It's been a while since I read an entire book in one day. Since I got the internet, I'll read between five and thirteen fics a day, which doesn't leave much time for book reading. So it'll take me three or four days to finish a book, assuming I like it. Let's not talk about how long it takes to finish a book I don't like. :(

This is why I was rather surprised that I managed to read all the way through Real-Farm, by Patricia Tichenor Westfall.

Part of it was because it was an 80s Avon book. I don't know if any of you remember Avon. Avon did a lot of romance novels and a lot of children's books. Children books that I read when I was little. They have a particular cover style, a particuler typeface, a particular chapter heading style, a particular smell. So part of it was clearly the lolstagia from a better, simpler time. A time when men were men, women were women, and I wanted to be Robin Hood.

Okay, maybe not a better time.

The rest of it was that it was not quite good, but close enough that I kept expecting it to cross the line at any minute and become awesome. Why? I don't know. It's kind of like thinking that you can ~*~change~*~ him if you just date him for long enough.

In any case, one of the major problems was that this book did not know what it wanted to be. For quite a large number of chapters, it seemed as though this was a book about a couple failing at farming and moving to divorce. It was definitely not your typical book about city kids that want to farm; it focused on how Patricia and Mark approached everything from opposite directions and clashed in the middle.

And then, all of a sudden, a huge chunk of time passed and they'd been divorced for a year. And there was still about 60 pages left.

What.

And then it was just a jumble of chapters with a tornado standing as sometimes-forgotten symbolism. I mean, this book focused on their relationship, hardly a paragraph going by without some mention of how different Mark was. And then all of a sudden... it switched. Jarringly.

In the end, I think it was trying to do the same thing that Mutant Message Down Under tried to do ten years later. Except... no. Just no. It did not work.

And now I have to go because I think the dog got himself stuck under the futon.