When I was in high school I had a teacher who loved romance novels (of the Harlequin variety). She and I would often chat before class and she told me this. I told her that I thought they were garbage. She said, “Over the summer, read just a couple; in the fall, come back and tell me if you feel the same way.” My mother just happened to have gotten a box of them (she shopped at yard sales and brought some of her finds to consignment shops) so I asked for the box. I read the first one and it wasn’t all that bad! I read the second…a third…a fourth…and it turned out that they were all the same exact story, just with the character names, locations, and certain specifics changed. I don’t remember how many I ended up reading. That fall I handed the teacher a list of the books I had read and said, “They’re STILL garbage.”
When I was in high school I had a teacher who loved romance novels (of the Harlequin variety). She and I would often chat before class and she told me this. I told her that I thought they were garbage. She said, “Over the summer, read just a couple; in the fall, come back and tell me if you feel the same way.” My mother just happened to have gotten a box of them (she shopped at yard sales and brought some of her finds to consignment shops) so I asked for the box. I read the first one and it wasn’t all that bad! I read the second…a third…a fourth…and it turned out that they were all the same exact story, just with the character names, locations, and certain specifics changed. I don’t remember how many I ended up reading. That fall I handed the teacher a list of the books I had read and said, “They’re STILL garbage.”