OMB

The second item in my Magical Mystery tour comes from the website Dear Author. It's a review site for romance and erotica novels, primarily. But don't let that throw you, it's definitely worth the look.
Over the years I've done a complete 180 degree change....okay, a 110 degree change on romance novels. Probably because of the dreck available when I was a teen, I never really got into them as a young adult, when all my peers seemed to be absorbed in either reading them or watching the myriad of soaps on at the time. Frankly, the preposterous nature of them all didn't appeal to me, particularly the soaps. Come on, couples that have being going at it for a number of years only to find that they are actually brother and sister (okay, slimly possible), but then he gets drawn and quartered and dies, only to show up a 'year' later in full health,  large as life and twice as natural? Gimme a break! Or the abuse situations that went on and on all the time in the texts and on the shows, only for the women to smile bravely and swalllow it, because "he loves me"? Not to mention how every female character in them always willingly pared their own personality away, like the stepsisters in Cinderella trimming their feet in order to fit the glass slipper, in order to 'fit' enough to snag a man. Till they were unrecognizable shells of themselves.Hardly romantic.

I took a chance on a romance novel in my late 20s and discovered that, thankfully, the genre had widened enough to not only incorporate logical plots, but overlap other genres I read as well.  So, I began to be a more frequent reader of the genre, avoiding the overly-hokey, cutesy-wootsy Twuuu Wuv as much as possible, in favour of the plotted, well-written books by authors that seemed to give a damn about their readers.  So, it seemed safe to go back into the waters.

And then I found this review. Swallow your coffee first, and read it all the way through, including the commentary. And long live the snark.