For a story to be engaging for a reader there must be a connection. Whether that connection comes via a relationship with the protagonist, antagonist, or plot, does not matter; simply that it exists to spur the reader on to read until the end. If this connection does not exist there reader will become bored, and the plot holes or character flaws that they would have forgiven for the sake of the story become obvious. Under intense scrutiny the story itself may fall apart as it did with Alex McAulay’s Lost Summer.
Keyes is an Irish author who writes bitingly funny, painfully real stories about modern day Irish women and the troubles that foil them. Keyes’ depiction of her country – much drinking, smoking, drugging, shopping, and middle class mores – is short on the mystical, magical, woo-woo that passes for Ireland in romance fiction. Since I [...]
