Weird confession: I struggle with stories where all the children have extremely distinctive names. I attribute this to growing up in a town with an infamous family who had six children and the elder five all had long unusual names that began with the letter R–there was one of these and one of these, just to name two–but the youngest child was named Fred. One of my least favorite things about the Bridgertons is their alphabetized names. And yes, I realize I have an unusually distinctive name–this would by why all four of my kids have extremely conventional names. I’m not saying it’s rational, I’m just saying it takes me out of a story.
How about for you? What are your writing pet peeves in romance? (I also dislike works overly rife with exclamation marks.)
Incorrect use of aristocratic titles and idiotic plethora of dukedoms in HR. Indicates unforgiveable and, seemingly, willful ignorance.
Romancelandia has transformed dukes in something like Sir…. Don’t like it one bit!
The same category are books where the Earl treats his valet as a friend, the abigail scolds her mistress and so on.
Took the words right out of my mouth…
I think of stuff like Eloisa James, with all her dukes, as Fantasy Historical Romance. I have to change my mindset when I go to read it, With James, the references to Shakespeare or other literature helps me contextualize it as being as fantastical as a Midsummer Night’s Dream. With some books with “Duke” on the cover, I don’t bother to buy or read the book because there’s no larger context to make me accept the author’s premises.
Sometimes FHR strikes me as the historical version of Harlequin Presents, which has all those billionaires (who are in many ways the duke equivalent in capitalism).
Great thought, still reading. Because, of course, dukes, like billionaires, grow on trees ripe for the picking. 😉
It’s a fantasy I usually can’t buy into because, like billionaires, dukes are people of extreme privilege and therefore limited empathy or understanding of how people actually live.
Agree that pet peeves are not necessarily rational. Having been a copy-editor/desktop publisher/fact-checker in previous roles, I’m one of those readers that always catch the errors. Annoying…but I can overlook and forgive, especially for authors self-publishing. The number of errors in the novella omnibus Sunflower Season was egregious but the intent is for a good cause…so ok then…pass for this one!
My real pet peeves are:
1) When an author decides to name two or more characters in the same story with similar names or starts with the same character…like Kat and Katherine in Dating-ish by Penny Reid (and then another character in the story with a name starting with the letter ‘K’…Kelly). Why?? Is there some writing rule I’m not aware of that recommends an author assign more than one character with a first name beginning with the same letter? There are…so…many…names…WHY must you mess with my brain?
2) Over usage of endearments and simile (had to look up vs analogy). After reading many, many Christine Feehan novels I’m forever ruined from the p*nis and ice cream cone simile. Repeated too many times and sometimes even multiple times in the same story. Cringe every time. Please no more. Endearment examples are ‘baby’ and ‘little one.’ Gail Carriger’s Competence is an example of over usage of ‘little one’. C. Feehan again for over usage of ‘baby.’ Does anyone have other examples to be aware of?
All those damn clothes on the floor.
Priceless, difficult-to-clean clothing, which few characters are tossing over the back of a chair or onto a chest, let alone hanging on a peg, even when they are in a bedroom and not a horse’s stall or a hayloft or or in the summerhouse or under the willows or in the grass. Some previously impoverished female gets an exceptional gown, is ecstatic to wear it, and then is willing to let it crumple on the floor instead of draping it over the footboard or some other nearby piece of furniture?
Leaving a stocking or a garter or underdrawers or gloves on the floor or rug? Sure. But the frequency with which elegant male tailoring and one-of-a-kind dresses hit the floor and *stay* there is just really, really implausible to me.
And, less of an issue but still indicative of our citified existence now, the number of mares ridden by women (or pulling hackneys in historicals) that never, ever go into heat. The number of mares stabled in barns along with stallions without any untoward incidents. Very few romance writers seem to have actual experience with horses or to have done exhaustive research.
Wonderful, priceless gowns on the floor! I too am not amused!
It’s a trope one sees everywhere! Even in country music!
I think the clothes-on-the-floor thing is supposed to indicate how focused the participants are on each other and sex, but the trope is so common and overused it does not convey emotion to me as a reader. As part of this, hairpins on the floor, ripped clothing and even popped buttons are getting tiresome in historicals, too.
Particularly in Georgian historicals, I am surprised by how few characters are ever stabbed by a straight pin in the middle of all this careless stripping.
I just finished Garrett Leigh’s LUCKY, and it was refreshing to encounter a romance with at least one hero who folded his clothes neatly before leaping on the bed!
and all those heroes riding stallions!
Yes. Handling stallions is tricky. Riding in the country on the estate? Possible. Riding in urban traffic or a public park? Much more problematic. So I wondered how hard it would be for an author to learn about this stuff — and these days it is not difficult. There is a lot of YouTube information, such as the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG5_DptkeVM
Warning — some explicit horse footage on this video from Stable Safe
Also, despite knowing a bunch of random horse stuff, I did not know that certain perfumes and soap scents (on humans) would make a stallion think a good time was in the offing.
I have the opposite frustration. A well trained stallion should not be any more difficult to handle for an experienced rider then a gelding or mare. Mares can be very temperamental, in fact. When I read that “no one can ride this stallion” I call BS, because either the horse is really poorly trained, or that’s the way the owner wants him to be. Stallions are ridden and shown all over the world, including with children riding them. Yes, you need to understand them, but I’ve ridden many easy-going stallions. Blooded horses are more high strung, but I rode thoroughbreds for years and with knowledge and experience they aren’t difficult to ride.
My limited experience with horses mostly comes through comments made by veterinarians. My assessment that stallions would be a problem in urban traffic was based on stallions being distracted if mares were coming into heat (which authors seem to think never happens), and also comments I have heard about stallions in harness not being as easy to control as stallions being ridden. But you have more direct experience than I do,
Putting lots of unbred mares into a barn with a bunch of stallions still sounds problematic to me, though.
Yes, stallions definitely complicate stabling and pasturing since they need to be housed separately from mares. That’s one of the main reasons, along with the desire for selective breeding, that most male horses are gelded–they are logistically easier to own. So yes, books that imply the stallion is in a stall next to a mare is getting it wrong.
Some have been mentioned – I HATE the word ‘baby’ as an endearment, it makes me cringe or, more often, laugh (not fondly.) It always evokes the recollection of Fred MacMurray uttering it to Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity!
No surprise that I’m with Elaine on the ignorance – which really is unforgiveable in this day and age of Google – on how to use proper forms of address etc. I’d add to that the frequent Americanisms in books set in the UK.
My biggest one right now is the constant – and inaccurate – reference by non-British authors to “British accents”. They love them – the sexy Brit hero with the sexy AF Brit accent is massively in vogue in contemporary romances. Bur they clearly don’t love them enough to realise that the sexy accent they are writing about DOES NOT EXIST. They mean an ENGLISH accent. Great Britain consists of England, Scotland and Wales. We are all British, that’s fine. But there is no one homogenous British accent. There are English, Scottish and Welsh accents.
Would these authors say that Outlander’s Jamie Fraser speaks with a British accent?
I think not. (And I suspect most Scots would be outraged if they did!)
Would they say Tom Jones has a British accent?
No – it’s a Welsh accent.
But they’d probably say that James Bond speaks with a British accent.
Why? Why is there something wrong with calling it what it is – an ENGLISH accent?
Why the f**k is it so hard to get right? Does Google not explain it? Are there not enough Brits on Twitter who would be only too glad to help out?
There is NO EXCUSE.
It’s funny–I hate baby but love babe as an endearment. That said, baby isn’t anywhere nearly as creepy to me as “Daddy.” “shivers”
And they’re only really talking about one type of English accent, aren’t they? Bugger the scousers, brummies, geordies etc.!
Well, yes, they’re almost always talking about RP.
My girlfriend likes babe and baby, and it is a real struggle for me to use them.
well…there are a plethora of accents in Britain. In Scotland, you have the Highland accent, the Lowland accent, the Isles accent. I can’t understand Glaswegian a lot of the time.
England? I want a hero with a Brummie accent. I just do. I’m married to a Geordie, and when he first took me home to meet his parents, I couldn’t understand them.
What they’re talking about is RP – Received Pronounciation, or BBC English (which isn’t accurate any more, because BBC announcers are encouraged to keep their natural accents).
I don’t mind baby as an endearment, as long as it’s just a pet name, rather than the way one half of a relationship treats the other. Daddy is just awful, though.
I’m not a fan of the whole Daddy thing either – it abounds in m/m and it’s not something I gravitate towards. I did, however, listen to an audiobook recently – I picked it up because I trust the author and like the narrator – where it was quite well done. I’m not rushing to listen to any more though!
My greatest pet peeve is abuse, manipulation or insults which are excused or even accepted because of the gender(s) of the character(s) involved. The hero stalking the heroine, the heroine slapping the hero, “you’re not like other women” intended as a compliment, that sort of thing.
My son’s girlfriend just enlightened me about the pick me girl. I dislike them intensely in romance.
In recent years, I’ve noticed punched has replaced slapped (esp wanting to punch someone in the face) in character thoughts. I think that is an escalation in violent thoughts when often the person is just mildly annoying or not doing what the other character wants. I hate that.
Use of the word “boneless” in the context of sex. It makes me think of raw chicken breasts. Authors, this is not romantic. Please stop!
Also, the proliferation of profanity in romance novels is absurd. I am fine with some, but many characters use profanity in every other sentence. It’s ridiculous. I was taught that you should vary the words you use and not repeat the same word over and over. Yet in many novels it is f*** this and f***ing that and what the f*** all the time. Boring.
Much of cable TV is like that for me. I love a good curse but it is so possible to have too much of a good thing.
I understand that there are some people who do curse every other word, but ITA that it’s boring. And what do these people say when it’s truly life changing or dangerous? I once read that when a sergeant, who was known for saying f*** all the time, simply said “get your weapons now” the soldiers knew the situation was serious.
I curse way too much but I never yell. If I yell, it’s serious.
I’ll never forget the first (and one of very very few) I heard my mom curse. My brother, age four at the time, was lost. He’d wandered off and we lived near a giant lake. As my mom walked up the steps in our house, she said “sh*t” as she stomped on every one. I was completely sure my brother was dead. It was the only outcome I could see that justified my lovely mom cursing. (He was not.)
I am also distracted when sex scenes are oddly written. I recently read a scene where someone “stuck out her tongue” to kiss someone. I associate sticking out one’s tongue with silliness not sex.
I hate the “I’m clean, so we don’t have to use condoms” conversation that seems to precede so many initial sex scenes in contemporary romance. No! Regardless of how “clean/just got tested/haven’t had a partner in a while” the characters claim they are, I want characters to be responsible and only ditch condoms when they’ve both been tested. (I know of two women who contracted herpes because they believed men who assured them that they were “clean.” Spoiler alert—they weren’t!)
I also have a logistical issue with the “he pulled the gusset of her panties aside and thrust inside her” element. Look dude, I know you’re eager, but take a moment to let a girl take off her underwear! Not to mention it’s got to be a chaffing hazard.
It’s funny–I just used the phrase “chaffing hazard” to explain to Dr. Feelgood why–along with the fact that I don’t wash my jeans every time I wear them–I never go commando in jeans. #forthewin
I just read a book with both of these peeves in the same scene!!! It made me chuckle.
But it also made me think about the “don’t use condoms” conversation. It always happens in the midst of sex. Sometimes just before penetration. So nope.
I may be able to buy no condoms sex if the couple who have a discussion before hand. Where they actually talk about risks and what they are comfortable with.
Agree!!!
I totally love well done scenes where people discuss sex before doing it, or at the start of doing it, to discuss any important items (such as condoms, or any other no-gos) before the heat is really on. it is such a respectful approach to sex and to the other person, even horrible heroes who say they are just here for the sex get a lot of points from me for having this conversation.
Heroines with generally male names. Jolts me out of the story every time as I have to remind myself that this name does, in fact, refer to the heroine. Contributed to killing Star Trek Discovery for me. Thank the gods for Strange New Worlds.
Main characters who don’t do their jobs properly. If I can’t respect them I don’t care whether or not they find love.
Family member names are a big nope for me. I have not read very popular books for this reason. I can’t get past it. A friend suggested that I just substitute another name and I’m not able to do that.
Oddly spelled names are ones I can’t get past as well.
Excessive swearing is jarring to me .
Any book title with Duke in it is another guarantee I won’t read it . I’m frankly done with Dukes, Earls etc.
I love this topic. I had no idea I was getting so picky.
Turning British historical periods into a version of small-town America with their values, and wants. Regency, Wisconsin kind of thing. Probably because I’m British, so I can spot it, and it’s alien to me. In the past I used to get all Little Britain, but now I just don’t buy the book. Some of my friends love them. It’s not for me, that’s all. Have fun with it.
On the other hand, I enjoy the American-authored true small-town romance because it is so different.
Historical inaccuracies turn me off, I mean the big ones, not little bits here and there. If a book is written in the third person, and these days they all are, that person would know how to address a duke, they’d have a working knowledge of politics, even if they didn’t talk about them all the time, and they’d know how to get from Grosvenor Square to The Strand. The bland vagueness of some stories.
Romance in general? When tropes are followed blindly, so the characters are forced into situations that don’t fit their characters.
Mafia romances and biker books, where the woman is kidnapped, abused, and the “hero” has a revelations, but she is still the Only One. (not all mafia romances and biker books, just the bad ones).
I think we all are thrown when books get the basics of our worlds wrong. I have spent my adult life medicine adjacent and it makes me crazy when people casually drop in medical problems and/or solutions that are impossible. JUST ASK A DOCTOR, I always think.
I also dislike it when someone gets the American South wrong–if you’re from a small town in the Carolinas, and you order ice tea, it is sweetened. One would never order sweet tea–it’s the unsweetened kind you have to ask for and, until about ten years ago, lots of places didn’t have it.
Order sweet tea here and it’s hot and milky with 4 sugars!
Order sweet tea here and we know you’re not from here!
The south is the only place that understands when you order your tea “half cut” or “half and half.” In the north iced tea is unsweet and you have to try to dissolve sugar into it, which doesn’t work. When I lived up north I started getting tea mixed with lemonade so I could have it a little sweeter.
mind you, there is the Tiffany effect.
Tiffany was a perfectly good name to use in Regencies – it was the pet name for Theodora or Theodosia, but read Tiffany in a historical novel, and you think, “woah, what?”
My mother loved the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, so I grew up thinking that naming ones children alphabetically, starting with A – in the film, Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, etc. – was a Good Thing. As a result, I didn’t mind the Bridgertons at all (and now that I think of it, I wonder if Julia Quinn was inspired by the movie).
Unlike Dabney, I grew up with what was then a very common girl’s name. My middle school was small, only 8 girls, and 3 of us were Susan. At school and elsewhere, I stopped turning around when anyone said my name because I knew it wasn’t necessarily me they were talking to. Even at home I had an older cousin named Suzanne, and the names can sound alike when someone is calling from another room. So when it came time to name my sons it became a balancing act to find names that weren’t too common but weren’t weird.
The balance is what I think I wanted. I wanted to be named Christina or Natasha. Something that everyone could spell with ease! To this day, I have to spell my name every time someone has to write it down.
I too have an unusual first name and even worse, I live in California, where Spanish is so common that people don’t know whether to pronounce the J in my name as a J or an H. In reaction, I actually gave my kids classic Anglo-Saxon names to spare them. And the most straightforward spelling version too. My husband and I know a lady named Syndey (alternative for Cindy) and he referred to her as Sydney before I corrected him!
Carrie seems like an easy name, but since it can be C or K, A or E, one R or two, and end in I, IE, or Y (sometimes EY), I rarely have someone spell it correctly.
Interestingly, I’d never think of spelling it any other way! I’ve never seen any of those alternate spellings.
This reminds me of when I went to elementary school in the 80s and we had multiple Jennifers in our class. Teachers would use the first name and first initial of the last name to refer to them (“Jennifer B.”).
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is awesome and I also don’t mind when an author does sibling names in alphabetical order. I like it better than when there is a big family of siblings and all of their names begin with the same letter. It is much harder for me to keep track of them!
When I named my children we tried for straightforward and no nicknames. It almost worked! I am a Carolyn that goes by Carrie, a nickname no one associates with Carolyn, at least in the US. I had roommates who told callers they had the wrong number when they asked for Carolyn. 🙂 And let me tell you, Carrie seems like an easy name to spell until you realize the MANY combinations: C or K, E or A, one or two R’s, ending in I, IE, or Y. In grade school I got every combination possible on my valentine cards!
I have a son named Thomas who at 31 is still a Thomas because we all refused, including him, to let his named be shortened. Our “mistake” in child naming was our 4th child who we named Rebekah. It does occasionally get shortened to Bekah, although thankfully she loves the unusual spelling even though people get it wrong a lot. the other three don’t have names that can be shortened without sounding weird.
My biggest pet peeve is plots where the whole conflict could be resolved with a five-minute conversation. Everyone loved The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons, but I found it incredibly frustrating. If the heroine had a five-minute honest conversation with her sister and her lover, the whole thing would have been resolved.
My other pet peeve is the word “mount” during sex scenes. It always makes me think of horses, which is probably not what the author had in mind :).
Mount…. just say no.
I also hate when the big mis is an easy fix.
The easy fix big mis is a pet peeve for me, too.
Most of the things that are an instant turn-off for me (historical inaccuracy, terrible dialogue) are easy to spot early on, so I can abandon the book and move on to something better. What really annoys me is when I’ve invested a lot of time in a book which has been going great until the author can’t bear to let it end (or has mucked up the pacing and hasn’t met their word count yet). I don’t know how many (usually contemporary) romances I’ve read in which the characters have formed an emotional connection and settled into a relationship and….there’s still a third of the book to go. I’m emotionally checked out at this point and all I have to look forward to is either lots of redundant sex scenes or a stupid misunderstanding or both. Sometimes I skim to the end, sometimes I just abandon the book at this point, but in either case it kills the buzz of an enjoyable read. In my opinion a great romance novel is one that manages to maintain the suspense of getting the couple together until close to the end of the book.
An author told me recently that it’s hard to make any money unless you write four books a year. FOUR BOOKS! That kind of pressure makes it much harder to take the time to tell a rich story.
I can understand that. I’m not expecting every romance to be Pride and Prejudice in its complexity. I just get sick of books that seem to arrive at a good place for the characters and then they tediously meander towards a long overdue conclusion. If the story has been told satisfactorily then I’m fine with the book clocking off early, so to speak. I won’t feel shortchanged because I didn’t get enough pages for my money.
I agree. I think a lot of self-pubbed authors are indeed writing shorter books.
Mine are pretty much a version of most things all of you have shared already.
But with time and more books read, I’ve come to also dislike romances in the first person.
No, I will rephrase that: I don’t think some romance stories told in the first person are a good choice and I often feel frustrated to think about the narrator’s voice and I just can’t imagine real people talking or thinking like that, and often the story (or the tone/vibe) feels childish and silly to me.
I’m also ambivalent about first person romances. I don’t mind them if they’re done really well. But it’s hard to give a balanced view if you can only see the world from one person. Serena Bell does a good first person romance because she has both leads tell the story. That works better for me than a single first person narrator.
I’m not a fan of first person narration in general. Some authors make it work very well, but alternating first person is very much in vogue in contemps.
You’ve reminded me of one of my peeves that I haven’t come across in a while though – which is the one where the character is thinking about themselves and in their first person PoV thinks something like “as I contemplate my long, wavy red tresses and survey my brilliant forest green eyes in the mirror…” ugh. Who talks/thinks like that?!
“my brilliant forest green eyes” is a hard pass
Yes, this! I want to know what the main characters look like but the good authors let you know in a much more natural way.
Perfect example! Yes! No one thinks of themselves like that! It’s so weird and this often puts me off from what is likely a good premise…..
I too really do not like romances in first person. It seems getting more popular by the week. I read about a book, am tempted to buy… but fortunately there are excerpts! Even the German romance market is overflowing with first person narrations, perhaps even more extensive.
It’s first person present tense that puts me off, and in romance is often mired in self-indulgent navel-gazing. It also often slows down the pace of the story.
I think writing in present tense has become a dominant style across all genres over the last 20 years. I suspect it was popularized by creative writing schools and writing groups. I’m not a writer or an editor. I do make mistakes with grammar and tenses, and often wonder if writing in present tense is a lazy way for some writers to get around figuring out what tense they should be using.
I’ve mentioned this on another past post, but I’m allergic to writers who describe characters as looking exactly like [celebrity’s name]. Currently there is an astonishing amount of male characters who apparently all look like one of the Hemsworth brothers, and I’ve recently come across two different references to side characters that look exactly like Lana Del Rey. I think it’s incredibly lazy writing, and even worse it can – at least partially – ruin a book if said celebrities are some you outright dislike, for whatever reason. And if you don’t know who said celebrity is, it’s even more pointless. You shouldn’t have to do an image search to find out what the writer is going for.
I feel this way about almost all pop culture references. Our world moves so fast–it feels as though referencing someone or something that’s hot right now dooms your future readers to confusion.
Just as people under fifty, in general have no idea who Nick Nolte is (People’s Sexiest Man of the Year in 1992), in ten years, many readers will be baffled by a heroine who resembles Halle Berry.
Seconded – Thirded? I read a book recently where all the reviews were talking about its similarity to Ted Lasso. Um… that’s all very well, but although I know it’s a TV show, that’s ALL I know about it. The book was ‘meh’ – I don’t know if I might have liked it more if I’d understood the similarities. Maybe not…
I’m reading an ARC by a wonderful contemporary romance author. However in the first chapter she references:
the band Social Distortion (I had no idea who they were)
DeNiro
Jeep Wrangler
It’s a lot of modern pop culture to take in.
Not only have I heard of Social Distortion, but I’ve seen them in concert! (Many, many years ago, lol.) However, I agree that using pop culture references is both lazy and an easy way to get a book dated very quickly. I recall a spate of books from the late 1990s until about 2015 that mentioned Trump in a positive way or likened billionaire/CEO heroes to him. Yeah, those didn’t age well!
The Trump thing is in SEP’s It Had to Be You. He’s a good guy and… it just seems out of date.
The only one of those I recognise is DeNiro (I’m assuming it’s Robert!)
I’ve enjoyed books that have pop culture references, but I think some authors still manage to make them more ‘general’ and refer to trends rather than specific people or products. And as the OP says, describing a character as looking like X is just lazy and also risks turning off readers who don’t happen to find that particular person attractive.
It’s also disconcerting when you read a book from another part of the world where popular culture is different. I’ve actually been in a Tesco, but to most US readers, that would cause them to draw a blank.
When I come across references, both linguistic or physical, I’m not familiar with, I google them. Or I assume, like Tesco, that it’s a store from the context. I mean, there are references in American books I don’t get because I’ve never lived in the west, midwest, or New England, so stores, foods, and slang can differ a lot. I don’t get most references to TV or movies, or current celebrities, so those go over my head, but I carry this very powerful computer around in my pocket so it’s easy to look it up.
This is how I feel too. I’m not as fond of a character being compared to a celebrity but peppering a book with references to the location is OK with me. British author Lily Morton tends to put a lot of references to British TV shows and performers in her books. I use the Kindle Wikipedia link or Google on my phone to look them up and feel like I learn something!
I read so many shop/brand names I’ve never heard of – sometimes I can work out what they are in context (Walgreens is a pharmacy?) and others I have no idea. With any luck I don’t need to know specifics so I just ignore it and move on!
Yes, Walgreen’s is a pharmacy!
I’ve given up on many books with too many references to product names instead of using the right description. I want to know if the heroine wants to buy some chocolate or sausages. It might not be important for the story but it can be quite jarring for a non american reader.
The book I referenced above was out of control with pop culture references. I’m VERY good with pop culture and at least a third of them I’ve never heard of. I would bet that if my daughter read it, she’d have never heard of 75% of them.
I really distracted from the novel and added nothing to it.
This book is really something. She’s also referenced:
Charlie perfume
Jonathan Franzen
the musician Frank Taylor
Easy Rider
Discworld
the band Lord Huron
ELO
the Muppets
just to name a few.
Well, I’d say kudos for the Pratchett shout out (and ELO!) but surely the only onein that list that’s anywhere near universal is the Muppets!
Jonathan Franzen, Easy Rider?
Isn’t there a film called Easy Rider? As for Jonathan Franzen, no idea… Which shows exactly why this sort of thing is a problem.
Easy Rider, a mega film from 1969 with Peter Fonda influencing a whole generation.
Franzen highly acknowledged author even in Europe. But it seems to be a problem how old one is
My kids wouldn’t know who Franzen is. He’s definitely not a mainstream name in the US!
My biggest pet peeve is the unnecessary epilogue where every couple from the series returns to show how happy they are. Or not even the epilogue. The previous couples come back and hijack the current couples’ book. It bothers me so much. They had their turn. Previous couples should only come back if they have something add to the story.
I loathe books that are touted as a ‘new-take’ on classic/popular stories, especially Jane Austen’s books. No thanks! And there are sooo many…………
Also, books based on Fairy Tales – I can really do without another version of Beauty and the Beast.
As others have mentioned, Americanisation of British settings and language winds me up too – especially the use of ‘row houses’ for terraces.
I’m not really bothered by endearments like babe, baby, honey etc. but I’m not keen on little one and my child is just vomit-inducing! I’ve only come across daddy being used in m/m daddy kink books and I’m not sure that I could take it in a m/f book….
Another thing, WHY do all these HR heroines want to run gaming hells? 🙂
I dunno. It seems to me that all the new HR heroines want are activists. They want to get the vote, save the children, overthrow the patriarchy, remake the fabric of society.
As well as the predictability of a HR heroine being a social activist, this sometimes sets up a scenario where other women are frivolous and shallow compared to her because they enjoy fashion and parties and so on. I’m not keen on this dichotomy, as though a woman can only do one or the other, with the one being automatically superior to the other.
Yes! The pick me girl.
OMG yes!
WHY do all these HR heroines want to run gaming hells? 🙂
Hah! And yes, what Dabney said. I hate to say this, but for all that it was badly needed in real life, #metoo has nailed shut the coffin of HR because it is now no longer acceptable to have a heroine who doesn’t Do Something With Her Life. They have become as common as All The Dukes.
“Cardboard” Children.
All those children who are plot tools, coathangers, only there to annoy, be cute, push a point.
I mind generic adults (best friend, jealous ex, jerky childhood friend, office rival…) much less if the central couple is good, I really do not like generic, or unreal children (as in little adults, too old, too young, too sweet, too mean…) .
I generally prefer romance without children, but will read and enjoy where children are real, and truly part of the character’s lives.
However, cardboard children really irritate me and authors who use them lose my trust, I will be do careful research before reading their books again. A lot of Silhouettes series romances were like that, and I rarely even look at those lines anymore.
Don’t know why, but all those pregnancies in HPs do not bother me…
Go figure…
I hate romances or romance series where EVERY character has to be in a relationship to be “fulfilled”. I would love to see a romance where a secondary character said “My life, my career, my interests and my friendships are fulfilling and I’m happy to be single,” and nobody, including the author, saw them as broken or needing to be fixed.
I am sick and tired of books that have no plot. Just 200+ pages of mental longing/lusting. I want a story!
Okay, in a time (any historical romance, before 1970) when there was no reliable birth control (yeah, yeah, I know. Sheep’s guts and all that) AND having an out-of-wedlock baby ruined so a woman’s life and placed a life-long stigma on the kid AND when virginity was absolutelyexpected (especially in upper class marriages in the past) and lauded by society before the marriage night, what drives me absolutely crazy (foaming at the mouth insane) is when the virginal, “this is my first ball and my family fortunes depend on my marrying a man with money to bail out my gambling father and dissolute brother”) slips outside in the garden and gives a man she met ten seconds ago a bj which she loves.
My pet peeve in romances are when relative or friends take away a character’s agency. For example books where the “friend” goes behind the heroine’s back to warn off the guy the heroine is interested in. I also hate manipulative families where the adult child feels like they have to do what the parent’s (or sometimes siblings) want out of obligation or guilt. It happens a lot in “rom-coms” and is often played for laughs. I’m just not interested in reading about parents trying to control their adult children unless breaking free from the control is part of the plot. I don’t find an adult’s inability to say no to manipulative parents very sexy.
You get a lot of stories of homophobic parents/friends in MM, and I can deal with it depending on the book. If it’s a big part of the plot and there’s a lot of abusive behavior, I’m probably going to give it a pass. I get that it’s too often reality, but I don’t really read romances for a dose of the ugliness in the world.
When the hero or heroine are bending over backwards trying to fake a relationship to please a parent, it always makes me wonder what will they do when the parent starts pressuring them for grandchildren. Fake a pregnancy?
I just remembered another pet peeve and one reason I stopped reading mf rom-coms: humiliation or embarrassment played for humor. How many books have the heroine doing something completely stupid in front of the hero? Way too many.
Oh yes. My favorite is when people tell the heroine that the hero is in love with some woman who’s not aware of it and doesn’t return his feelings, and the heroine keeps thinking what an idiot this woman is until someone helpfully spells it out to her.
ooooh yes!!!
This put me off SEP for a long time – she loves humiliating the h/h both and apparently it is funny & ok by all the loving people around them, or even done by them – so off-putting! I still have a hard time with some of my own family members for doing it to me or to others in front of me. And compounding it by saying ” you cannot even take a friendly joke… so sensitive…. tsssk”
SEP was definitely on my mind when I was writing this. Unfortunately she has a lot of company in contemporary romance for embarrassment as humor. One of the worst offenders for me was Kristen Higgins, both for heroines humiliating themselves and friends/family pushing them around.
Agree – SEP was just so important to me that I really regretted how this got worse and worse and how I lost a great author progressively to problems I stopped being able to overlook.
Authors like Higgins, and many others, I tried once, and once I got the vibe of humiliation, I just stopped and forgot them, or even why I did not like them. I am wary of home/smalltown romance for that reason, it so often includes this trope, especially.
As with so many of you, blatant historical inaccuracy is a peeve. Another is when one of the characters is going along and keeps running into famous historical people, as in the U.S. walking down the street and running into Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc. Along with the inaccuracies in titles, I read one where “acknowledging” a son was required for him to inherit, even though he was born to the man’s wife but, on the other hand, another character acknowledged an illegitimate son and so he was in line to inherit. Made me wild, especially since I’ve read a number of books where a woman has a child by a lover and her husband’s kind of stuck with him being considered legitimate (unless it’s wildly impossible for the husband to have fathered him, as in he’d been out of the country for years).
And bad grammar, improper use of words … I remember reading something where someone picked his predecessor and was quite proud of his descendants (where ancestors was meant). Also the use of “it’s” as the possessive, rather than “its”. ack!
I hate to be a grammar snob, but when I encounter obvious grammatical errors, I lose confidence in the writer and the story. I think a big problem is that so many romance writers seem to depend on their Facebook followers or beta readers to do their editing & proofreading. Publishers will spend a lot of money to design a great cover but seem disinclined to expend funds for competent copyediting. I recently read a book where the hero went for an 11-mile run (that distance was specified) in the early morning; at the end of his run, he sees the heroine “gilded by the late afternoon sun.” Someone should have done a time-line edit–I think even I could have run 11 miles in less than eight hours! I used to keep a list of “Hello, Editor!” moments as I was reading. I’ve seen “world wind” for “whirlwind”, “feudal” for “futile”, “missal” for “missile”, not to the mention to ubiquitous “you and I” when it should be “you and me” (or any other mismatch of nominative & objective cases). My personal “favorite” (I’ve probably mentioned this before, but it’s in the DiscoDollyDeb canon) was in a book where the hero’s name was Theo, and throughout the book the heroine would say things like, “Theo and I’s house” or “Theo and I’s car.” What was worse was that at the end of the book (which was really quite a good story), the author thanked a person she referred to as her “Godmother of grammar”! To which I could only say, “Godmother, turn in your credentials.”.
Ugh. I remember seeing a similar accreditation in an author’s note somewhere – I think saying their beta/proofer was an English graduate or teacher! I’d have hated to have been one of their students, is all I can say.
I wish I had a dollar for every “grizzly murder” in fiction (bears were not involved in any of these).
Several years ago I tracked errors I spotted in almost a decade of recreational reading. My write-up is at http://www.ccrsdodona.org/markmuse/reading/rightword.html