I have a habit of checking out books from the library where every week, I set the search to "available now" and "romance" and just pick whatever. The usual result is medium but I really love my pet genre so even a kinda bland romance beats the breaks off of a mid scifi, for instance. Only rarely is any worth further noting on, but one broke through recently, and that was All Folked Up by Penny Reid.

The hole of the donut of the genre belongs to the modern romantic comedy. I would gladly sit through the most dire of regency romances watching as people who have no real problems in their life dance at balls and so on before daring to put my hand back on the oven. Every book I've read that styles itself as a modern romantic comedy (except for those written by Lindsay Sands) is in no sense of the word funny. Somehow this subgenre is entirely populated by the least funny authors on the planet. Much of it is even anti-funny, like if you were about to laugh but then read this and you then feel nothing. And it's not like the romance can pinch hit here, the book being painfully unfunny or anti-funny cuts the legs out from under the budding romance. I keep coming back, tho. I keep giving the modern romantic comedy second chances, because in my heart I know it cannot be a matter of genre. It's not like these all need to be so flavorless to operate. It's not like humor cannot work in romance novel form. Surely, surely sooner or later I will catch lightning in a bottle and have a laugh at a vampire spending an entire chapter on the quest for a condom, or something that rises to that level.

All Folked Up did not do it. If anything, it boomeranged so hard I felt I needed to explain myself rather than just moving on to the next one like I usually do. There was one single thing that happened later into the book that truly broke me, leading to all of this, and I'll save it for the end. I need to explain first who these people are and what the book is.

Hannah is retiring from being a stripper and moving into management. Her friends are planning to give her a big retirement gift, which she mistakenly interprets takes the form of them setting her up with her lifelong crush, Isaac, when he orders an illegally high number of consecutive lap-dances from her at her own party. I think this situation is meant to be funny, in retrospect, but I think you need to be kindof an asshole in your opinions about sex work for this to be at all humorous, and the rest of the book is pretty respectful to the idea overall while not diminishing the sorts of things sex workers go through, so I kindof cannot make this setup operate on a humor level.

Isaac isn't the present. Instead he's an undercover G-man on a mission to catch a human trafficker by siezing Hannah's phone and installing spyware on it, because for whatever reason that guy is a regular of the strip club (fine, believable) and always asks for Hannah (or Goldie, her stage name, also sure, believable) and always uses her phone to communicate with his crime pals and not his own or a burner (fucking what). Isaac had purchased time with Hannah to flip her as an asset to his investigation, and she, not knowing this, pushed the line of what a lap-dance is supposed to be because the two have been horny exclusively for each other since grade school. I guess that is also supposed to be believable. I suppose I'm not against the idea of hooking up with somebody I knew from grade school nowadays or whatever, but it's been awhile, man, we're basically totally different people I think there would need to be a warmup period. I mean, not for me because I'm a ho, but you get the idea.

But the genre is the genre so they only like each other and all other people on the planet hold no appeal. Again, couldn't be me, but it could be your protagonists if you write romance novels. Anyway, Isaac presumes that Hannah is illegally prostituting herself and treats her like a perp, doing all the most familiar and dehumanizing cop shit we all know and loathe from modern cop shows. For a romance to work for me, I need to like both people individually and together. So if I hate one of them, it's never going to work and reading the book will be a slog. The only way I was able to tolerate Ali Hazelwood's characters, for example, was by pretending the book ended early with them hating each other. Hazelwood also isn't funny at all. But here we have Isaac and he's off to a piss-poor start with me with all his cop brained shit.

I kept going in case somebody later handed him his own ass about it, which happens at least twice, I think from former protagonists of the first two books, but I am sure never going to find out for myself because Reid would need to take on a pseudonym for me to ever give her a chance again. My endless second chances are for the genre. I'll never bother with Danielle Steel ever, either, just so you know where I sit. Ok, so Hannah doesn't push back on Isaac's accusation because he's going to go undercover at the club as a bouncer, which means he will be right nearby for a few weeks as the investigation unfolds. Hannah is a total pushover and has been living her whole life belittling herself for the sake of someone she loves. Until now-ish her mother, and now all the other club workers, and now Isaac. We're meant to root for her to take something for herself for once, and another character thankfully does this later by locking them both in the storage closet and refusing to let them out for two hours. Which again, I think is meant to be funny but it just seemed kinda normal to me. Tina, friend of both of these knuckleheads, is the closest thing to a relatable character the book has. She doesn't get enough ink.

But yeah, we spend the next 200 pages getting mixed signals, presuming the other person means something they don't, and occasionally being an arrogant fucking cop about everything, which is somehow not total icewater. But it's the genre of happy endings, so eventually we hook up and things are great for them. Then the investigation goes to shit because having a single point of failure that is easily discoverable by your target is a monumentally stupid idea, so the bad guys show up and kidnap Hannah or something and I'm gonna be honest, I did not read the rest. I really and truly do not need a denoument of Die Hard in my romance novel, as compelling as that concept sounds when you put it that way. Ok, maybe one of those shittier action movies...ok I think I got it: I really and truly do not need a denoument of Under Siege 2 in my romance novel.

There is a, so to say, structural issue with the book that maybe is not a problem in itself but I find there has only been one example in my wide experience where this works and is fun rather than being this bizarre crutch that mucks everything up. Each chapter has a subtitle of the character you are now in the perspective of. So you have Isaac chapters and Hannah chapters. Each chapter also begins with a quote from some other book, a way to flavor the coming events of the chapter, which also is not a bad idea in itself, but...all of the quotes are from one of Penny Reid's other books in the series. My girl is just quoting herself and trying to take a victory lap like the fucking Obama medal meme. Some of the quoted characters even appear in this book! Why is this here? Once I realized where these words came from I just skipped them. We're not quoting some sage, and I'm not reading that shit. The only time it worked, by the way, was for Gearbreakers and Godslayers by Zoe Hana Mikuta, and those books kick ass.

But the thing that actually broke me, the thing that stung so hard I had to write this, is that toward the end of the book, everyone is pushing Hannah to leave town. Her mentor thinks she's meant for bigger things and places, her friends think she's living in a shell and needs to come out (by leaving town), and even Hannah wants to leave! In this book in a series about folk and small towns and how great it is, no one wants to fucking be there!

And you know what? Neither do I. Greetings from Baltimore.