Victoria Hislop does not write Mills & Boon books. We know this because her novels are not published by Mills & Boon. Without such a smoking gun, however, we may have been unsure. Her best-selling debut, The Island, offered holiday romance with a little history. Her follow-up was faithful to the formula which had served her well originally. The Return is not a sequel, as the title suggests, but instead about a return. A more suitable title might have been The Plot Contrivance. However, it was wisely decided that The Return had more selling potential and mass appeal. Shows what we know.
In The Return, a unhappily married thirty-something who loves to dance travels with her best friend to Spain, for a holiday of dance and learning about character. Once they arrive, they dance, and oh, to dance. They learn of Flamenco, and other sultry struts. The heroine, Sonia, meets an ageing barista who tells her the story of the town and what life was like during the Civil War. Sadly the holiday comes to an end, and Sonia heads home, to her bitter marriage and her misery. Her friend, meanwhile, decides to live in Spain, as she has nothing keeping her in England (besides a daughter). But can Sonia? She has responsibilities, such as her sham marriage to an older alcoholic, her job which she hates and her father who only wants what is best for his daughter and obviously decided years ago the best didn't include any biographical information.
Sonia then chooses to return, yes, like the title, to visit her friend, but mainly to find the barista and hear the epic tale of his café and the rest of Granada's history. At this point the book takes a turn, as for the next three hundred pages we learn of the Civil War and the love story of a young Flamenco dancer and her guitar-playing lover.
The insane and completely unbelievable narrative contrivances that bring these elements together have to be read to be disbelieved. It's gobsmackingly bad writing, pat, inept and insulting to the reader. The Return counts as light holiday romance fare, but not Mills & Boon. Here's why. It's a Mills & Boon historical romance book-ended by a Mills & Boon modern romance. While Hislop's stories may not contain the standard happy endings considered vital to the genre, they do contain other necessary ingredients, and are equally terrible.
Needless to write, The Return is downright wretched and worth avoiding, but it does contain evocative passages of Spain and the occasional action sequence for the younger reader's flagging interest. There seems a confusion on Hislop's part over what she intends her novel to be. Mills & Boon books are rarely this confused, and never this ambitious. You cannot shoehorn a sweeping historical epic into your little paperback about an idiot struggling to realise her husband is a dolt. If it's a lesson learned you're after then you can't have been paying attention.
The distance between home and second hand books and charity shops is embarrassingly vast. The local library is closed for refurbishment. The second closest is also closed for refurbishment because of society's continuing battle against literacy and due to this, and because of a general distaste towards romance fiction, the reading of love stories has dried up since the unfortunate blunder that was Victoria Hislop's The Return. Despite this lax attitude towards research, our Bewildered Heart has refused to leave the subject alone, and often, as we stare at happy couples while they chat in their kitchens, we think grand thoughts of where to take this much derided of genres. Because the nearest cinema is many miles away and film-watching can be expensive, there have been limited opportunities to see the many recent Hollywood romantic comedies. Except Atonement, which was hilarious. The recent batch of insipid claptrap includes such ideas as proposing on a Leap Year Day, for luck, being a male Maid of Honour for the woman you love, being dressed twenty-seven times, marrying Ryan Reynolds and Ashton Kutcher's playful hunkiness excusing the need for plotting.
When you take apart these films, and with them, Mills & Boon novels, you'll find underneath the terribly-conceived love story, is an actual story, not involving love. Hollywood has confused the word story with the word gimmick, but we allow this because we so desperately need a reason to put Kate Hudson in incredulous situations. The emotional journey of your protagonist has to link with your story-line, but that doesn't mean you need your love-story to be your story. After all, having two people who are perfect for each other figure out they're perfect for each other isn't much of a story. You need robots exploding on the top of the Statue of Liberty! or the theft of gasoline trucks from Peru while robots fight on the top of the Statue of Peru!
Now, Bewildered Heart doesn't know much about story-telling, besides our rather arrogant proclamations that we know a lot about story-telling, but the point we are able to gather from reading articles on writing is that the beats must be conducive, linked consistently by a well-structured plot, with the main propulsion of the story aiding the advancements of the emotional epiphanies of the characters.
While in the past, on this very column, no less, we have speculated that a romance novel must be about romance, we now reach a different conclusion that this isn't always the case. Far from it. We can write a dramatic novel telling the twisting yarn of robots fighting on the top of explosions as long as the romantic subplot is embedded and doesn't feel tacked on or redundant, as it does in Hollywood movies.
The will-they-won't-they issues aren't as interesting as can-they-can't-they, especially as the author must establish in Chapter One that they want to and the reader demands that in the end they will. Is the psychological more compelling than the physical? This is prose, after all. We're not making an action film about robots fighting at the end of the world. When we do there will be a new blog.
No, according to our manifesto we're telling a love story. And yet we're not really. We're telling a ripping yarn, a romp, an adventure, with a love sub-plot that deems all matters irrelevant by the climax. Will the reader care that our protagonists didn't manage to find the hidden jewel of Peru and almost got killed by fighting robots? No, of course they won't. What's important is that they found each other. Aw yeah! And they survived the robot apocalypse. Man, that chapter got crazy.
In The Return, a unhappily married thirty-something who loves to dance travels with her best friend to Spain, for a holiday of dance and learning about character. Once they arrive, they dance, and oh, to dance. They learn of Flamenco, and other sultry struts. The heroine, Sonia, meets an ageing barista who tells her the story of the town and what life was like during the Civil War. Sadly the holiday comes to an end, and Sonia heads home, to her bitter marriage and her misery. Her friend, meanwhile, decides to live in Spain, as she has nothing keeping her in England (besides a daughter). But can Sonia? She has responsibilities, such as her sham marriage to an older alcoholic, her job which she hates and her father who only wants what is best for his daughter and obviously decided years ago the best didn't include any biographical information.
Sonia then chooses to return, yes, like the title, to visit her friend, but mainly to find the barista and hear the epic tale of his café and the rest of Granada's history. At this point the book takes a turn, as for the next three hundred pages we learn of the Civil War and the love story of a young Flamenco dancer and her guitar-playing lover.
The insane and completely unbelievable narrative contrivances that bring these elements together have to be read to be disbelieved. It's gobsmackingly bad writing, pat, inept and insulting to the reader. The Return counts as light holiday romance fare, but not Mills & Boon. Here's why. It's a Mills & Boon historical romance book-ended by a Mills & Boon modern romance. While Hislop's stories may not contain the standard happy endings considered vital to the genre, they do contain other necessary ingredients, and are equally terrible.
Needless to write, The Return is downright wretched and worth avoiding, but it does contain evocative passages of Spain and the occasional action sequence for the younger reader's flagging interest. There seems a confusion on Hislop's part over what she intends her novel to be. Mills & Boon books are rarely this confused, and never this ambitious. You cannot shoehorn a sweeping historical epic into your little paperback about an idiot struggling to realise her husband is a dolt. If it's a lesson learned you're after then you can't have been paying attention.
The distance between home and second hand books and charity shops is embarrassingly vast. The local library is closed for refurbishment. The second closest is also closed for refurbishment because of society's continuing battle against literacy and due to this, and because of a general distaste towards romance fiction, the reading of love stories has dried up since the unfortunate blunder that was Victoria Hislop's The Return. Despite this lax attitude towards research, our Bewildered Heart has refused to leave the subject alone, and often, as we stare at happy couples while they chat in their kitchens, we think grand thoughts of where to take this much derided of genres. Because the nearest cinema is many miles away and film-watching can be expensive, there have been limited opportunities to see the many recent Hollywood romantic comedies. Except Atonement, which was hilarious. The recent batch of insipid claptrap includes such ideas as proposing on a Leap Year Day, for luck, being a male Maid of Honour for the woman you love, being dressed twenty-seven times, marrying Ryan Reynolds and Ashton Kutcher's playful hunkiness excusing the need for plotting.
When you take apart these films, and with them, Mills & Boon novels, you'll find underneath the terribly-conceived love story, is an actual story, not involving love. Hollywood has confused the word story with the word gimmick, but we allow this because we so desperately need a reason to put Kate Hudson in incredulous situations. The emotional journey of your protagonist has to link with your story-line, but that doesn't mean you need your love-story to be your story. After all, having two people who are perfect for each other figure out they're perfect for each other isn't much of a story. You need robots exploding on the top of the Statue of Liberty! or the theft of gasoline trucks from Peru while robots fight on the top of the Statue of Peru!
Now, Bewildered Heart doesn't know much about story-telling, besides our rather arrogant proclamations that we know a lot about story-telling, but the point we are able to gather from reading articles on writing is that the beats must be conducive, linked consistently by a well-structured plot, with the main propulsion of the story aiding the advancements of the emotional epiphanies of the characters.
While in the past, on this very column, no less, we have speculated that a romance novel must be about romance, we now reach a different conclusion that this isn't always the case. Far from it. We can write a dramatic novel telling the twisting yarn of robots fighting on the top of explosions as long as the romantic subplot is embedded and doesn't feel tacked on or redundant, as it does in Hollywood movies.
The will-they-won't-they issues aren't as interesting as can-they-can't-they, especially as the author must establish in Chapter One that they want to and the reader demands that in the end they will. Is the psychological more compelling than the physical? This is prose, after all. We're not making an action film about robots fighting at the end of the world. When we do there will be a new blog.
No, according to our manifesto we're telling a love story. And yet we're not really. We're telling a ripping yarn, a romp, an adventure, with a love sub-plot that deems all matters irrelevant by the climax. Will the reader care that our protagonists didn't manage to find the hidden jewel of Peru and almost got killed by fighting robots? No, of course they won't. What's important is that they found each other. Aw yeah! And they survived the robot apocalypse. Man, that chapter got crazy.
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