I'm going to go bite down hard on a gluten-free ginger snap now. This is a slap-dash, hot mess (with an alarming number of typos, by the way), and the protagonist was an unlikeable character whose name I've already forgotten, even though I finished the book less than an hour ago. Why would writing down the details of her failed love affair be considered “novel writing?” why? Why would this work for anyone? A novel is not a memoir. Please don't tell me a story in first-person, in “real time,” as it's happening to the protagonists it's a serious pet-peeve of mine.Īnd, using the vehicle of the protagonist “writing a novel” as a way of conveying her backstory to the reader.

The shifts in present tense and past tense? Didn't work for me, and it's the reason I can't embrace The Hunger Games either. It took me a full paragraph, each time, before I could figure out who was “talking.” The shift from two alternating first-person viewpoints? Sloppy and awkward. ? There was no running, and anyone could have caught her. In what way was she a gingerbread woman? Run, run, run as fast as you can. This story, The Gingerbread Woman was so boring to me, I am convinced that Jennifer Johnston was bored as she was writing it.

Not that much ever happens in Anne Tyler's or Larry McMurtry's novels, but I want to read them all. well, in a novel, things need to happen, y'all. These are not things that we want to happen, ever, in real life, but, in a novel. Or, maybe a bad guy will jump out of the bushes with a long, shiny knife and a menacing sneer? Have you ever found yourself reading a story that is so boring, you start hoping someone's going to die?

Shadows on our skin jennifer johnston