Author: Kel Summers
Date: 2023
Publisher: Kel Summers
Quote: "The boy she had loved and left behind. The memory of him was fresh as the ocean breeze."
This is the basic second-chance romance plot, told so succinctly as to be little more than an outline. Jake and Riley were "in love" as teenagers. She went off to the city for fifteen or twenty years. He stayed in the little town of Sunset Cove, Florida. She comes back to take over her parents' business. He's still there. They still feel attracted to each other. I don't need to bother typing the rest.
What makes a romance interesting are the details the author throws in to make a point. In the supermarket six-a-month series, those details got pretty predictable too. There were the brands where what was added to "They met, they hesitated, they kissed, they quarrelled, they made up, they married each other" was always "And they did what people do to make babies, only they weren't married yet so they used a device the name of which was considered too unromantic to mention." There were the brands where what was added was always "They went to some utterly fascinating trendy tourist trap and did all the tourist things there, kissing and quarrelling in between." My high school library had about fifty or a hundred of the ones where what was added was "This was how she trained and qualified for a relatively interesting job, worked six months, then met some man and quit to get married." That kind of thing turns people against the entire romance genre.
Then there are the more interesting kinds of story where the characters have vividly imagined, interesting lives in addition to their romance. The author has done some serious research to find things to tell readers in this story. Both Gone with the Wind and Jubilee took more than a decade to write; as a result, not only do the heroines work as symbols for The South and Oppressed Virtuous Womanhood, respectively, but along with their predictable emotional moods we learn a lot of history from their stories.
Nobody expects e-books to bear much comparison with classic novels that just happen to include a romantic plot element, but it has been observed that romances can be used to say anything at all. They can introduce us to exotic cultures or charming small towns. They can teach us languages, or language skills, or etiquette. Serious authors have observed that romances could be used to educate women about, say, infant nutrition...
But Silent Sunsets reports the incidents of its plot so tersely that there are no added elements. It's a stripped-down story. There are no subplots, no plot twists, no quarrels and reconciliations, minimal conversation, and very few details of anything.
This approach to romance writing probably appeals to some readers. It has to be just what somebody always wanted. Maybe that reader was you.
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