O.k., I just read my first, and probably last, romance novel. Loveswept #255 Hold On Tight by Deborah Smith. It’s copyrighted 1988.
First of all, if the rest of the loveswept novels are anything similar to this book, they should have called the series sexswept. I don’t know what it is about women writers and their obsession with sex, but they seriously need to read better books.
I was expecting romance, you know, falling in love. The vast majority of this book was nothing but explicit sex scenes. No romanticism, just sex. If all ‘romance’ books are like this, it would explain society’s corruption of the word love. Most men believe there is a difference between love and sex, obviously, this is a difference lost on women.
The first part of the book was really enjoyable, hence the fact I continued to read. I got a good kick out of McClure’s initial character. The easy to read writing style was appreciated and I bunkered down for what I thought would be a pleasant read. I was disappointed shortly with lack of romanticism involved with the characters’ first romantic encounter, it seemed more corny than anything, as though the author was just trying to get to the juicy stuff [sex]. I did, however enjoy the laugh-out-loud line on page 17, “insanity had started with a torrid kiss and ended with a fainting marsupial”, that summed the encounter up perfectly.
That was pretty much the extent of what was fun about this book. Shortly after, they hook-up and for the next 150 pages or so its nothing but a variety of different scenes of sex, all lacking any apparent relevancy. The only reason I kept reading was because the woman was supposed to have this horrid secret that presumably could destroy everything.
It was so boring. I never thought of sex as boring until I read this book. It was just over, and over, and over again, nothing but sex. The characters got flaky and the holes in the plot grew to unfathomable size.
And after all that boring repetitious monotony, come to find out, her secret wasn’t anything at all-a total, but by that time expected, disappointment. The way the author made it sound, I was hoping the main chick would have killed someone in the past. Turns out, her big secret was that her dad may have been involved in an embezzlement scheme. And, in the end, it turns out that wasn’t even the case.
I suppose if you took all the sex out of the story, it would have made a great 30 page short story. But stretching something like this out to over a hundred and eighty pages really made the characters flimsy.
Maybe someday I’ll write a romance and show women what that word means.
