{"id":80,"date":"2008-08-12T14:22:01","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T19:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=80"},"modified":"2025-07-31T22:17:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T03:17:14","slug":"getting-the-job-done-take-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/getting-the-job-done-take-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting the job done, take 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read paper books in the daytime and the ebook at night so it doesn\u2019t bother my husband while he\u2019s trying to go to sleep, but I ran out of paper books in my house that I hadn\u2019t read. On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up what was billed as an erotic historical Georgia romance (yeah, I\u2019m into the Georgian thing right now) from the library.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Only now, halfway through, it hasn\u2019t been erotic and I had the mystery figured out 75 pages ago. You know what really irks me? The clues to the mystery had some logical conclusions one could have\/should have drawn from them and they weren\u2019t even touched.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing: the heroine is posing as a man (a Beau Brummell type) for various and sundry reasons, and she is being sent threatening notes (er, cliched ransom notes of the type cut out of newspapers and glued to the notepaper, and have you seen some of the cool fonts<\/a> made to mimic that?). Well, the author has made it clear that no one knows she\u2019s a woman, but the threatening notes make it clear that the threatener does<\/em> know she\u2019s a woman and yet \u2026 neither the hero nor the heroine question this. Why?<\/p>\n

So if you don\u2019t make the first critical leap as to how someone knows this, then you can\u2019t narrow down all the people who might have it in for her enough to do such a thing. Well. I made both leaps and then I leaped to the back of the book to get my agony over with. It wasn\u2019t the agony of a reader who can think like Sherlock Holmes (because I can\u2019t and there\u2019s a reason why my villain is known to all and sundry from the git-go) and went through all these mental gymnastics to deduce the identity of the perpetrator. It was the agony of a reader who went, \u201cAnd you people missed this 75 pages ago \u2026 why?\u201d<\/p>\n

And thus far, the sex has been almost nonexistent and we have devolved into the boring once the mystery\u2019s solved. So \u2026 I put it down and I\u2019m so not interested in picking it up again. Glad I got it from the library.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the group of books I talked about in this post<\/a>. I finished #1, finished #2 (which didn\u2019t live up to its promise, either because the external conflict was so contrived and the book was about 50 pages too long), and book #3 was actually good. I could see the author\u2019s growth throughout the series. However, the anachronistic speech did sometimes pull me out of the story, e.g., \u201cshe wasn\u2019t going to go there,\u201d in the meaning of, \u201cI\u2019m not going to bring up that subject or think about that thing.\u201d In Georgian England? I think not.<\/p>\n

Yet \u2026 The book I put down for good is a much better-written book with regard to prose and word choice than the whole series of 3 books I had issues with. I finished all 3 of those books\u2014not in record time, no, but I zipped right along and had a fairly decent time with them.<\/p>\n

Conclusion: The technically better book failed to get the job done, whereas the annoyingly flawed books did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read paper books in the daytime and the ebook at night so it doesn\u2019t bother my husband while he\u2019s trying to go to sleep, but I ran out of paper books in my house that I hadn\u2019t read. On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up what was billed as an erotic historical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[532,424],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17120,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/17120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}