A Stormy Greek Marriage by Lynne Graham (The Drakos Baby, Book 2)
Books like this are the reason I stopped reading category romance in my mid-20s. I hope I don’t come across too many more of them in the near future. DNF.
I have five more titles in my Lynne Graham glom pile, but I’m not sure I can bear to go on. On one hand, I knew getting into this book that Graham writes domineering heroes of the 80s alpha kind. I thought I could cope with it, but this book is such a trainwreck I gave up halfway through.
Surprisingly for a category romance, this is part two of a series. (Perhaps Graham should have just written a full length book, did anyone think of that?) The back story is explained well enough to get the gist—I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t be prepared to slog through an entire book to basically learn that Alexei finally slept with his personal assistant, Billie, taking her virginity. She’s pined for him in secret but felt she was no match for the dazzling beauties that naturally flock to her rich, handsome boss.
Unfortunately, Alexei tripped and hit his head and managed to conveniently forget the two nights they were together. More unfortunately for Billie, the oblivious Alexei tried to rekindle a childhood romance as Billie coped with the consequences of their nights together—yes, the old secret baby.
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Abandoned Book by swotai (via Flickr)
Today I started reading the first book in a paranormal series that seems to have been generally well received. I got up to page 16 before I closed the book, knowing I’ll probably never read this series. Sixteen pages were enough to tell me that the author’s voice and style are just not going to do it for me.
For one thing, certain words bugged me as sounding out of place or not quite right. Like when a writer uses a word and you know what they want to express, but the actual word is just an approximation, or they’ve tried to turn a verb into a noun (or a noun into an adjective, etc.) but used the wrong morphology–or worse, turned it not into a noun but an adjective being used as a noun when a perfectly good noun already exists.
Another problem was the awkward management of POV (point of view). I’m not against POV changes within the same scene. I even tend to prefer them in general (although I concede there are certain types of stories that are strengthened by restricting POV). But when I notice and am jarred by the POV changes by page 16, I think it’s safe to say that it will only get worse as I read on.
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