Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Coming Soon...

I finally have a title for Book Two in the Sin City series: Stirred Up. Not only that, I am nearly done writing it! I expect to release it in July and will report back when I have an exact date. This one is a full-length novel and features Cheryl, the red-headed stripper from Set Loose. I'll have a nice little description for it soon.

Book Three will come out early next year, but since I havent started it yet, I can't get more specific than that.

Stay tuned...


Thursday, May 9, 2013

New Adult for the Not-So-New Adult

Recently I've read a few "New Adult" romances, a sub-genre I hadn't heard of until recently. It's pretty new but has taken off now and is growing. (Of course, I often think something is taking off right when I hear about it.) Featuring heroes and heroines between 17 and  20 (ish), they often (though not always) depict the characters in a high school or college setting.  The content tends to be more mature than Young Adult novels, and the main characters often have sex at some point in the book. In the ones I've read, the sex is treated as a serious thing and the characters don't engage in it until they have reached a true understanding of each other. Of course, some adult romances take this approach, too.

The first book I read in this category was Tamara Webber's Easy, and I absolutely loved it. So when I heard about another New Adult book by another author who was getting a lot of press, I decided to give it a try. It had hundreds of rave reviews on Amazon, so I was pretty sure the book (hereafter referred to as Book X) was going to be good. Unfortunately, not so much. It started off strong and had intriguing, appealing characters, but it went downhill about halfway though and I ended up skimming the second half, unable to finish it.

Needing validation for my reading experience, I then went to Amazon to see if anyone else felt like I did. Reading through the two and three star reviews, I did find other readers who felt as I did, but they identified as adult women, thirty years old and up. The younger readers didn't seem to have a problem with how melodramatic and over-the-top the book got.

It got me thinking about what it means to read a book targeted at girls in their late teens when you are far beyond that yourself. I am not the target audience, so is it fair of me to criticize?  These books, like all romances, are fantasies, and in New Adult books, they're fantasies for girls decades younger than me. Who am I to judge?

Of course I do. A good book is a good book and this one could have been written better. A good editor would have done the trick. And there are some books that completely do it for me, regardless of their target age.  If I hear that something is good I want to try it, and it's a let down when the book isn't so great. I no longer trust Amazon reviews, since I so often don't agree with all the raves I read, but they are useful for judging which ones are worth taking the time to sample.

In any case, I'm still on the lookout for New Adult books. It's a time of life we all remember, and love at that time can feel even more poignant. People are just starting to understand themselves and become independent. These feelings are all new and wild and sometimes out of control. It's fun to read about it, and remember that time in your own life, even if nothing nearly so momentous or sexy happened during it.

When I was that age, I was reading long, over-the-top historical romances and loving it. Maybe I would have loved the melodrama of Book X at that age, too. It doesn't have to be great literature to hit you right where it counts.