I have missed several of this year’s TBR challenges. This one is going to be a series of quickshots at a couple of books I have read this year. So quick I can’t even be bothered putting up book cover photos.
And there will be SPOILERS so some readers may want to look away!
Julia Quinn’s The Other Miss Bridgerton – I was really surprised when I looked at my Goodreads account to note that this is the only historical romance novel I have read this year. For the most part, I have been reading contemporary fiction but I hadn’t picked up on this until I started writing this post. I enjoyed this new addition to the Bridgerton extended circle. Poppy Bridgerton and Andrew Rokesby. Andrew is a kinda-pirate whose crew accidently kidnap Poppy who had gone for an explore while she was visiting a friend and unintentionally found herself in the caves were this pirate crew stored its booty. As the majority of the book was adventures at sea, and being stuck in the captain’s cabin conversations, the character building was layered. The interaction between the Poppy and Andrew was fun and interesting. My only complaint about this book is the boring as bat-shit penetrative sex scene tacked on to the last chapter. It was unnecessary and annoying. I think that it made for a lesser book. I have no objection to sex scenes in romance novels, and certainly there were various other sex scenes in the body of the novel that established the physical attraction between the hero and heroine. The last sex scene, after the love proclamation, just didn’t resonate. Meh. But otherwise, the novel was Yeah.
Victoria Hislop’s Carte Postales from Greece – I really enjoy an epistolary novel so this one really should have worked for me but instead it annoyed the shit out of me. The author seems to have spent a lot of time in Greece, and has picked up on some nuances of Greek culture but she mostly just fell into perpetuating stereotypes. The premise is that a woman living a lonely life in London starts receiving postcards from an unknown person travelling through Greece. She decides to travel to Greece to all the places that are on the postcards. There is a mixture of flashback stories relating to the locales on the cards, interwoven with perspectives from both the sender and the receiver of the cards. It was trite but appealing enough (even with the eye-rolling revenge stories) but then I got to the WWII story of the German soldier during the occupation and a liaison with a young Greek woman. This story annoyed me enough that I had to just give up. Do note, that at least at the point where I DNFd the book, it was not a romance, and nor was the story where I gave up.
I just didn’t want to give the book more time.
You know.
So many books.
So little time to waste it on drivel.
Shallowreader 
So many undiscovered gems out there, to spend any time wanting to strangle a shitty book!
I know, right! I possibly gave it too much time. I am a sucker for Greek stories 😀
When we ask for diverse stories told by own voices, we are often shouted down with cries of, “writers use their imaginations! how can you limit them?”
And we’ve read those stories for literally centuries because that was the only time we saw ourselves on the page in LiTeRaChUr (aka, dead white men fiction). And we are tired of it, we deserve better. We deserve to see ourselves as we are, not as fetishized props for someone else’s cultural shock/awakening/growth.
I agree wholeheartedly. Though it is weird who I will give a pass to, and who I don’t. For example, Hislop annoyed me, her writing was very much “oh the quaintness, I do love it”. Yet I will give a pass to Lynne Graham who writes the most ridiculous Greeks and nothing is real – but then again, the unreal absurdism of category romance is part of why I can give it a pass (does that even make sense???).
It does; in one, you buy the over the top trope-stastic fantasy. The other is too pretentious and self-conscious, taking itself too seriously.
Yes! You have nailed it! The earnestness is cloying in the pretentious writing. It is why I can barely manage to read dead white men any more (or even living ones, to be honest).
I tried to read a Hislop, b/c of the Greek setting years ago, and it was a total yawnfest. And she doesn’t know squat about Greece. So, I’m not surprised you DNF-ed. It’s up there in badness with Capt. Corelli’s Mandolin?
I couldn’t bring myself to read (or watch) it. Just the trailer was enough to turn me off. And you are totally right on Hislop knowing nuthink.
You’ve missed absolutely nothing. And Nicholas Cage, ugh.
I know! I can’t stand Cage and I am always miffed when people say my husband is his dead ringer. Grrr.
He was “okay” in Moonstruck, but I don’t like his mug or ‘tude at all. Nah, not really, the H doesn’t look like him. And I have genius IQ at pattern recognition, so you know I’m right.
I think you are missing the weird, creepy, slightly-off-centre appeal of Mr Cage!
Oh no no. It is the weird, creepy, slightly-off-centre Mr Cage that is unappealing. I see it. But I dislike it.