Sunday, April 23, 2017

Finding Ms. Write by Various Authors

3 Stars

Finding Ms. Write is an anthology of 12 f/f contemporary romance stories and I thought it a perfect way to discover some new authors without breaking my bank.  *LOL*  You see, most of the f/f authors that are recommended by folks publish with publishers that A) never seem to go on sale and B) sell their novels for $13 a piece.  Not conducive to exploring a genre.  And quite honestly, Bold Strokes Books and Ylva Publishing should take a look at that if they want to expand beyond their comfy genre niche.  I love romance of all sorts, but quite honestly, they don't make it easy.

So, on to the book.  The stories were well-written and somewhat engaging for the most part, but what struck me was that they all seemed to have main characters who had either been dumped/widowed/deserted in some way.  Is this a big f/f trope?  The anthology didn't seem to be going for that - it's supposed to be about the publishing industry - but it seemed that every last one of these ladies had some tragedy in their past.

For the most part, all the romances are very sweet.  Not much steam or heat happening, which disappointed me.  I like my romances to have some physical oomph to them.  There was just an element of blandness to many of the tales and characters.  Maybe blandness is not the right word... I don't know.  I just found most of them too calm for me maybe.  On the plus side, the majority of the characters weren't wet behind the ears kidlets under the age of 25.  It was refreshing to read about mature women - except jeez, did they all have to have lost a love?

One thing really irritated me though... I really don't need to be reading a romance story about a main character who has early on-set Alzheimer's to deal with.

In conclusion, I will say that Finding Ms. Write was a nice read, filled with nice stories about nice people.  Nice.

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