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Thanks to nezumi_sama for the (thankfully not serious) present of A Very Gothic Christmas - two frankly dreadful novellas of the Mills & Boon type, with the addition of an occult theme.
I managed to make it all the way through After The Music by Christine Feehan - I knew we were off to a bad start when the hero turned out to be black-haired, blue-eyed, with the face of a fallen angel, and the heroine had red hair and green eyes. (There's a reason why the hero in my regency novella is sandy-haired, covered in freckles, and reminds the heroine of "nothing so much as a mottled beach pebble"). The appalling cliches and nausea-inducing romance were entertaining enough to keep me reading for 260 pages - but, when the hero of Lady Of The Locket by Melanie George turned out to have black hair and blue eyes as well, I had to give up in despair...
The week's rental DVD was The Shipping News. Fairly standard storyline of broken people fixing themselves and each other within an isolated community; pulled out of mediocrity by a stellar cast (Kevin Spacey, Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Pete Postlethwaite, Rhys Ifans - and Jason Behr! Nice to see him in something other than Roswell!) and moving performances. Not one I'll be adding to my collection to watch again, though.
I managed to make it all the way through After The Music by Christine Feehan - I knew we were off to a bad start when the hero turned out to be black-haired, blue-eyed, with the face of a fallen angel, and the heroine had red hair and green eyes. (There's a reason why the hero in my regency novella is sandy-haired, covered in freckles, and reminds the heroine of "nothing so much as a mottled beach pebble"). The appalling cliches and nausea-inducing romance were entertaining enough to keep me reading for 260 pages - but, when the hero of Lady Of The Locket by Melanie George turned out to have black hair and blue eyes as well, I had to give up in despair...
The week's rental DVD was The Shipping News. Fairly standard storyline of broken people fixing themselves and each other within an isolated community; pulled out of mediocrity by a stellar cast (Kevin Spacey, Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Pete Postlethwaite, Rhys Ifans - and Jason Behr! Nice to see him in something other than Roswell!) and moving performances. Not one I'll be adding to my collection to watch again, though.
