I wrote about finding this author, Catherine Cookson, by following a mention from a Netflix review to a movie that I added to my queue to Amazon to find out who this woman is (was? don't know if she's still with us) to my public library to take out one of her novels.
So I settled in for what I thought was going to be a whacking great read the other night before sleep took me away until morning and by page 19 (that's the end of the first chapter) I was annoyed by the writing style.
So what annoyed me? Sometimes, as with a Danielle Steele or something by one of those man-book writers such as Robert Ludlum, it's easy to pick out what's annoying. It's monotonous. All the sentences are approximately the same length and have the same rhythm, like Gregorian chant only without the haunting beauty.
There's other writing that strikes me as childish, full of so many adjectives and adverbs that it reads like something composed by an eighth-grader the night before it's due and jammed full of extraneous words to reach some teacher-imposed limit.
Another thing that puts me off is too much description as in "He was six-foot, three-inches tall with a full head of jet-black hair, and gray eyes." Somehow, that sort of prose sucks away all my imagination so that I cannot see the character at all.
Cookson has some of these traits but none in an overwhelming abundance. There is a sameness to the rhythm of her sentences and a facileness (is that a word?) to her prose that gives it a Teflon coating that simply slides off my brain before it can be absorbed.
Years ago, when I was a young teen, I developed what I called my "30-page test." If I didn't like a book by page 30, I didn't bother to finish it. I notice that in my more mature years, my judgments are more quickly made. Hence my stopping on page 19 of this book.
Ah well, at least I had some Alexander McCall Smith on my shelf. A nice compensation indeed.
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