More bodice ripping...

[jmc_bks]

This time, the condescension isn’t being offered to genre romance but to what appears to be historical fiction or literary fiction.  Or so I’m guessing based on the publisher, Algonquin.

 

Don't be fooled by the prissy cover or that ironic title. Robert Goolrick's first novel, "A Reliable Wife," isn't just hot, it's in heat: a gothic tale of such smoldering desire it should be read in a cold shower. This is a bodice ripper of a hundred thousand pearly buttons, ripped off one at a time with agonizing restraint. It works only because Goolrick never cracks a smile, never lets on that he thinks all this overwrought sexual frustration is anything but the most serious incantation of longing and despair ever uttered in the dead of night.

 

That opening alone makes me roll my eyes.  The reviewer seems rather ambivalent about the book, calling it at various points a miasma, intoxicating, claustrophobic, and garish. 

 

As usual, I wonder why newsprint book reviewers insist on labeling every book with a hint of sexual tension as a bodice ripper. 

Comments

[janicu.livejournal.com]

Ug, the words "bodice ripper" should just be struck from the english language! Banned!

[menage-a-kat.livejournal.com]

I'm not that bothered about the term, to be honest. I never used to associate bodice rippers with forced seduction, but with the woman ripping her own bodice open with desire!