Comforting Vs. Tired

I tend to file away all genre fiction in the same file cabinet I keep in my brain.  Which is to say, I don't think they're all that different from each other.  It's "genre" for a reason.  There are conventions, there are expectations - it just varies depending on the genre you're talking about.  For example, hero(ine) quests are pretty darn popular in fantasy, in romances you get the "happy ending," and in mystery/suspense I expect there to be some crime-solving involved.

One thing though that I think does make the romance genre unique is this concept that many readers have of a Comfort Author.  Those authors we turn to when we want and/or need "comforting."  It's the genre reading equivalent of drinking hot chocolate by the fire place on a cold winter's day; Or having a crappy day at work, and coming home to have macaroni and cheese for dinner.

What makes an author a Comfort Author for me is that I know exactly what I'm going to get even before I read the first sentence.  I know this concept is enough to turn up the noses of every stuffed literary shirt on the planet, with English professors falling into a swoon and tutting, tutting an awful lot.  I know, it sounds absurd.

Which begs the question - what is exactly the deciding factor on what makes a Comfort Author....well....comforting?

Ask any reader on the planet if they stopped reading an author because "all their books were the exact same thing over and over again," and every single one of us has at least one.  Besides the sloppiness of the final product - it's why I ultimately quit Patricia Cornwell.  I've heard other readers say it's why they've quit Janet Evanovich, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Lora Leigh and Danielle Steel (just to name a few).

But then there are other authors who employ similar themes and tropes consistently throughout their body of work, and we continue to lap it up - begging for more.  Or in my case with Maggie Osborne, bemoan the fact that they retired.  Because as much as I love Maggie?  Yeah, she had a tendency to beat the ol' "rough around the edges, tomboy heroine" drum pretty dang hard.  Then there's Pamela Morsi - whose historicals tended to all be set in a similar backwoods settings, all with "salt of the Earth" style characters.

My latest Comfort Author?  Just might be Jessica Hart, who has such a major category romance backlist that I'll probably get through it all by the time I'm 85.  I'm currently reading her latest release, We'll Always Have Paris (review eventually will land over at TGTBTU), and I was struck by the fact that she definitely has her favorite pet themes.  This story features a stuffed-shirt hero and a bubbly, extroverted heroine who will undoubtedly breathe some life into his gray, drab world.

It's a familiar trope for me, and for Hart.  She's used it before in Oh-So-Sensible Secretary (stuffed shirt heroine, free-spirit hero) and Juggling Briefcase and Baby (stuffed shirt hero, free-spirit heroine).  She's also fond of the heroine who is the polar opposite of the rest of her family members (see We'll Always Have Paris and Under the Boss's Mistletoe).  And yet?  I'm sucked in.  To the point where I'm kicking myself from here to eternity for starting the book when I darn well knew I was going to have to put it down and go to my job.

Stupid job.  Stupid boss for expecting me to do stupid work while I'm at my stupid job.  I knew I should have called in dead when I had the chance.

So what is it about Maggie Osborne, Pamela Morsi and Jessica Hart that keeps me reading, even when the book has striking similarities to other books written by those very same authors?  What has turned them into Comfort Authors as opposed to Old Tired Authors I've Broken Up With?

Honestly?  I'm not entirely sure.  It might be that they're working with tropes and themes that I've grown so particularly fond of over the years that they don't feel "tired" to me (yet, at any rate).  It could also come down to the elusive magical element we call Voice.  Some authors just have that little bit of magic, that element to their writing that sucks you in to the point where you'd read their grocery list.  I'm not sure how to define it, and I'm not even sure what those elements are in an author's "voice" that end up striking a chord with me.

Whatever it is, I probably shouldn't try to over-analyze it or question it too much.  I should just be happy that I have such a relationship with more than one writer.  Enjoy the ride Wendy, enjoy the ride.

What is it for you that makes an author a Comfort Author?  Are there striking similarities shared between their books that you've overlooked for one reason or another?  What makes you quit one author because all their books "sound the same," yet continue on with others and deem them "comforting?"

TBR Read: Foxfire Bride

The Book:  Foxfire Bride by Maggie Osborne

The Particulars:  Historical western romance, 2004, Ballantine, in print and available digitally.  Also, neither here nor there, the last book Osborne published before she selfishly decided to abandon me and retire from writing.  Not that I'm bitter....

The Review: I'll be blunt: with a couple of exceptions, by and large my reading so far this year has ranged from "meh" to "I can't finish this."  This weekend I DNF'ed two new victims, one of them by a writer I normally enjoy.  I was starting to get punchy.  People, I was getting desperate.  So I asked myself, "Self, what do you feel like reading?"  The answer was: a western.  Yes, I have a stack of review books a mile high, but I was at my breaking point.  I needed to be selfish.  I needed to read something that was calling to me.  And this book by Maggie Osborne won the race.

I inhaled it in 24 hours.

Matthew Tanner is a prosperous mining engineer and he's just gotten word that his father has been kidnapped.    He's currently staying outside Carson City, Nevada and the kidnappers are demanding that he bring $50,000 to Denver in three months or his old man bites it.  Scaring up the money isn't an issue, getting to Denver is.  He needs an experienced scout to lead him and his two hired guards.  What he gets is Fox.

Fox is a remarkable woman with a sterling reputation.  She made a name for herself traveling through the west, alone.  A woman, traveling the west - alone.  She's resourceful.  She's smart.  She's also stubborn, and won't take crap from anyone.  After a rival guide shoots her in the leg, she and Peaches, a black man she's known since she was a child, settle in a small cabin and scrape together a living by harvesting ice.  But it's been a mild winter, and Fox has had time to brood.  After years of avoiding it, she's now determined to have revenge against the man she feels ruined her life - a mine owner named Hobbs Jennings.  She knows the man is in Denver, and is thinking about making the trip herself when Tanner shows up.  She's not wild about taking some greenhorns on the trip, but hell - Tanner's money is going to pay the way.  So she doesn't have to go to Denver on her own dime, and she gets to where she needs to go.  Win, win - right?  Well that is, until the trials of the trip and falling in love with Tanner smack her in the face.....

I love road romances, which is probably another reason why I like westerns so much.  I like that element of adversity that so easily fits into the setting.  This entire book is pretty much devoted to the trip from Carson City to Denver.  Besides the attraction brewing between Fox and Tanner, Osborne also rounds out the cast with very intriguing secondary characters - Peaches, plus the two hired guards that Tanner brings along to protect the money.  These characters added a lot of depth to the story, and I soon was swept up more so in the group dynamic, than in the budding romance.  It just made a really good mix.

Fox is pretty much a standard issue Osborne heroine.  I hate to use the "tomboy" label for her, mostly because I feel strongly that she's a product of her environment and circumstances.  Hobbs Jennings stole her life from her.  What was left for her to do was make the best of the situation - and that meant finding her own way out west.  So yes, she's a hard woman on the outside.  But on the inside?  That's another matter entirely:

"She wasn't afraid to step in front of a gunslinger itching to squeeze a trigger, but she was afraid of an officer's wife who was probably small and delicate and about as threatening as a kitten, whose only weapon was ridicule."

Ultimately what is standing in the way of the romance is the fact that Tanner and Fox come from two different worlds.  He was educated in Boston, had his tour in Europe, wears nice clothes and smokes good cigars.  She's worked on the docks in San Francisco, had to eat out of garbage cans some nights, has worked as a guide, and even lived with some Indians for a time.  These two people won't fit together in polite society, but that doesn't make the attraction between them burn any less.  It also means that if they want to make it work, they'll have to find a way.  I loved that Osborne doesn't make her heroine morph into a pod person to make it happen.

For a long time this book sat around my B range.  It's extremely readable, and I was inhaling it, but it didn't quite have that oomph factor.  A huge chunk of the conflict relies quite heavily on convenience and we do enter Big Secret territory.  I'm still not sure if I'll ever want to reread it (typically my requirement for an A read), but damn - it made me cry.  There were moments at the end of this story where my heart about beat out of my chest and....my eyes leaked out some tears.

I, generally, do not cry over books.  I just don't.  Cold-hearted soul that I am.

But Maggie Osborne made me cry, and I flat-out loved the characters here.  They all really came to life, and I got very emotionally invested.  I did feel one secondary character is left twisting in the breeze slightly at the end (mostly because by that point I was so invested I wanted to know everything....), but really I'm just splitting hairs.  It was a great read, and just what the doctor ordered.

Final Grade = A-

Wendy Fails At Fangirl

Keishon's TBR Challenge is coming up next week, and in preparation for it, I thought it would be fun to read one of the few Maggie Osborne novels I still have buried in my TBR. For those of you new around here, I lurve me some Maggie Osborne. I have four books by her in the Bat Cave Keeper Stash, and even two other books that I wasn't wild about (for the record: Shotgun Wedding and A Stranger's Wife) still had enough juice for me to not only read them all the way through, but they also "stuck" with me for a while. Well, the unthinkable happened yesterday. The unimaginable. A sure sign of the apocalypse if ever there was one....

I DNF'ed a Maggie Osborne novel.

The book in question is Silver Lining, and yes, I know this lands me in the minority. Azteclady loved this book. It got a very favorable review over at TRR. AAR gave it a B. Even Mrs. Giggles slapped it with a rating of 76. Out of all of these examples, I find myself agreeing a lot with what Mrs. G and AAR (Blythe handled the reviewing duties here) had to say. But, let me explain for myself....

The story opens with the heroine nursing a mining camp through a raging case of the pox. She's had it before, and has heard you "can't get it twice" - therefore sticks around to play nursemaid. The camp has gone from boom to bust thanks to the epidemic, so when the men recover they're downright grateful to her. They offer her anything her heart desires and in a moment of rashness she blurts out that she wants a baby. Not some poor little orphan child but her own baby.

I've long said that in order to keep from going insane, authors really shouldn't "think" of readers while writing a book. Frankly no book in universally loved, you can't please everybody, and authors should just concentrate on writing the best book that they can. In the romance world, I think all the author really needs to do is deliver the happy ending. Readers are going to bring their own personal baggage into any book they read, and authors have no control over that - so why should they make themselves crazy over it?

The whole "No thank you, I want my own baby" scenario is one that bugs me. I have friends who were adopted. I have friends who have adopted. My own niece is adopted. I have baggage. Loads of it. Does my family love my niece any less because she didn't go swimming around in our gene pool? Absolutely frickin' not! We love her just as much as my nephew (a product of said gene pool). She's smart. She's cute. She loves to read. That kid is the bee's knees. Do my friends with adopted children love them any less? Absolutely frickin' not! I think I can safely say that each and every one of them would lay down and die for their children. Period. They would do anything to protect them. Period. So yeah, baggage.

Moving on, the heroine doesn't want a husband, she just wants the baby. But the preacher can't abide with fornication so the hero, despite being engaged, draws the short straw and is forcibly wed to the heroine. Here's the thing. Heroine doesn't want a husband. Hero doesn't want to marry heroine. Yet they still stand before the preacher and say "I Do." Huh? Is it just me, or does this make no sense? They're adults. Nobody is pointing a gun at them. Why not just say, "I don't" and walk away? Oh yeah, because then we'd have no novel.

Anyway, then of course the hero takes the heroine back to his parents' ranch and the heroine gets a warm reception. Then the chick the hero was supposed to marry shows up and complications ensue. Chick #2 (or maybe she's #1 since she was engaged to the hero after all) assumes The Evil Other Woman role and that's where I completely lose interest. The older I get, the less patience I have for The Evil Other Woman trope. Plus it begs the question, what the heck did the hero see in that chick to begin with if she's so frackin' vile? It doesn't say a whole lot for his intelligence now, does it?

And that, as they say, was that. I skipped ahead to the final few chapters, skimmed those, and called it a day. So....

Final Grade = DNF

A Maggie Osborne book. Sigh. I never thought this day would come. In the meantime, I've yanked another book out my TBR to meet Keishon's challenge. Hopefully I'll have better luck with it.