Counting the Days

Uninspiring and abysmally tiring

It’s not the tired story line I had a problem with, I’m actually quite lenient there, and, depending on the situation, I’m even up for the comfortable trek through the cliche mine field that comes with this sort of drama/romance. What really got to me was the repetitive and irritating use of ‘telling instead of showing’. This whole thing was riddled with gut punch inducing paragraphs of how great the leads were and how great the leads were for each other, sentence after sentence of words detailing and rehashing the same lines over and over; who, what, when, where, why- but never actually ever showing why they were both such great people and why they were so great together. To put it in perspective, say I had two friends who were dating, it’s known in our circle of friends that they are just perfect together, his wine to her cheese, blah blah. But when I come to think of it... I have never seen any indication that these two are amazing together. Instead... I have all of our friend group, and the couple themselves talk about how great they are together, how perfectly suited, how magically tied, all wrapped up in an overly cutesy segway scene of Hollywood 3 second cuts... and that’s it. That’s all I have to go on. There’s no proof. There’s nothing for my poor mine to examine and witness. Nothing in the old brain banks to back up these claims. Maybe I’m coming off a little harsh... but honestly it’s one of the most important things in story writing, because if it’s not done right, it just pulls you completely out of the story, and then your plopped back into the dreary world you were trying to escape. Not good. This was one of the many of my complaints, along with both characters’ frequent back and forth whiplash inducing mind monologues- “Is he for real, is he lying to me, is this really him, is it an act, is he a good guy, is he not a good guy, he seems nice right, maybe he’s not nice, but I can feel he’s really good, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe he’s not good. But he seems good, but he’s probably bad, but maybe he’s not so bad” On, and on, and on, and on. It’s doesn’t stop, it’s completely maddening. It was a constant hit to my patience and really tested my resilience, to the extreme. A few special mentions of particular eye scratching frustrations with the book- the number of times she mentions her curves. Curves curves curves curves. She hates then, he loves em, curves curves curves. It’s incredibly eye rolling, honestly, I rolled my eyes every time. Seriously, it was a lot of eye rolling, I needed to take a break and eat a biscuit. Moving on. Next; character stupidity, the amount of plain stupid things the characters thought. Especially the ending. You could see it coming a mile away, but that pure stupidity and frustrating self loathing... did my head in. I like to read a book fully before judgment, and a lot of the times I like to read the next instalment just to give the series a bit more time to leave an impression, but I think I’m done. Actually when I finally finished that last page, I was so incredibly relieved, it’s quite sad really. I was frustrated with my own moral code of ‘just give the book a chance’ during the seemingly endless groan worthy subject matter this poor story holds. To wrap it up, the overwhelming sense the book left me with was ‘alien from outer reach solar system reads earthling romance ebook, intrigued, alien decides to try to replicate interesting human invention to bring back to his people... writes this book.’ That’s honestly the closest thing that fits. The whole book send the vibe of “I’m going I follow the formula and write a generic romance.... but I’m sooo not into this and I want to finish it soon because Bold and the Beautiful is on, so I better get cracking, hmm yes, generic hero, generic heroin, let’s add in some curves, some blatant and unabashed flexing, some sappy and totally unnatural flirting... hmm yes this is coming along nicely, annnnd now I’ll just add in to the spots necessary a bunch of paragraphs describing all the things that are awesome about these too and basically how perfect they are for each other, without any action or indication how exactly and why exactly they are. No one will notice I’m sure, I’ve ticked all the boxes... it’s fine. Probably. Alright. Done. Ok.... now where’s the popcorn.”