...half an hour going through Amazon and reading people's reviews of various teen/supernatural/romance books. One review was really scathing about some book called Halo or Hades? Or, rather I think they're the first and second books of this series.
So.
Apparently, the heroine is this angel who falls in love with this mortal (not really original; this could be the plot of THOUSANDS of books) and then this demon "kidnaps" her on a motorcycle (seriously, it's even on the cover) so that he may woo her and marry her.
This is the part where people stare at the crazy person laughing at the computer.
(FYI, yes I am that person.)
Seriously, what is with all the drivel that's been written these days? Twilight has a lot to answer for, but then again, it's not like Twilight did something new - I don't know how it got popular, maybe right time, right place? But it didn't exactly introduce something new - supernatural romances have been published before but to lesser attention - for example, LJ Smith's Nightworld series, where the soulmate principal is introduced and inevitably binds two people who could not be more different. And naturally, one of those pairings must be a mortal girl and a vampire. (It's like the law of teen romance fiction. Pair the good, kind, fair, innocent mortal girl with the worst guy possible...who just then turns out to have a heart of gold and was hiding his feelings under his tough-man exterior.)
Real guys don't function like that. They are more apt to annoy you with questions about what your mark on that last test/assignment/project was and then try to hold back their smug smiles when you tell them it was a sixty-six. They are the ones who either care too much or care too little about their academics. The obsessive ones, the annoying ones, the earnest ones that are just let's-face-it too needy.
This is why fiction has a market - real-life men are flawed, people, they are flawed, sometimes you can't see it at first, but trust me, they are there. Book men? They are fantasies, and for one fleeting moment when you're reading, you can pretend you're the heroine and that your love interest is let's-face-it just awesome.
Relationships are messy - you can't kill off your ex the way a writer can kill off a character. They don't have easy beginnings or easy endings, with the all the fake angst and teenage melodrama.
Yet despite the obvious escape fiction provides me, I've always liked stories where the relationships aren't easy, where you can't tell the difference between love and hate, where the unresolved sexual tension is so thick. I relish those stories.
(Just these past few weeks, when I should have been studying for midterms, I find myself reading and rereading this complicated stories... it's this complexity I crave, not over-simplicity.)
But then again, who doesn't love a happy ending?
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