Reply to June 2026 - What are you reading?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I jsut reread Natalie Zina Walschots Hench, about a young woman who finds herself working as a temp on the Villain side doing spreadsheets.  She is terribly injured by a "hero" and gets laid off, and starts working on tallying the human cost of heroes.  And goes on from there.  I loved it as much the second time!  Re-read because it was published in 2020 and the sequel, Villain, just came out a couple of weeks ago so that's on my to read list.

I just started American Fantasy by Emma Staub.  It's got a fairly low rating for goodreads, so I'm curious to see how it goes (I'm only on page 50).  A 40 (50?) something woman goes on a 4 day cruise dedicated to fans of an aging boy band (think New Kids on the BLock on a cruise today) where guests can interact and hang out with the boy band.  She ends up befriending one of the band members.  If this was a straight romance book by a well known romance author, the concept would be a home run.  So very curious why the low rating.  The blurb says it's a richly textured, uplifting story about the magic of revisiting youthful feelings, and the even greater magic of starting anew.  [/quote]

I LOVED American Fantasy! I'm surprised by the negative reviews (I haven't seen them myself though...) And I wouldn't call Emma Straub a romance author (though there's nothing wrong with romance). I would characterize her books as litery fiction.[/quote]

No, that's the point I'm trying to make.  If this premise was written by a popular romance author (like Katherine Center), it would be golden.  This is a can't miss romance trope.  But it's written by Emma Straub, a literary fiction writer, and has a very low Goodreads rating.  Has her literary audience turned their nose up at this premise?  Did romance readers pick it up because of the premise and then get turned off by the literary-ness of it?  Is it the wrong premise for the right writer, or the right premise for the wrong writer?

I just finished it today.  It's not as bad as the ratings would lead me to think, but I didn't love it.  There's quite of bit of snobbery here - likely much of it intentional.  The female main character works at an Opera magazine and we're talking about 90s boy bands!  But there's also unintentional snobbery, too, that bleeds out - about cruising, the type of people who cruise, fandoms.  I read through some reader reviews on goodreads and people didn't like how little actually happened.  I can see that, there's a lot that happens in the main character's heads (literary!), but not a lot of plot.  It did feel like she got a lot of the angst at fame at a young age right (and she thanks Joe McIntyre from NKOTB, so she had a good source).  [/quote]

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