“Don’t look too closely. Don’t expect too much. Don’t set the bar too high. WE’RE JUST GIRRRRLS.”

Bah again.

OT, but did you read the Steve Almond piece in Salon? Or did I miss it? When he said “the modern writer is engaged in an enterprise almost guaranteed to crush her spirit” I don’t think he was just talking about romance writers.

It’s not being too sensitive. It’s an attempt to keep it sweetness and light.

Which is why I don’t read romances anymore. I want to know if a book sucks before I plunk down 8 bucks for it.

As long as a genre emphasizes being nice, and sensitive, and trying *really really hard* over critical assessment, as long as it promotes some sort of misguided sense that one has a special connection to those who happen to share one’s plumbing and thus owes them extra consideration, as long as it, in short, acts like the bigeyed emo-poetry writing chick who made the rest of us roll our eyes in every class she was in…

..then that genre is neither going to get nor deserve respect.

I understand that some authors may not want to publicly bash their peers, but I’m of the mind that they owe it to readers to be honest.

If they can’t say what they feel, then they should leave the reviewing to the people who aren’t afraid to tell it how it is. Nice Girls need not apply.

I don’t know much about the romance genre, but I wholeheartedly agree with your take on how higher expectations can at least encourage, if not ensure (insure?) better writing. That very issue is why I feel like the book I recently finished should have at least ten other women listed as co-authors – despite my initial difficulty with receiving criticism in my writing group, it’s exactly what helped me become the kind of writer who *could* write this book. I was totally up for the task of writing something crappier when I joined the group, and I’m not saying I’ve written the kinky War and Peace or anything now, but to the extent I’ve succeeded in writing something that doesn’t suck, it’s because other writers told me when I was writing stuff that did.

Your fan,
Joan

I didn’t say romance writers shouldn’t review romance novels. I was explaining why they rarely do it. And I was urging all reviewers who trash books to, as I put it in one of the comments, “be fair and reasonable about it and not appear to derive any pleasure from the experience.”

Yours truly,
Just another delicate flower

There is a group of romance writers who give each other unconditional love and support, just as there are many critics who automatically dismiss and/or trivialize every novel shelved under romance.