Yes, I read romance novels, though I don't read anything and everything in the genre. While I do sometimes read series romances (Harlequin/Mills and Boon), these aren't by any means my favourite read. I find the shorter ones far too unsatisfying and very formulaic. When I do read them, it's mostly as 'throwaway reads' - ie for when I'm on long journeys or on holiday. In that case, they are books I don't intend to take home with me!
Like Kaethel, my favourite within the romance genre is historical romance. There, too, I'm very fussy, and will avoid like the plague authors who sacrifice historical authenticity on the altar of sexual explicitness. So where characters in books set in eighteenth-century London (England!) sound like contemporary Americans, I'm jerked out of the story. The kiss of death for me is an author who cannot do elementary research - so anyone who writes an 18th or 19th century woman divorcing her husband, for instance, goes on my 'avoid like the plague' list.
I kept waiting for the real hero to arrive and rescue her... but it turned out that the rapist
was the hero.
My favourite authors in the genre include people like Mary Balogh, Carla Kelly, Edith Layton, Jo Beverley and - thanks to a recommendation from Ann McBride - Mary Jo Putney. These authors, apart from getting the period detail as accurate as possible and, especially in the case of Beverley, explaining why they depart from it, just write the kind of stories I like to read. They're all different - no formulas there, apart from the obligatory happy ending. <g> They also include internal narrative - some of us really do like to know what the characters are thinking!
And this brings me back to 'formulaic' - it really irritates me when publishers take it upon themselves to decide what readers should like. I don't want to be told what to read, and I don't want my favourite authors constrained by some editor who really has no idea what readers enjoy. Take one of Mary Balogh's recent novels, More Than A Mistress. Loved it... but there was an element of closure missing near the end. I was far from the only reader to think so: this point was mentioned in Amazon reviews and also on Mary's email list. Mary herself posted to tell us that she had actually written the scene whose absence we were all bemoaning, but her editor had advised that it should be removed.
But we're all different, and people's tastes in reading matter do vary enormously. Take Jo Beverley's Devilish, in my opinion one of her very best. I was puzzled by a review on Amazon claiming that the story didn't start until p. 166 - and when I read my own copy and got to p. 166, what I saw was a love scene! Clearly, for that reader, the 'courtship' is irrelevant... for me, it's the whole point.
Do I write in 'romance novel formula'? I guess I'm not really the best person to answer that!
Though I'd add that I do read other fiction; I enjoy political novels, such as Michael Dobbs' excellent House of Cards series, and contemporary women's fiction which doesn't necessarily fit into the romance categorisation.
Dunno if this ramble answers your question, necessarily, Yvonne...
Wendy
