{"id":2234,"date":"2012-03-17T21:25:10","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T01:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/?p=2234"},"modified":"2012-03-17T21:37:06","modified_gmt":"2012-03-18T01:37:06","slug":"say-it-aint-so-a-dnf-lowell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/17\/say-it-aint-so-a-dnf-lowell\/","title":{"rendered":"Say It Ain’t So – A DNF Lowell?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my February Prime borrow on Kindle I picked up Elizabeth Lowell's, \"Golden Mountain.\"\u00a0 <\/a>\u00a0It now appears to be free,\u00a0so you might want to pick it up and give it a read.\u00a0 Your opinion could certainly vary from that of a crazy duck lady, because IMHO - this\u00a0is one to pass on.\u00a0 And I can't believe I said that about a Lowell romance!<\/p>\n

I love every Lowell book I've ever read with the exception of this one.\u00a0 Ms. Lowell is an amazingly talented author, but this book just didn't do it for me.\u00a0 I couldn't finish it.\u00a0 I\u00a0read about 10 to 15% of the book before I put it away.\u00a0 I only read that much because it was a Lowell\u00a0so I kept waiting for it to pick me up and get me involved.\u00a0 Except that never happened.\u00a0 Not only did I not get involved, I dreaded picking up my Fire and would make excuses why I couldn't read more just now.\u00a0 That's when I knew that I had to let this one go because normally I steal time from writing to read.\u00a0 I was a romance fan a long time before I was a romance author, after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why didn't I like this one?\u00a0 First, it took way too long to get started.\u00a0\u00a0The first part was the heroine following\u00a0her father around and assisting him while\u00a0he took photos of\u00a0 Chinese miners and mining communities.\u00a0 When\u00a0the father died - very early in the book (not a\u00a0*spoiler*) -\u00a0 the heroine wandered off to Seattle to take photos.\u00a0 Then we're treated to long, expansive descriptions of the Chinese community in Seattle.\u00a0 By the time I put it down the story seemed almost ready to go somewhere, but by then I didn't care.\u00a0 In a romance, I want to feel tension between the hero and the heroine fairly quickly.\u00a0 I'm okay with a few pages of backstory, but get me involved first, then feed me the history.<\/p>\n

My other big problem with this book was that it wasn't clear from the get go who the hero was.\u00a0 There were 2 brothers - one good guy and one wild one.\u00a0 It seemed that the good guy would be the hero, but the first chemistry we read about occurs between the heroine and the wild brother.\u00a0 I wasn't even sure if the good guy could be the hero because there was a reference to the good guy having slept with the heroine's newly discovered step-mother,\u00a0a prostitute for one of the Chinese crime lord big shots we read far too much about.\u00a0\u00a0That made me feel\u00a0icky about the good guy brother.\u00a0 Of course the good guy could have turned out to be the bad guy and the wild one could have been the real good guy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My biggest problem with the book was that the lack of clarity about the hero made me feel unsure of the story.\u00a0 I'm okay with a hero that starts out\u00a0with issues.\u00a0\u00a0I'm okay if he is the biggest rogue in the galaxy.\u00a0 I know that once he meets the heroine, he'll\u00a0change.\u00a0 Oh, he'll be unwilling to change and perturbed with the world at large because he is changing.\u00a0 But by the end of the story, I'll have been with him through his changes and I'll adore him.\u00a0 But that can only happen if I'm clear that I should be rooting for him instead of finding him annoying.<\/p>\n

I hate romances where the heroine is torn between two men.\u00a0 Or at least, I generally hate them.\u00a0 I recall that \"Whitney, My Love\"<\/a> was an exception to that rule.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Golden Mountain could have been an exception too - it should have been, because it was written by Lowell.\u00a0 The difference between Whitney and Golden is that we knew who the hero and heroine were in Whitney and we saw chemistry between the hero and heroine early on - even if the heroine didn't see it yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I guess\u00a0Elizabeth Lowell\u00a0can't be perfect every time.\u00a0 So she's only \"almost\" perfect.\u00a0\u00a0If I ever achieve \"almost\" perfect I'll rent out an airplane and skywrite it.\u00a0 I'll buy TV time and advertise it.\u00a0 But I won't start budgeting for that just yet...<\/p>\n

If I were you, I'd give \"Golden Mountain\" a pass and\u00a0pick up Lowell's \"Only\"<\/a> books instead.\u00a0 \u00a0 I got them while they were $1.99.\u00a0 Of course, they're old favorites but now they have space on my Fire.\u00a0 It looks like HarperCollins is running \"rolling\" $1.99 specials on a bunch of Ms. Lowell's work.\u00a0 Trust me, pick those up and pass on \"Golden Mountain.\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my February Prime borrow on Kindle I picked up Elizabeth Lowell's, \"Golden Mountain.\"\u00a0 \u00a0It now appears to be free,\u00a0so you might want to pick it up and give it a read.\u00a0 Your opinion could certainly vary from that of a crazy duck lady, because IMHO - this\u00a0is one to pass on.\u00a0 And I can't ...continue reading \"Say It Ain’t So – A DNF Lowell?\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2234"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2241,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234\/revisions\/2241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}