the ask@AAR: What love stories DO NOT stand the test of time?

Reader Kris recently commented that when she reread Lisa Kleypas’ Dreaming of You it DID NOT hold up at all. She wrote:

From Sarah saying NO to Derek not listening and the portrayal of the villainess, I won’t be reading it again. And I don’t understand why I loved it so much in the first place.

This is an experience we’ve all had. There are romances we loved back in the day that now make us shudder or, at the very least, wonder what on earth we were thinking.

Earlier this year, I tried and failed to reread Devil’s Bride by Stephanie Laurens. The prose was absurdly purple, Devil is kind of a dick, and Honoria is just plain silly a great deal of the time. Today, it is a hard pass and yet, when I look at Goodreads, I see that in 2013 I gave it four stars which, for me, is high praise.

How about you? What are books that really no longer work for you? Why?

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