Your Humble Blogger has never read very much in the Romance Novel genre. And by “not very much”, I mean maybe three books of pornomance, and mostly skimming those. Somehow, though, I have a sense of formula—there’s this woman, and this older man, and he’s gruff and annoying, and he probably mistreats her when they first meet. Likely he’s a woman-hater for some reason. Later, the woman is put in a humiliating situation, and then a life-threatening situation (or is held captive). The man eventually rescues or frees the woman, and they end up revealing their mutual love.
Now, Your Humble Blogger has no sense at all of whether this formula is correct, or whether there are perhaps half-a-dozen different formulae (I mean, really different, not just slight variations) all more or less equally common. I don’t even have any direct empirical evidence that there is a formula. I have heard that there is one, as I have heard people talking about reading and writing romance novels. But I don’t really know, the way that I know there is a formula for, for instance, heist movies.
My point is that there’s this thing that I think I know, that I’m perfectly aware that I don’t actually know, that is entirely a matter of prejudice and mindset. And yet, when I’m reading a novel that seems to me to be awfully romance-novel formulaic, it gets on my nerves. Which is terribly unfair, but there it is. And what’s really unfair is that Falling Free doesn’t even match the formula very well, and it still got on my nerves this time through. Which actually may have been because the bath water wasn’t hot enough.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.