Dear Author reviews “Shining in the Sun”

and says:

Much of what I enjoyed about Shining in the Sun is the balance between issues of sexual and personal identity and strong genre storytelling conventions. While I had a number of issues with the book, I was engaged enough to want to dig through my digital TBR pile for False Colors before another review book claims my time.

(Read the whole review here)

It’s a very interesting review, I thought, because I think it’s true that I was playing with a lot of Romance tropes while writing it – trying to feel my way into what made a Contemporary click.  Hee!  I’m very glad she had the reaction she had over Max.  That was what I was hoping for 🙂

Judging from the comments, I’m putting a lot of people off my books by my over-descriptive style.  But I think I’ll have to shrug and call that a difference of taste.  I find a lot of modern books too spare and pared down – too thin and without juice or colour – as the characters rush from one action scene to the next in a flat, grey world that rarely has any reality or glamour of its own.  I like to stop and smell the roses.  And I like to know whether they are yellow roses or red, and whether they’re trained up a trellis or a hedge.

Funnily enough, it is scenery that I seem to retain most from the books I love, the hurrying river and cold wind, the miles of brown land and the melancholy peep of small water fowl amongst the reeds, when the Fellowship of the Ring are travelling down Anduin.  The sunshine and the fountain, and the black inquisitive eye of Archmage Nemmerle’s raven when Ged first arrives on Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea.

I worry a little that these things are no longer fashionable.  But perhaps it’s not as necessary to describe the world as thoroughly in a contemporary as you would in a historical, because people think they already know it?