I was just looking through my immediate TBR (to-be-read) basket, which is one of those long bread baskets, to see what to read next and suddenly realized that I have three first person romances in there currently. That strikes me of indicative of something but I’m not sure what or if it’s a good thing since I’m not all that crazy about the use of that perspective in romances and can’t figure out how I ended up with that many in the basket at one time in the first place.
Okay, I know exactly how I ended up with them, impulse buying, pure and simple. What I’m more unclear about is why I didn’t notice they were all written in first person until I got home with them.
What really surprises me, though, is that they’re from two very different sub-genres of romance. One seems to be humorous and the other two are more paranormal, but that’s only going by the back blurbs so I could be completely wrong there.
Katie MacAlister’s Hard Day’s Knight definitely fits the mold of humorous romance, at least on first glance at both the cover and back blurb. This one I should’ve suspected was first person to begin because I’ve read several of hers and at least one of the contemporaries was in first person. I wasn’t thrilled with that one, so I’m not sure why I fell for it again. Of course, I do know because I’d been eyeing it for at least a month or more on the shelf at the store trying to convince myself not to buy it. The description kept sucking me in, so I hope I’m not too disappointed. Not with the story so much as the use of first person. I can tolerate it in certain types of stories but I’m just not sure this one will fall into that category. Why do people think humor and first person mixes?
Hunter’s Moon by Lori Handeland looks like it might actually be a story that could “need” first person, so I’m a lot more optimistic about it. It’s been my experience that one of the best natural uses of first person in romances is Gothic style stories where there’s a big mystery about one of the pair. That certainly appears to be the case here, so I have hope.
And then there’s Seal Island by Kate Brallier that I talked about in an earlier blog. It also seems to be a more paranormal story, so the first person may work better with it, too. We’ll see.