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We all have problems and a pandemic to deal with.

I love to escape by diving into the pages of a good book as a way to do it.

It’s a chance to forget my personal ish and revel in a fictional character’s dramatic life for a little while.

Whether it be a romance, contemporary fiction or a combination of both which is my preference, I’m in.

What about you? What’s your escape?

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Just enough intensity …anticipating what will happen next …before diving deeper…visualizing just how …

I think that the definition of “romance” may have changed when I wasn’t looking.

A while back, I started (and stopped) reading a number of books on Kindle Unlimited after just a few chapters, either because lots of Easter Eggs and back story were given away within the first few pages OR because the book was simply a string of sex scenes strung together by an anemic story line.

Call me old-fashioned but great sex scenes in a novel require more than sexually explicit words tossed carelessly onto a page.

Or a bed.

In my opinion, writing a great sex scene requires effort, patience and some kind of love thrown into the mix in order to give the characters a happy ending.

That pun was totally intended! 🙂

But there was one e-book that had me shaking my head at just how quickly things unfolded and then deflated.

The breakdown of the book?

4% : Female character (FC) tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant and the boyfriend dumps her.

6%: FC gets upset, storms out, has a minor accident and is helped by a sexy rugged stranger who takes her home because he lives nearby.

11%: FC tells sexy man her entire story and that she is pregnant. There’s a storm brewing so sexy man insists that she stay in his guest room.

13%: FC and sexy man fall into bed. He declares his love for her and tells her that he is ready and willing to love her and her baby.

Really?

All of that at the 13% of the book? Isn’t that a little quick? Where could the rest of the story possibly go?

I was curious enough to speed read through the rest of the 87% so I really can tell you where the rest of the story went:

Spiraling fast downhill until it crashed and burned.

• No tense sensual build up between the characters.
• No slow burn towards that first kiss.
• No flirty moments between the two characters.

Nothing. Nada. Nein.

I’m not looking for the chaste vanilla of the Harlequin romance books my Granny devoured or the BDSM of Fifty Shades of Grey. There’s nothing wrong with them – they just aren’t my preference.

I can do without the 20 different words to describe the same body part and the blow-by-blow accounts of which body part went where and at what frequency…

I like my “romance” with just enough intensity between main characters that leaves me anticipating what will happen next between them. Romantic scenes that make me want to read and reread certain scenes before diving deeper into the book. Visualizing just how a scene would unfold in my mind.

Less is more.

And a little imagination is good for the soul…

All Rights Reserved ©2017 Marquessa Matthews.

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WTF.

The way my head spun around must have scared that lady to death because she froze with her mouth wide when she saw me staring at her.

Or maybe it was the stink eye I gave her, I don’t know.

“Yeah, I heard that this novel is really good but the author’s Black so I don’t think that I’d relate…“

That’s what she said right before she noticed me standing there. And when she did, she was quick to scurry off with her friend like a rat in the light to the far end of the bookstore.

It’s a good thing she did because I might have said something unpolitically correct standing in the middle of the “Romance” aisle.

Mira… [I have no clue why my brain always reverts to Spanish for this word instead of English]

Everyone, including that woman is entitled to think what she thinks and to feel what she feels. We are all entitled to our preferences.

I mean, stories that involve vampires, space, historical ship or urban street fiction don’t float my boat so naturally if the book cover represents any of that, I will likely pass.

But never NEVER have I looked at an author’s profile picture on a fiction book and said that I wouldn’t be able to relate to it because of the author’s color or ethnicity.

If anything, because of the “default White” book world in which I grew up reading, I’ve always looked beyond that default – Isabel Allende, Pico Iyer, Amy Tan and the list goes on. Not being from someone else’s cultural background has never stopped me.

There are a bunch of things I could unpack for you that lurk behind that woman’s words but I’ll leave that for another time.

What I will point out is that I curiously flipped through the novel that woman referred to and it was clear that she simply had assumed the storyline and book would be…uh… “Black”.

But it wasn’t.

The main characters were White, the book blurb didn’t refer to race and neither did the front cover.

I guess that romance and happily-ever-afters are not relatable if you’re from a different ethnic group.

Judging a book by its back cover will only make you miss out on some great reads and that woman surely did.

(By the way, my inside voice is still calling “that woman” by a totally different name… 👀)