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A review by crispycritter
Late Bloomer by Mazey Eddings
Did not finish book. Stopped at 39%.
This started out as a really sweet book but I am just having a tough time with the prose. A lot of the feelings in this book were described “bombastically,” to quote a well known romance reviewer. And that’s usually ok - after all, romance can be a little over the top. I like big feelings. But we got big feelings that were immediately followed up with “and this is what this means and why it’s important.” As a reader, I didn’t feel like I was given an opportunity to feel those feelings alongside Opal and Pepper, I was just kind of beaten with them and lectured on their significance. And it got tiring and sucked a lot of the joy out of my reading experience - discovering the significance of stolen glances and grazes of hands via a gently guided narrator.
TL;DR an unfortunate amount of showing not telling. And I'm gonna rant a bit - not about this book specifically, but I gotta put this somewhere. Other smarter people have articulated this before, but I think this is a trend in modern fiction of all genres where authors don't trust their readers to draw the "right" conclusion about what's transpiring within the pages. We don't have themes anymore, we have small theses an author writes mini dissertations on. Part of the joy of reading is layering on my own interpretation of what's happening, based on my lived experience. If there's no room for me to do this, what's the point? Petition to reign in the overly didactic hand-holding and just let readers love AND HATE things, fairly or unfairly. This style of writing is like putting a restrictive covenant on land you sell, so that future generations can't freely decide what to do with it long after you're gone. Once you put your book out into the world it doesn't belong to you anymore, you gotta let it go and let people freely interpret it, not bake in an oppressive narrative voice which demands a single, correct reading experience.
Major props to the neurodivergent character rep. As a ND reader, Opal and Pepper felt incredibly authentic and I deeply related to both of them. Lovely lovely characters.
Major props to the flower farm / gardening research - as someone who loves gardening, this might be THE first book where someone knows what season rununculi bloom, etc etc. I remember reading another book where a character planted seeds in the dead of winter for a plant that would have most certainly been an annual in that region and just screeching in annoyance.
TL;DR an unfortunate amount of showing not telling. And I'm gonna rant a bit - not about this book specifically, but I gotta put this somewhere. Other smarter people have articulated this before, but I think this is a trend in modern fiction of all genres where authors don't trust their readers to draw the "right" conclusion about what's transpiring within the pages. We don't have themes anymore, we have small theses an author writes mini dissertations on. Part of the joy of reading is layering on my own interpretation of what's happening, based on my lived experience. If there's no room for me to do this, what's the point? Petition to reign in the overly didactic hand-holding and just let readers love AND HATE things, fairly or unfairly. This style of writing is like putting a restrictive covenant on land you sell, so that future generations can't freely decide what to do with it long after you're gone. Once you put your book out into the world it doesn't belong to you anymore, you gotta let it go and let people freely interpret it, not bake in an oppressive narrative voice which demands a single, correct reading experience.
Major props to the neurodivergent character rep. As a ND reader, Opal and Pepper felt incredibly authentic and I deeply related to both of them. Lovely lovely characters.
Major props to the flower farm / gardening research - as someone who loves gardening, this might be THE first book where someone knows what season rununculi bloom, etc etc. I remember reading another book where a character planted seeds in the dead of winter for a plant that would have most certainly been an annual in that region and just screeching in annoyance.