It’s Read Around the Rainbow time! If you haven’t seen the rainbow posts yet, we’re a group of authors who blog on the same topic on the last Friday of the month. This month’s topic is:
As a Reader, what’s more important to you, the story itself or the way it’s told?
My initial thought was that this is easy – story wins every time! But this might come as a surprise to you LOL, but I’m a bit of a bitch at times. I have a lot of pet peeves, and depending on how lenient I feel on a specific day, they can make me DNF a book in a heartbeat.
I HATE epithets, like the taller man, the younger man, the blond or whatever else some authors tend to use instead of a name. They’re perfectly fine to use before we know the name of the character, but if we know the name and the taller man reaches for something, we’re done.
I’m VERY hesitant about speech tags. He said, she said, asked Ofelia. Here it depends on how often they occur, but it’s after every time someone opens their mouth, then I fear we’re done.
I’m not a fan of first-person POV. This isn’t something I quit a book over, of course. Heck, half, if not more, of all books are written in first person – some of my absolute favourites are! So here’s it’s more a case of quitting the book before starting. If I’m looking for something to read and open the first page and it’s written in first person, I’d say I move on to the next book in my library in 90% of all cases. This is given I don’t know what I want to read.
If I’ve picked up a book I want to read and see it’s in first POV, I sigh and keep on reading because then the promise of a story is there already. If I’ve seen a review that made me think I might like this book, I will read on. It’s for when I’m randomly opening books in my library, I skip the first-person ones.
So there you have it, my irrational and bitchy book opinions.
BUT I’d still say that story wins over how a story is written because if you can get me to read that first chapter despite groaning in misery if the younger man winks at me, then I’m yours. If you can hook me, if you can make me care, then you have me.
Did you know that a book I rec pretty often is The Last Pure Human by Twisted Hilarity? It’s an online story. I don’t read them often. It’s a WIP. I don’t read them. It’s in third person double POV, but it ticks off the rest of the pet peeves above, and it has many many more that are more part of the plot than the way the story is written, and yet… This is pure guilty pleasure on my part. Cat aliens, people!
A couple of years ago, I wrote a rant post about what I dislike in books and The Last Pure Human has all of them and more, and yet I’ve read it, not once, not twice, but three times. The third was pure accident. Someone was asking for a book they’d read where a guy got a mark on his butt cheek when mated, and I thought Hey, I know this one! and ended up reading it again.
What can I say? I feel for Max. Poor guy. What would you do if you were the last human alive and found yourself mated to a giant cat alien?
Story wins!
The Last Pure Human
Kasan, a prince of the feline Kyashin race, is in deep shit. He’s in heat, he needs a consort to help him survive it, and his uncle has locked him away from every available candidate. When he’s offered a small human male at the last moment, he’s quite happy to accept. His new consort, on the other hand, is a little less than pleased with the situation. So what’s a human to do when he finds himself in the bed of a hot, sexed-up alien? We’re about to find out.
It begins on a rainy night, trapped in an ATM vestibule.
On the verge of death by zombie in a public restroom, a young man is saved at the last minute by a shovel—and the intriguing man who wields it. A man who doesn’t really want company, and definitely isn’t interested in sharing names. But ‘Mercury’ also comes with an RV that doubles as a zombie-proof fortress, and almost any company is better than none—even if that company has a cute nickname for his nailgun, and inflicts him with the name ‘Gaga’.
Biker gangs known as regulators rule the streets of a war-torn city with hate and pain — their cruelty is etched into every inch of Dae’s battered body. He has never known anything but hurt from the hands of men … until he meets Coby.
Ofelia Grand 