My Love, I'll Drink You

Poison Study; Maria V. Snyder; Fantasy; +3; T. M. Wagner at SF Reviews.net

Commander Ambrose was so overboard. So totally overboard. That character was just silly. And when Yelena gets a bite of food laced with "My Love" and just has time to call out the name of the poison to Valek, who is falling in love with her- oh, that was cute. Not.

The whole book is so overboard! I'm not sure I'd actually choose to eat My Love rather than read it again, though. It was a fun little story, I absolutely flew through it. But it's one of those books, you know? You get into the rhythm and the world of it, and you sort of float along, but it takes a long time to really get into it, and then something will happen to pull you out of that zen zone- sometimes it's external, sometimes its a jarring phrase on the page, and then you realize that the book just isn't that good, at all, and why were you so engrossed in it? And then it takes actual work to get back into the story! That happened to me alot; usually I was shaken out of the story by an awkward sentence or phrase.

I mean, really... Fun story, bad writing.

It's a major pet peeve of mine and something that I've been noticing a lot in SciFi and Fantasy. Those two genres just don't seem to have the same level of quality control in publishing that Literary Fiction does. Or perhaps it's just that I am less picky about the SciFi and Fantasy novels I grab off the shelves, as opposed to my habit of only reading "established classics" from LitFic.