Google the words and you'll get all the Bridget Jones variations, Sophie Kinsella's and Jennifer Weiner's extensive oeuvre, with some Emily Griffin, Candace Bushnell, and a few others. You will also find plenty of controversy over the term to represent a genre that should more accurately be known as women's commercial fiction. You say tomato...
I can't pretend to know about the controversy or even have an opinion about it. I do understand the issue is mostly one of respect and parity with other genres and with male fiction. But without deep knowledge, I won't attempt to take a side.
While the samples are uneven and I have yet to read the pinnacles of the genre (the original "Bridget Jones' Diary" and "The Devil Wears Prada"), this is the bullet point list of my impressions, in no particular order:
- There's the good and the bland; the sexy and the juvenile; there's the unmentionable
- Scenes start when a character opens a door and end when another one closes it. Are there no editors in the genre?
- Other than flashbacks, narrative style is linear
- The lady protagonist has a propensity to "gasp"
- Often times she finds men's expressions "unreadable"
- Same word that comes to mind after 3 pages of the latest Bridget Jones, the second Prada Devil
- Predictable also comes to mind
- And I still would call a select few enjoyable
- Mostly, I don't read this stuff
- However, this is what I've written, my book, all of the above
- I do watch this stuff (repeatedly, with way more enjoyment than the books)- when it's made into a movie
In the meantime, I continue to torture myself by attending the readings of authors in whose company I'll never be. Hopefully, I'll be too busy turning my book into an HBO special.
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