akirlu | FFS, or The Shovel Breaks (Reply)

My portable book of the moment is Touch of Evil by C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp. A post of

alg's had made me curious about them. And for a genre romance, it's less dumb than some. But there are structural forms of the genre that tend to drive me right up a tree, so that's the first thing they've got to overcome. And immediately they start with the contrived expositional devices, like fugues of recollection in the middle of conversations, or long dream sequences that replay past events, in order to cram in all the backstory in the first ten pages. So there's that, too. But then the dumbnesses start piling up.

I had forgiven them letting the main character wander off with all the perishable groceries still on the counter on a warm July day, and supposedly right in the midst of getting ready to cook, only to suddenly decide to start working on some improvements in the lobby of her appartment building. After all, she's got a concussion, so her brain ain't quite right. (Though it's a little too obvious that this is all in aid of getting a "comic" introduction to the male love interest.) But to believe that someone who is supposedly a hyper-responsible landlady has left a bunch of saw-horses and tools and paint and construction hazards-to-passing-tenants just sitting out in the public lobby while she's gone for a week is more of a strain. She's not worried about actionable accidents? Add to that the fact that she is supposedly doing professional-quality workmanship on the improvements she's adding to the building but blithely starts trying to tack up wainscotting before the paint on the trim is even dry and my credulity is looking very peaky indeed. She just rips the trim out of the package, skips the sanding and priming stage, slaps a single coat of paint on the thing, and swarms up a ladder to tack it to the wall. (How exactly was she managing to handle it if the paint was still wet?) That's not professional-quality, that's embarrassing slop work.

But okay, I got past that. And let's just breeze by the secondary character who thinks that the events of two days ago happened yesterday, exactly like the main character who slept through yesterday.

So now it's a bit later and she's about to enter a church, and she pauses outside at the point where she always stops to admire the stained glass window. (Outside? Does she always go to church at night? 'Cause stained glass windows don't usually "read" to the outside unless the light inside is brighter than out.) And she notes to herself that the window is a depiction of a famous work of art -- the Pietà. I will pass right over the fact that Michaelangelo's Pietà is merely one of many, not the anything. That's only annoying. But. Michaelangelo's Pietà is. Not. A. Famous.Painting.

I mean, ffs, someone at Tor should have caught that.

I'm not even going to discuss the idiocy of the privatized freight elevator.

Edit: Oh, I didn't read far enough. Right after the window, we find that our Catholic protagonist doesn't know that the Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin are not one and the same. And that the authors don't know that the liturgical color associated with the Blessed Virgin is blue, not russet. Aaaaaargh.