erica
I like stuff with romantic elements and angst, usually YA, fantasy, paranormal/urban fantasy or variations thereof. Usually wrinkles nose at sci-fi due to unlikely tech. Straight girl who likes boys that like boys!
Currently reading
On the surface by Kate Willoughby: boring AND frustrating at the same time.
I'm neither a sport-fan nor a sometimes-sport-spectator, but for some reason the idea of sport romance appeals to me - and occasionally I will also actually like a sport romance. This didn't work for me and though I tried, it finally hit the point of no return on DNF-land at chapter 35 (pg. 235 of 297). It had nothing to do with the sporting part. I mostly liked Tim as long as he was doing hockey-stuff. Not so much when he was fawning over Erin, because Erin... Erin I basically never liked - she was too much of an immature girl's girl for me; I really did not get what Tim saw in her most of the time.
I felt zero of the supposed chemistry. I don't know how old Erin is, but I'm guessing around 30 (her sister is 36). Tim is 32-33, and (supposedly) has a lot of life experience. If I didn't know this, I probably would have stripped at least a decade of both their ages based on how they spoke and acted. There was no real depth of character to either of them, despite the author giving Tim some Emotional Baggage. It felt like a teenage romance with some grown-up stuff in it, and not a good one. I've read YA-romance with characters with more depth (Katie McGarry, I love you).
By chapter 35 I had first suffered through an Over the Top Very Public and Staged proposal, and I loathe those. Proposals are intimate things, they should be romantic, and if you need to make the grand gesture, it should still be a private thing. Not publicly on camera and/or in front of a huge crowd. I hate it when I see it in real life. I hate it when they do it on film. And now I know that I also hate it in books (not that I ever doubted that). Once I was past the proposal-horror, I was presented with a cringe-worthy Manipulate Tim to Want a Baby plot, and I was not OK with it. At all. My biological clock is not ticking, babies are really not that interesting, but I could possibly live with babies being a central thing if both MCs actually wanted one. Manipulating somebody into going for it, and making it into such an important part of the (current) plot has managed the coup of making me both frustrated and extremely bored at the same time, and I'm done with it.
So. Bye bye book. I'm gonna find me a sport romance with less baby-drama in it.
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