My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below
Faro's Daughter by Georgette Heyer C+
Faro is a game of chance, and the orphaned daughter in this book title is the niece of a widow who has turned her London house into an unofficial, and illegal gambling house. This venture has not gone well, and the aunt is in great debt. However, a young lord has fallen in love with her niece, who is, of course, viewed as not the thing by society. His mother fears that the niece will marry her son for his money, and requests that this young lord's older cousin, a rich man about town, try to buy off this gambling house's girl. He does, offering her money to drop his cousin, an offer which she finds insulting, since she had no intention of marrying him in the first place. And in mutual anger, they both set out to better each other in a game of wits. The ultimate end is predictable.
Tropes are both good and bad, or so I've been led to understand. Many readers, at least of genre books, expect to find the customary tropes of their genre in their stories, since they often are the essence of the genre fiction. On the other hand, an over reliance of them, or the use of generic tropes, is a sign of a less accomplished author. These Heyer Regency Romances all have her trademark tropes, which include a single, handsome, cool, competent and rather domineering male, and an unmarried, level-headed, young woman who, at first, dislikes the domineering male, but eventually falls for his masterful charm, and he for her beauty and common sense. Heyer has used this scenario with various variations, in her romances to date, which, taken in small doses, can be very entertaining. But, after a half dozen or more of these stories over the last several months, I've had my fill of them for now. It will be some time before I return to Heyer's romances. Still, I am going to give her mystery stories a try, though I'd have to drive down to the library to do that, since there are no ebook versions available at my library. Such a pain...
Note: I have done so, and as this is posted, I have one of her mysteries in hand. Review in a few months...
No comments:
Post a Comment