this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Romance Books
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@willaful In print, doing a re-read (30+ years later) of James Clavell's Asian Saga, triggered by a comment from someone on another forum. Expecting the books to be horrifically racist, and indeed the characters are, but the books are more just... about people who are various grades of awful. Listening to Elle Kennedy's latest, "The Graham Effect", which, if you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you would like. Very on-brand for Kennedy. @romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful I have friends who are scientists who said they couldn't enjoy e.g. Ali Hazelwood's "Love Hypothesis" because the way the science is portrayed kept knocking them out of the story. So far I've been able to get along with the fictional universities in these college hockey series, like Kennedy's invented Briar U, but for some reason in this book I feel like there are more holes in the scenery than usual.
@romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful Briar is supposed to be "Ivy" but then Yale - one of the most recognizable Ivy League schools - "isn't in their conference." The courses of study and the fraternity-centric campus culture also aligns more with big state universities than typical Ivy atmosphere; it often feels more like a Southern football school inexplicably plonked into New England. One game description alternates the opponent between Northeastern and Northwestern.
@romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful The hardest thing to swallow in this book is one of the major hurdles; supposedly one of Briar's fictional rivals collapsed financially and was absorbed by Briar, so now their hockey teams need to be combined (and somehow this is a problem for the men's team but not the women?). This isn't a thing that happens often, so I can't say it's not accurately portrayed... but it's not a thing that happens often.
@romancelandia @romancebooks
@willaful Anyway none of this in any way affects the quality of the story or the relationship between the main characters, and Kennedy is good at a lot of the things that make romances which are fun to read. It's just like those moments in a movie where the background scenery is clearly from a different city, and you're like, wait a minute... @romancelandia @romancebooks
@notTheAudience Yes, I know just what you mean. :-)
@romancelandia @romancebooks