Help! My Romance Novel is Possessed!
So, I was finishing this book today (if you haven't read The Measure of a Lady yet, there are spoilers!) and in the last 100 pages or so, it completely turned on me!
It starts out with this 20-year-old woman with her teenaged siblings in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. She's pretty religious, but I didn't feel like the religious stuff was heavy-handed or anything.Then, all of a sudden, this saloon owner falls in love with her, and it's all about Jesus! Everyone is talking to Jesus, and quoting the Bible, and the heroine has some huge issues with serving prostitutes in her restaurant (she manages to neither get married nor turn to prostitution during her financial struggles) AND THAT IS ALL THE BOOK IS ABOUT AT THIS POINT. And she realizes, hey, hookers are human too! and decides that she has been awful and judgy.
Anyway, the book wound up sort of being a waste of my time, mostly because it was just that last part that ruined it (no problems with religion in books/anywhere else, BTW). The rest of it was pretty good, for something considered a "romance/humor". So, I went and got The Regulators by Stephen King, which I think is pretty much the opposite of what I just read. He always scares the shit outta me. I still have Tommyknocker nightmares, and it's been a while since I read that book. I think that he is scary because I can imagine myself in the situations he writes about- the scariest things I've read just have normal people who find themselves in horrifying situations.
It's the same with movies, for me. It's hard for me to get scared during movies that have some sort of alternate-universe thing going on, because it's hard to relate to. But anything that shows a normal life suddenly turned violently around- that is frightening. Especially zombie movies, because it's scary to think that (in movie land) the world was normal, and then, you basically wake up the next morning, and it's not.
It starts out with this 20-year-old woman with her teenaged siblings in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. She's pretty religious, but I didn't feel like the religious stuff was heavy-handed or anything.Then, all of a sudden, this saloon owner falls in love with her, and it's all about Jesus! Everyone is talking to Jesus, and quoting the Bible, and the heroine has some huge issues with serving prostitutes in her restaurant (she manages to neither get married nor turn to prostitution during her financial struggles) AND THAT IS ALL THE BOOK IS ABOUT AT THIS POINT. And she realizes, hey, hookers are human too! and decides that she has been awful and judgy.
Anyway, the book wound up sort of being a waste of my time, mostly because it was just that last part that ruined it (no problems with religion in books/anywhere else, BTW). The rest of it was pretty good, for something considered a "romance/humor". So, I went and got The Regulators by Stephen King, which I think is pretty much the opposite of what I just read. He always scares the shit outta me. I still have Tommyknocker nightmares, and it's been a while since I read that book. I think that he is scary because I can imagine myself in the situations he writes about- the scariest things I've read just have normal people who find themselves in horrifying situations.
It's the same with movies, for me. It's hard for me to get scared during movies that have some sort of alternate-universe thing going on, because it's hard to relate to. But anything that shows a normal life suddenly turned violently around- that is frightening. Especially zombie movies, because it's scary to think that (in movie land) the world was normal, and then, you basically wake up the next morning, and it's not.