Sex? It’s a pity…
I've recently finished reading a free e-book that I thought was going to
be a relaxing read about a woman who reinvents herself after the breakup of her
marriage and who somehow gets mixed up in solving a murder (not the cheating
ex-husband’s I should add) However, I was totally thrown out of the story by
the sex scenes which peppered the action. Now, I don't have anything against
sex scenes but these had a vibe that they had been dropped in just for the
spice. I guess they were intended to be erotic but I found them comedic. I
spent so much time laughing because I couldn’t buy that characters, who had
known each other for a few minutes could have sex so great that she has nine – yep, count ’em, NINE - orgasms the
first time they have at it! (Just to ratchet up the inadequacy meter for the
normal population) The scenes did nothing to progress the story, nor gave me
any additional reasons to care what happened to the characters. In fact she’d
become such a bleater that the further I got into the book the more I hoped she
would be the next murder victim. No such luck. To make matters worse, I figured
out the killer’s identity as soon as he appeared on the page. The last chapter
was an info dump that tied up all the loose ends via a conversation of
assorted characters while the new lovers looked adoringly into each others eyes.
Kill me, kill me now! I'm still trying to figure out why I persevered with
reading it. Maybe being a freebie, I figured I shouldn’t whine. Maybe I simply hoped
it would get better. Maybe I wanted to give the writer the benefit of the
doubt.But there’s something I learned: good sex in a novel isn’t just in the writhing,
it’s in the writing. Otherwise celibacy from the page is a good option.
I've recently finished reading a free e-book that I thought was going to
be a relaxing read about a woman who reinvents herself after the breakup of her
marriage and who somehow gets mixed up in solving a murder (not the cheating
ex-husband’s I should add) However, I was totally thrown out of the story by
the sex scenes which peppered the action. Now, I don't have anything against
sex scenes but these had a vibe that they had been dropped in just for the
spice. I guess they were intended to be erotic but I found them comedic. I
spent so much time laughing because I couldn’t buy that characters, who had
known each other for a few minutes could have sex so great that she has nine – yep, count ’em, NINE - orgasms the
first time they have at it! (Just to ratchet up the inadequacy meter for the
normal population) The scenes did nothing to progress the story, nor gave me
any additional reasons to care what happened to the characters. In fact she’d
become such a bleater that the further I got into the book the more I hoped she
would be the next murder victim. No such luck. To make matters worse, I figured
out the killer’s identity as soon as he appeared on the page. The last chapter
was an info dump that tied up all the loose ends via a conversation of
assorted characters while the new lovers looked adoringly into each others eyes.
Kill me, kill me now! I'm still trying to figure out why I persevered with
reading it. Maybe being a freebie, I figured I shouldn’t whine. Maybe I simply hoped
it would get better. Maybe I wanted to give the writer the benefit of the
doubt.But there’s something I learned: good sex in a novel isn’t just in the writhing,
it’s in the writing. Otherwise celibacy from the page is a good option. 