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
Oh man, I have so many of these! The ones that come to mind off the top of my head are both writer quirks:
1. When the author clearly believes that pronouns are death and therefore, instead of using them, she has to plop in an entire synonymous phrase, so you keep getting these jarringly overwritten collocations. The example that I always think of was actually originally called out by a reviewer on this site many years ago!, but unfortunately I can’t remember which reviewer or which book. But it was something like, the heroine is eating ice cream, but the author, instead of doing the sensible thing and using a pronoun, refers to it as “the cool creamy treat.” Which like seriously. This is LITERALLY WHAT PRONOUNS ARE FOR. I’m a professional syntactician and I swear to you, authors, this is literally what pronouns are for.
2. When the couple is having sexytimes, and someone’s body (usually the heroine’s) gets described in the wrong POV. It’s the sin of a POV character describing their own hair colour up a degree or two of magnitude. E.g., if we’re in the hero’s head, and there’s a description of the heroine’s perky breasts or silky skin or whatever, that’s cool, he’s interacting with her body at the moment, so that makes sense. But if we’re in the heroine’s head, and she describes her own body that way, it’s just like… who does that??? I mean, kudos for having a healthy body image! but anyone who has the brainspace to be musing about how great their boobs are in the middle of sex is either focusing on the wrong things or really bored or both.
There’s a super-popular author who seems allergic to personal pronouns. Instead, she uses a lot of “possessive-profession” constructs. “His librarian” “her rock-star.”
I hate it.
Some schools teach that as well, and I despair for the poor kids.
Oooooh! I could write my own novella of Pet Peeves but here are just a few:
I concur with Kristen about the novella that is just a brief short story where you are expected to know a whole contingent of characters being unacceptable. Often a DNF for me and I think it’s a prod to the reader to order and read a raft of the author’s books in a series to understand what the hell is going on. And I agree with the previews at the back of a Kindle book. It generally means I won’t be revisiting that author. A recent example of this was The Wallflower’s Wicked Wager (A Waltz with a Rogue Book 5) by Collette Cameron. I read the first three chapters and was so dismayed by the F- quality of the prose (at least three over-done adjectives for everything ad nauseum) that I skipped to the last chapter and skimmed it. Then I found at least 4 lengthy teasers of her other books. No way will I be back.
I guess my biggest peeve is one I’ve mentioned here many times over the many years I’ve been following AAR. And that is the bungling of English (and Scottish) aristocratic titles. It’s so simple to get right and I’ve never understood why an author would choose to have characters who have titles and then get it completely wrong. To me, it’s a completely avoidable error and so cringeworthy that it often puts me off an author. I like historical accuracy but appreciate that fiction often needs a little bend in the rules. But titles? It’s really silly. and some of the errors I’ve seen have been so ludicrous that you almost have to wonder where the editors are.
One final peeve. That’s the sneaky reprint with a new cover or, in the case of an anthology, using previously published material. One example I remember was a Christmas anthology where the publications dates of the various novellas was in the BACK of the wretched book! I always check the front where you would expect to find this information but I thought that was really out of line.
‘Historical’ romances that are completely anachronistic and that have absolutely no grounding in the era they are set in.
Yes…………
I HATE it when authors use similar names for characters that interact a lot. For example, a book that has a John and a James. Or Mary and Maureen. You get the idea. I cannot keep track of them!
Yeah, I recently read a ‘novella’ that was more like a plot summary. I felt so cheated!! Needless to say, I went on Amazon and gave it a blistering review.
Writers who do not invest in a professional proofread/copy edit drive me crazy! It takes me right out of the story when I encounter a passage that has clearly not been edited. Here are a few recent eyebrow-raisers:
“My life was moving at a world wind speed.”
“He gave me a rye smile.”
“I had been too kind to her. Too gentile.”
Writers—please don’t rely on your beta readers and Facebook groups to do your proofreading.
This 100 percent reminds me of Laurel K Hamilton deciding she didn’t need an editor and then her books going sideways.
Rye smile. Too much bourbon maybe. :)
Typos I’ve seen…
“She tried not to react to his fowl breath.”
“Resting his shin against her head…”
“He greeted her with a huge.”
“She looked young and innocent in the white muslim dress.”
“The guard had to go take a leek.”
“He looked deviantly at the little boy.”
“She titled her head.”
Rye Smile. That is awesome!
When a book has been published as a series of books but its really 1 book, The first ones have no real ending and trying to remember what happened in the previous is impossible and having to pay for is 2 or 3 times.
Somany.wav . Elaine S tackled a LOT of mine, but any lack of consistency annoys me. Research fails I don’t immediately pick up on, to my sorrow (Caz will point them out to me, causing a lightbulb moment!) but the big stuff I will.
Also any book being listed as 500 pages – then it turns out to be 300 pages with several excerpts padding it out. Don’t do this, publishers.
I also love nonlinear timelines, but I hate nonlinear timelines that are so confusing you cannot even attempt to follow along with them.
As a Brit, Most of my pet peeves concern historical novels. Calling a duke, my lord instead of your grace, and calling a lord your grace! If a gentleman is called Sir John Smith, he is called Sir John, NOT Sir Smith – this can really jar me out of being engrossed in a novel. Also, British people do not walk ‘blocks’ – we have no idea what a block is! We would say ‘he/she lives some streets away’.
YES!
Modern dialogue in a historical. I mean the kind of collquial expressions that had never been heard of when I was a kid, let alone 200 years ago. Also overtly sexual flirting involving an inexperienced historical heroine. I came across that in a Courtney Milan novel (the only one of hers I’ve read or am now likely to read) and it really jarred. How did she understand his innuendo and repond in kind when she lived a sheltered life in an English village where sex was never mentioned? The characters could have wandered out of an office or a bar in 2018, their conversation felt so modern.
YES!
Yes! I can remember posting an excerpt from a novel that everyone agreed had to be a contemporary but was actually from a historical novel. Ridiculous.
Oceanjasper: Yes, yes, yes!!!! I loathe 21st century stories purporting to be historical novels with the characters dressed in long skirts or sporting a neck cloth.. And they are often speaking in modern idiom (and getting it wrong – as Gillian Wheatley mentions – e.g. overtly obvious Americanisms in British-set stories). And I won’t even begin to go into the overlaying of modern morals on 18th century stories. Why do authors do this? Who do they think they are fooling? I wish one of the perps would explain it to us.
Modern morals in historicals drives me nuts. Sure, every age had outliers, but characters still need to feel like they belong to their own time.
Yes, this. I agree, there were always exceptions, but with the sheer volume of historicals being put out today, it seems like pretty much every single character is an exception.
The ongoing tradition of the baby epilogue is my longest source of ire with romance writing, especially historical romance writing. Not all couples could have children. Not all women want/wanted children, even in the past. I find myself shifting more toward contemporaries partly to escape the stereotype that babies equal marital bliss and that craving babies is in a woman’s DNA.
I’m probably in the minority but I do not generally even like epilogues. If a story does its job well, a peak into the future to ensure happiness abounds should be unnecessary. I always find myself speed reading the epilogues, as I find the vast majority tedious and unnecessary.
I hate this one, too. In the last historical I read, the heroine was infertile and had a job, along with the hero, that wouldn’t naturally kern toward parenthood. So naturally the author dropped a couple of orphans into the story for the two of them to adopt.
(also sadly this keeps cropping up in the contemps I read, though one refreshing example I read recently had a proudly childfree heroine).
I agree! I do consciously seek out authors who are a little more forward-thinking on the “maternal” issue, but I think the entire genre has a long way to go on this topic. I’m even happy if babies are just not mentioned at all in a book’s resolution. I’m not saying that all books need to promote a child-free version of happiness, but I would settle for a few now and again.
I’m tired of the trope where the heroine is convinced she’s barren, with angst ensuing as a result, only to discover that all she needs is the hero’s golden manhood (as opposed to the evil ex’s limp bizkit). This is now so predictable that I’m only going to read about such heroines if they stay barren and come to terms with it.
This drives me crazy too, and I think the part that bugs me the most is that if the author just left that part of the ending open, and didn’t say anything about children one way or another, everyone who read the book could fill in the version they wanted, children or no children, and everyone could be happy.
I also hate it when an author takes risks with a heroine but then softens the whole thing by having her entirely plotline revolving around how desperately she wants children, so as to make her more “acceptable..”
THIS I freaking loathe. LET HEROINES BE UNUSUAL AND PRICKLY.
I’m nodding along with a lot of these to do with HR – misuse of titles (seriously, it’s not hard to look it up these days), Americanisms (ditto)… the old chestnut of “we can get married because Reasons and then get an annulment/divorce” – er – NO! Just lack of research full-stop.
And I’m not a big fan of the “babylogue” either. IIRC, Juliana Gray sends the whole thing up rather nicely in How to School Your Scoundrel.
I’m also going with over the top first person personal descriptions; “as I combed through my wavy auburn locks” – who on earth describes themselves like that?
Speaking with my Editor’s Hat on – the number of books that don’t seem to have touched an editor’s desk, let alone have actually been edited staggers me. And I’m not necessarily talking about self-published books here; the traditional publishers can be guilty of just as many howlers.
I so agree with you about the marriage part. There seems to be this myth that unconsummated marriages were a reason for annulments! Also, there are historical romance novels where a man marries his brother’s widow. No-one could do this, legally in the UK until 1921!
The barren heroine who is cured by hero’s magic sperm by the end is really annoying. Or heroine who assumes she is barren because she didn’t get pregnant in her previous relationship. And the men who are more than happy to buy that.
I also hate it when detailed eye color is observed from too far a distance.
Retconning events and characters because the series became popular and was expanded beyond original contract and author caves to popular pressure.
Using too many brand names when characters would normally just use the generic word for a product.
My number one pet peeve is instant boners and tingling nipples every time the characters are in the same room. Especially the first time they meet.
YES!
THIS!
My pet peeve is when the author has a character (or the narrator) summarize what happened in the previous books. If that has to be done, it should all be in one book.
My second peeve is repeat explaining. I don’t need to be told every 3rd page why you are unworthy, that your past has something mysterious, or how much fun you are. Tell me once. Better yet, show me.
Re: the first one: it depends a bit on the nature of the thing for me (e.g. if it’s a doorstopper fantasy series and we’re on book twelve, it bothers me less), but one particular version of this that I really hate is when a couple’s story begins as a secondary plotline in earlier books of the series and then their book starts at what is clearly the middle of their story. I want to read their story from its beginning in their perspective, whether it technically has already been hinted at or not. So many authors do this and I hate it.
I’m not a historian, but I hate it when I read a historical and something very obviously anachronistic happens. For example, I recently read the first chapter of a Victorian-set book, in which the heroine was riding in a curricle with her father and her brother, and they came upon the hero, who was severely injured and lying by the roadside. Before getting out of the curricle and helping him, the heroine*s father and brother discussed if it would’nt be better to go to the next town and send an ambulance to the hero…
Also, descriptions of eyecolors. I just don’t think there are many real-life people who think that their lover’s eyes remind them of a cool brook burbling merrily through a mystical, sunlit forest or something like that.
Really, really, really bad (or non existent) editing (writing):
“….Those things were the devil, and it never failed that my cursive would end up looking like someone else’s name that wasn’t mine.”
Thanks for an entertaining post btw, this is my first visit to this site.
Welcome CindyC, look forward to seeing you here again
Anachronistic names. Mary Balogh and Eloisa James have some notable examples. A Duke and Duchess called Elijjah and Jemma? More like gunslinger meets cheerleader. Regency heroines called Lauren, Jennifer and Samantha? Way too modern.
I’ve noticed that eye colour at a distance thing, too. I read one book where the heroine was standing on top of the castle tower and looking down at the hero who was on the drawbridge, and noticing the colour of his eyes. I wish I had eyesight like that.
And the Everyone’s Pregnant ending. Louise Allen is usually one of my favourite authors, but she had the worst ever ending to a series of four books. One heroine had just given birth, and the other three were all pregnant. That’s two or three babies too many for me.
I think I’ve read that series, too, and agree – I’m a fan of LA’s as well, but that epilogue was waaay OTT.
This post made me laugh, and I agree that naming can be quite off-putting. I had trouble with Kerrigan Byrne’s heroine, Farah, from The Highwayman.
Historical authors are always stuck having to obey by the laws of the Tiffany Problem; Tiffany is actually a completely realistic and normal name for a medieval heroine, but it’s 100 percent unusable due to how our modern ears hear the name.
You can actually use Tiffany in a historical; you just need to spell it in such a way that it looks more like what it originally came from (e.g. Theophany, Teophany, Theophanie) and less like itself. That way it looks decidedly weird, but it doesn’t look anachronistic. Also, I’m not sure quite when the “Tiffany” spelling became the official spelling, but it has to be relatively recent anyway, so a spelling like Theophany (or something like Typhenie, which people wouldn’t accept either) would probably be more period-appropriate anyway.
One of the many advantages of m/m romance and fiction is pregnancy is not a factor although happily family can be. There is no horror of MCs being barren or only complete when pregnant.
I’ve heard of M/M romance where mpreg occurs…
Nothing drives me crazier than inept and incorrect use of foreign languages (usually French or Italian) by authors. How hard is it to find a native speaker who can check a phrase or sentence for accuracy these days??
I have several pet peeves actually. The one I hate the most is the undisclosed cliffhanger. Seriously, You drop 2 stars automatically for that little farce. Knowing in advance is a must. Also the full priced novella. I recently read a series of “books” that were 150 pages (about) each that were $9.99 each! Maybe this was because the author had won a Hugo recently but come on! The three books could easily have been one story…..but not $30 worth. Although excellent stories I cannot recommend them due to price. *cough* Murderbot *cough*.
Personally – like many others – I hate when a book shows no sign of being copy edited. Misspellings, misuse of words, words that were in an earlier draft but didn’t get deleted from the final version – I’ve seen all these. My special pet peeve is when a word is used to mean its exact opposite – the most frequent one I’ve seen is using “descendant” to mean “ancestor”. One book I read had someone choosing his predecessor. I’ve also seen the phrase “hoi polloi” (from the Greek meaning “the many” and meaning the masses) used to mean an elite.
My recent (and not so recent) pet peeve: an independent woman who always maintained her senses around men and suddenly starts having an out of nowhere attraction for a guy she has hardly spoken to. It breaks my reader’s connection with her… and I’m pretty much done with the story then.
Agreed!
When this happens, where is the consistency of that character?
I hate it when, especially in contemporaries, the sex happens too soon. For me the fun of the romance is the sexual tension, it’s the path towards a relationship, it’s the personal thoughts that go into it and the mutual recognition that the other is “the one”.
There’s this saying that men think about sex every whatever minutes. But according to many contemporary romances, women do as well… of course they can if they want but it’s annoying!
Plus, it annoys me too that publishers ruin my chances of having well organized shelves by releasing books in series with different formats/sizes/fonts/layouts..!
I just thought of two more things that really bug me. Waiting a year for the next installment and lack of justice or revenge against villains, especially in historicals. To many times the heroine has been the victim of horrible violence or terrible injustices and the author just blows it off. The most common outcome is the bad guy is shipped to the Continent or America. I need to feel vindication for the heroine and I have no problem with killing the perpetrator in a historical. Leaving town just doesn’t do it for me.
YES THIS. You just know that once the villain’s off in America or wherever, he’s going to commit further atrocities against other women. How is that a happy ending?
Omg, the amount of red heads in books!!!!Ahhhhhhh
Yes! Also the thing where a trilogy’s heroines are a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. So many trilogies do this! Why????
I can’t stand overuse of words like mayhap(s) and nay. Once or twice in a book is my limit. And why do so many people have green or grey eyes? Even silver?
I do appreciate all the extra large “equipment”, however!
I believe it was Josephine Tey who called that “writing forsoothly”. I think of it as tis-twas-twere – if a book’s TTT factor is too high it’s out. Likewise with the dinna-doona count.
To Kristen – Many thanks for opening a wonderful can of worms for us to share and drool over. What a great list of posts on this topic which I am convinced is one we have all been itching to have a say about!! I can only hope that the authors who no doubt look at but don’t post on this site are paying attention. And to Suzanna – thanks for mentioning completely anachronistic names for characters. I crave a Kylie dressed up in a hooped 18th century court dress or a Kyle duelling with a Jayden early one morning in Hyde Park. ;-)