Please kill me. Kill me like a face-hugger victim in an Aliens movie.
Once again, a crappy midlist romance novel* has made baby Cthulu cry. It is that hideous combination: eye-dialect + tone-deafness.
Isn't that Writing 101? "Don't use eye-dialect unless you are Mark Twain"? In this particular case it's combined with the worst stereotypes of "Irish" speech.** The author doesn't let pass any opportunity to use countrified Irish sentence structure. That's well and good, but when every sentence is phrased that way, it ceases to be "giving the flavor of an ethnic speech pattern" and becomes offensive. As I read, I hear it rendered in the worst fake Irish accent ever. It's a Monty-Python-making-fun-of-back-country-hicks stereotype.
If this book ships to Ireland, I suspect the Catholics and Protestants will put aside their differences and unite in a campaign to find and murder this author by forcing her to eat her own book. And they will make her wash it down with warm beer.
The "Oirish" is, naturally, only the worst of the author's many crimes. Among the others:
+Her sentences do not flow naturally into each other, giving the feeling that they were randomly reordered by some computer glitch.
+The standard romance novel idiocy of stopping the action to have one character muse upon another's particular physical features, demonstrating how very HAWT the other character is.
+And, of course, the talking in dots. Worse, apparently neither the author nor the copyeditor had the slightest idea how one punctuates or capitalizes around dialogue broken by ellipses and narrative. Thus we get chimerae such as: "But I thought..." She lifted her fan. "...you were going to the dance."
This one's going to take a few days, because I can't possibly work on it for more than thirty minutes at a time without turning into the protagonist at the end of an HP Lovecraft story. Cthulonic terrors would be easier to take than this.
*Yes, not all romance midlist authors are crappy writers. Just 80% of the ones whose books I work on.
**Starting with, but definitely not limited to, consistently using "me" for "my" when the hero speaks.