Oct 24 2007
RP: What went wrong?
When a book starts out really strong, sucks me right in and keeps me glued to the page, I get excited. Even as I’m intensely involved in the story, there’s a part of me pumping its fist and doing the Snoopy dance in the background because I found something good, and if it’s a series that already has subsequent books up for grabs… ah, bliss.
A book last week had an exciting start. Interesting character. Blood and guts. New take on old mythology. First in an established series. I was completely stoked.
And then a third of the way through… it unraveled into a string of illogic and convenient coincidence.
I don’t mind if a character makes a mistake or does something misguided or even downright stupid in the heat of the moment. It makes them more human. But there better be a good reason for it other than “I can’t make this next plot event happen unless my highly educated and presumably intelligent protagonist spontaneously loses a hundred IQ points here.”
I don’t mind coincidences. They can be especially powerful if they’re of the bad variety. But if you pull a blatant deus ex machina to bail a character out, that character better acknowledge it with a “dumb fucking luck” remark, it better be followed by a torrent of woe that makes the lucky break nothing but a cruel joke, and you better not keep using the same trick over and over again because the characters are incapable of staying alive without divine authorial intervention.
I’m all for a kickass heroine, but when she is smaller and younger and less experienced and physically and spiritually weaker than any of the big, strong men who are trained assassins but still got their asses handed to them by the bad guy’s bodyguards, you can’t seriously expect me to believe she takes baddie out all by herself, even if baddie conveniently misplaces his brain and even more conveniently has a sentimental fugue in the middle of the battle.
When a book starts out with a bang and then goes awry, it’s worse than if it was bad from page one. It’s like the difference between watching Wil E. Coyote fall off a cliff and going rock climbing with your best friend, reaching the top, giving him a congratulatory high five, and watching him fall off a cliff. With one, you know it’s going to be a train wreck all along. With the other, everything is going great until a tragic turn of events, and all you can do is watch helplessly while something you once cared for plummets to a grisly end.
Be consistent. Give me either a crappy book or a book that’s good all the way through. Don’t get me all excited and then do a bait-and-switch. That makes me grumpy, and when I get grumpy, I’m inclined to drive to the bookstore—not to buy your books, but to hide them behind Linux technical manuals and histories of Finland.
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9/30
11/4
11/4
11/25
October 26th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Oh, definitely. :/ So disappointing, and yeah, I’m always more annoyed if the book started out well because if it’s bad enough that by the end (or whenever I stopped) I feel like it was a waste, I’ve wasted that much more of my time and probably bumped my blood pressure up by that many more points.
I remember this one book from the seventies, it was fantastic. Historical romance, great characters, lots of adventure and running around, everything was great until the end. They’re being chased by British soldiers and they’ve managed to escape from whatever trap they were in at the beginning of the last chapter. They dash off to the beach near where the guy’s ship is anchored and his crew have a boat all ready to take them off so they can sail away, and… the chick refuses to go. Not for any particularly good reason, either, but just “No, you must go without me, I’ll stay behind.” O_O And for whatever reason, the guy didn’t toss her over his shoulder and haul her ass into the boat, either. He argued a bit, then sort of shrugged and hopped in and rowed off to his ship. She stood on the beach watching him leave while the Redcoats showed up and arrested her.
The end.
Umm, WTF?!
It was a perfect book, one of my favorites, until that last page or so. What the heck was that writer thinking?? [headdesk]
Oh, and then about a decade later, she writes a sequel. And has the gall to babble on in the introduction about how DELIGHTED she’d been that so many of her lovely readers had written to her expressing a wish to read more about these characters.
[facepalm]
Umm, no shit, Sherlock? :( Jeez….
I don’t know if she was really that clueless or had some weird, ulterior motive, but in either case I wasn’t impressed. And the sequel was decent, but nowhere near as great as the first book had been, up until the end. [sigh]
Angie