written in another era should represent the mores of today. I don’t envy authors trying to find a voice that is both contextually legitimate and in tune with today’s expectations.
Completely agree with that!
Just gone on a Roberta Gellis glom to cleanse the palate.
However, historically, many women took years to get pregnant, had multiple early pregnancy miscarriages and lost children early. So having historical romances like some Balogh epilogues (I love Balogh, I have just started to skim her epilogues) where every woman is either pregnant or has babies, in a series closing book, is a bit much.
I never took much notice until both the epilogue and the babies became so common that I just wondered whether there were some publisher’s rules somewhere.
I just wrote a book that has everything – sex, erotica, witchcraft, suspense, drama, biblical stories, women raping men, men raping women – the only thing it doesn’t have is babies. It even has math problems, but not babies. I know sex leads to babies, – I am not stupid, but somehow I don’t think sex can be mixed with babies in the same book, like you can’t mix milk and wine at the same meal. At least I can’t.
I personally don’t have children, don’t want them, don’t plan on having them and in “real life” I don’t care if people make the choice/decision to not have them either.
In books I don’t mind characters having babies. I don’t look for books that only have that sort of content/epilogue but I don’t mind at all when they do! I suppose it’s just a matter of taste, some readers like, others don’t..I never thought of it, however, as being evidence we are supposed to only accept HEAs as valid if so. Again, it depends on how that is included in the plot.
The baby thing is complicated and studies on how people ultimately feel about not having children vs. having children are thin on the ground. We do know that the gap between how many children women who say they want kids want to have and how many they actually have is the greatest it’s been in 40 years. (2.7 vs. 1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years. We also know that the fertility rate for women over 40 is increasing. The infertility business is booming–Americans spent over 3.5 billion dollars on infertility treatments in 2013, the last year I could find stats for.
My sense at 57 is that if you decided you want kids–at any age–and didn’t have them, that often brings a great deal of sadness. If you never, at any age, wanted kids and didn’t have them, you’re happy you didn’t.
Yes, this is all true and yes, motherhood is as you have said very complex and even divisive. It more than most gender issues divides people, as it speaks directly to what roles women have in society or should have. Since I initially raised the issue way up thread, the point I was calling attention to is that romance novels are not representing what you have stated. The overwhelmingly vast majority of romance novels are creating a conflict-free resolution where nearly all women want babies or have babies in the end, usually in the epilogue. Such literary consensus is curious to me and even troubling because it does not allow for the complexity of the issue that I think most women see in th