Deborah Cooke: Author

RWA’s National Convention is this week, and is being held in Washington D.C. this year. I’m not going to National this year, which is both sad (because I’ll miss seeing lots of friends) and a relief (because I might actually catch up on things).

One big bonus of going to National is the chance to add to one’s pile of To Be Read books. I always come home with a load of books from conference, freebies and A.R.C.’s and books I buy, either at the Book Fair or in local bookstores. My T.B.R. pile keeps getting taller, so this year, I’m celebrating not going to National by digging into the pile. I’m reading this week.

My first two grabs were unfortunate picks, and this has really disappointed me. The first was an historical romance by a comparatively new author. I picked it up because the cover is lovely, then read the back and was enchanted by the premise. It’s being published with enthusiasm, so I thought I was in for a good read.

There should be much to like about this book, given the clever premise, but the first fifty pages are so burdened by backstory that I just can’t read any more of it. The dependence upon cliché is depressing and the characterizations are so thin that I could spit through them. I’m really disappointed – even skipping forward to read what should be “good bits” didn’t motivate me to read more.

That this book is being published with enthusiasm when the author’s craft is so mediocre is truly depressing. This book and its ilk are why some people sneer when they find out what I do for a living, why they assume that all romance novels are dreck.

The other book I grabbed is literary fiction, a title that won a prestigious award. I thought this would be a magnificent book, given its credentials. Well. The language is beautiful and seductive, although it actually suffers from a similar difficulty with managing backstory. Instead of backstory being dumped in great thwacks that interrupt the pacing (as in the first book), this book’s backstory slithers into every paragraph, leaving me as a reader wondering where exactly we’re at. It is clear that both writers have an aversion to using flashbacks, but even flashbacks – which are often graceless but can be effective – would have been an improvement over the style choices made here.

Plus the literary book is very sad. It might echo real life and real people, but they’re not people I want to know or spend time with. Tragic things happen to them, they sigh, they find pleasure in the way snow falls, and they keep plodding along – waiting for the next tragic incident to turn up. They are astonishingly passive characters, drifting through their lives. When disaster strikes, I guess it means that at least something has happened to them.

Blech. Here’s hoping my next two grabs are better. I know I’ll be after commercial fiction again, in search of an active protagonist or two. On the upside, I’ll get through the T.B.R. pile in a hurry if these choices prove to be typical. I’m still hanging in with Mr. Aveni, although the chapters on table rapping and seances were more interesting to me than this one on phrenology.

Have you read anything wonderful lately?