Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Evening

[swan_tower]

Look, I sympathize. It is genuinely difficult to have your POV character be Totally Wrong about something in a way the audience can detect but he is completely unaware of, and have that work. But one of its failure modes is "your POV character is a blithering idiot," and I'm afraid that's how I felt in this instance.

It probably didn't help that everybody else in the novel was coming across as abrasive and unhelpful, too.

Sorry. I really wanted to like your book, but it just didn't work out.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, dear.
That's an element in books I struggle with, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, that's a tough one. I think allowing them to figure out something intermediate sensibly is one mode of trying to dodge this. If you don't let them figure out the right answer to something from scratch, there's a very serious risk of the Blithering Moron Protag Problem.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

It astonishes me how often authors want me to feel for an idiot that gets themselves into easily preventable trouble via their idiocy.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I think only P.G. Wodehouse can get away with it. (Not that Bertie W. is an idiot, exactly, but there's definitely some blithering involved, astonishingly well crafted as it may be.)