authorgraph

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Angst Overload! New Adult and my take on its appeal

New Adult. New Adult. Lord, Jesus, Mary, Joseph all the friggin' Saints! Deliver me from that romance genre. Please! I do not like New Adult much like Dr. Seuss disliked Green Eggs and Ham. The excess of it all. Just yeech. Like romance as a reading preference isn't already brimming with emotions en plus? Maybe it's the age range of the characters that warrants all that...nonsense. I believe the H/hs are between 18 and 25 years of age in these books. I wonder if the authors are too. Okay, I recall that age range in my life but I do declare I was NEVER that naive or clueless or self-destructive a walking bundle of feels. Oh, yes the feels. Any and all feels. A tsunami of feels packed into a single story.

EXAMPLE: Youthful, orphaned heroine comes from a past filled with abuse of assorted kinds which has left her BROKEN. She is sole support for a kid sibling and/or an ailing relative who needs a bazillion bucks to get that life-saving operation. She longs for a different life but is so emotionally crippled it's not possible UNTIL...

The secretive, BROKEN hero with a similar set-up appears. Usually a ripped, gorgeous, brooding, tattooed asshole who treats her like ka-ka but because he's plays guitar and is BROKEN and bangs her like a screen door in a storm, it's okay! After much hitting all the feels, he reveals that he is a billionaire and they ride off on his Harley into Happyland. THE END.


I've tried to assess the appeal. Really I have. All I've come up with is that possibly, some people are so numbed by daily living that they need a literary fix to capture some semblance of human emotion. No matter how over-the-top. I don't know. Just my theory. Whatever. All I know is, New Adult makes me cringe. Readers love it though. And the authors of New Adult can't write it fast enough. Bless their hearts. Have at it. You get no competition from me.


No comments:

Post a Comment