{"id":122,"date":"2002-03-27T16:58:01","date_gmt":"2002-03-27T21:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=122"},"modified":"2002-03-27T16:58:01","modified_gmt":"2002-03-27T21:58:01","slug":"roberts_nora_in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/03\/roberts_nora_in\/","title":{"rendered":"Roberts, Nora: Inner Harbor; [meta] Criteria for a good romance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"75041317\"><\/a> <a name=\"link_75041317\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, the weather sucked, I had a headache, and class material was either making me cranky (Catharine MacKinnon, who I&#8217;m convinced is an alien) or soppy (not one but two stories of devoted long-term marriages in which one spouse was dying of ALS; one of them was a documentary on physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, so we got to watch him die, too&#8212;whee!). So I stopped by the library and perused the shelves for a good romance as a quick pick-me-up. <strong>Nora Roberts&#8217; <cite>Inner Harbor<\/cite><\/strong> isn&#8217;t <em>quite<\/em> what I was looking for, but it&#8217;s close enough for these purposes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Criteria for a good romance:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>By the end of the book, the protagonists must each have a spine.<\/li>\n<li>The obstacle keeping the protagonists apart must not be obviously stupid. The following are generally acceptable:\n<ul>\n<li>Personal beliefs or personality traits that follow from past experience <em>for good reason<\/em>. (For example, a crushing inferiority complex is no way to start a marriage, to borrow a phrase from <a href=\"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/11\/sayers_dorothy\/\">Sayers<\/a>. However, thinking you can never marry because your parent was Eeeevil and genetics is scary&#8212;obviously stupid. No, I&#8217;m not making this up.)<\/li>\n<li>Characters needing to mature or learn more about each other. (Opposites learning to compromise, <a href=\"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/02\/austen_jane_pri\/\"><cite>Pride and Prejudice<\/cite><\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>Codes of morals, ethics, or honor. (Best friend&#8217;s spouse\/former spouse, too young, too old, on the other side of a war, etc.)<\/li>\n<li>External obstacles. (&#8220;Sam will kill me if I try anything.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>Family obligations or disapproval. (Remember, Romeo and Juliet are <em>dead<\/em>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>There should be none of this &#8220;man spends most of book treating woman horribly, realizes he was wrong, and she forgives him immediately because she loves him&#8221; stuff.<\/li>\n<li>There should be a distinct lack of poorly-thought-out fantasy or sf elements, time travel, psychic connections, reincarnations, mystic New-Agey crap, and the like.<\/li>\n<li>Closely related: Don&#8217;t write historical novels if you don&#8217;t know how to do historical research or inclue. [Not a typo. To inclue is to get clues across to readers without lumpy exposition. <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/groups?selm=941015670snz%40bluejo.demon.co.uk\"> Jo Walton coined it<\/a>.]<\/li>\n<li>Unless one of the protagonists works in the criminal justice system, murder and mayhem&#8212;particularly if the protagonists decide they must stick their noses in to investigate, not that they have any clue what they are doing&#8212;are strongly discouraged. Women pulling slasher-flick stunts are Right Out.<\/li>\n<li>The following boring plots should be avoided:\n<ul>\n<li>Falling in love with someone you are using to get revenge on someone else.<\/li>\n<li>Getting pregnant and not telling the father.<\/li>\n<li>Being royalty in disguise.<\/li>\n<li>And really most deceptions, unless they are necessary for a morally permissible and serious purpose and don&#8217;t last for too long.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Decent prose (shouldn&#8217;t have to say it, but&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. ).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>(Some of these rules also apply to non-genre romance stories; I just went for a genre book yesterday because it was simpler. There are possibly more that aren&#8217;t coming to mind now. See also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sff.net\/people\/jennifercrusie\/romantictrivia.html#Rules\">The Romance Heroine Rules, from Jennifer Crusie&#8217;s fan mailing list<\/a>; #23 is very true, but the best by far is #19.)<\/p>\n<p><cite>Inner Harbor<\/cite> does have a ghost, but I can ignore that fairly easily. There&#8217;s also some deception, but it actually makes sense in context. It&#8217;s the last of a trilogy about three brothers who find themselves caring for a boy their adoptive father took in&#8212;but Seth has their father&#8217;s eyes, and there are allegations that their father&#8217;s death might have been suicide&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. Of course, the mystery gets solved, each of the brothers finds a love, and it all ends happily. I got just the last one because I have read them before, I didn&#8217;t want to invest that much time in my pick-me-up, and I like the way Seth becomes part of the family, which is concluded here. It worked pretty well&#8212;and the sun&#8217;s out now, which helps at least as much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, the weather sucked, I had a headache, and class material was either making me cranky (Catharine MacKinnon, who I&#8217;m convinced is an alien) or soppy (not one but two stories of devoted long-term marriages in which one spouse was dying of ALS; one of them was a documentary on physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/03\/roberts_nora_in\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Roberts, Nora: Inner Harbor; [meta] Criteria for a good romance&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,104,12],"tags":[362],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-meta-admin","category-romance","tag-roberts-nora"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}