The Review I'll Never Write

On Amazon or Goodreads, at least--

This is one of the most thoroughly unpleasant romances I've ever read. The protagonists' violent/unhappy pasts take the violence trope at face value: the characters deserve romance because life and other people are sooo unfair. And unfairness is the watchword here. The primary protagonist utilizes "_____phobic" language like a weapon. Everyone who disagrees with the primary protagonist's perspective--and intensely shallow version of diversity--is obviously "somethingphobic" plus all the other labels that accompany that mindset. Yet the primary protagonist is free to attack others with some of the most vicious language I've encountered in fiction (usually I have to go to the news). And the viciousness is excused due to the primary protagonist's victimhood/situation. The villains, after all, are entirely one-dimensional beings, a collection of "bad" labels who can be easily refuted and abused because, after all, they have those labels.

Good romance is more than throwing ideas together.

I will not be officially publishing this review for a variety of reasons: (1) the editor/teacher in me wants to give all authors a fair shake; (2) my review would be viewed as political when it is actually about writing; (3) this book is an outlier in the romance genre.

Regarding #2, the book's unpleasant tone and characterizations aren't just politically charged; they are bad writing. The primary protagonist is unlikable--which is a huge problem in a romance. The villains are tributes to the straw man fallacy; conquering them is meaningless. The lack of strong characterizations makes the book a polemic, not a story. (It isn't even good enough to be an after school special.) I would argue that the shallow politics and the bad writing are connected--perceiving aggressions and unkindness and prejudice as only belonging to people-who-don't-agree-with-me doesn't entirely prepare a writer for deep, empathetic characterizations.

Still, the problem comes back to the writing. This isn't story. This is lecture. (Or a Victorian morality tale.)

#3: I can happily state that most romance writers, nontraditional and M/F, avoid these particular problems. Some political language does crop up in some romances I read but generally speaking, the writers behave like, well, writers. Plot matters. Strong characterization matters. Dialog matters. There is also an awareness of where a particular argument could end up; the writers are intelligent enough to follow a train-of-thought/position to its natural conclusion. There is even, often, a kind of Azar Nafisi acknowledgement that fiction is naturally democratic and inclusive because it allows for different perspectives; a fictional world that only meets a specific set of "acceptable" criteria, even a supposed progressive set, would not be a world that benefits writers in the end.

Since many romances focus on harmony rather than disharmony, even the so-called small-minded villains are allowed to live according to their own principles.

The strongest decision a character can make in a romance: get on with that character's own life. Attacking people with labels is fairly useless, no matter to whom those angry labels are pinned.