INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Most every one of my reviewers are gems, people who, even if they dislike a book, leave valid reasons for their opinion …and, yes, I’ll thank them on Amazon the only way I can for their candor. To you, dear rater and reviewer, the following post does not apply. It is directed to one specific bad actress who felt it her duty to castigate, not only one of the characters—Sophia—but, specifically, Carole Hill. Let us begin.
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‘DNF’—that’s what one reviewer said about The 2nd Promise …AFTER dissing Sophia, plus both authors, but especially my collaborative partner, Carole Hill. Now, personally, I read every review, and those which give reasons for their opinions, low, medium, or high, I’ll attend …at least as much as I feel the point or points have merit, which means they aren’t just:
- unhappy the story wasn’t the same old, same old formula they crave over and over again …which, if they’d read the description and/or read the sample, they would have quickly discovered and moved on to something more to their taste;
- trolls—people who delight (or are ‘incentivized’) to dole out one stars;
- hard-to-please, no matter what—you know them because they give either one star reviews or four-to-five star reviews to every book they read, vociferously either berating the author and story or singing heavenly praises …and, yes, some of these are ‘incentivized’, too;
- those who read …or at least partly read a book and it went completely over their head and under their feet because they weren’t actually reading and comprehending what they read;
- and, lastly, those who did not like the mirror the book held up in front of their faces.
Usually I dismiss out of hand those readers who just criticize something before they finish reading a book—the DNFers …which means ‘Did Not Finish’, by the way. However, in one particular case on The 2nd Promise, I took strong exception to one DNF reviewer. So, I’m going to pointedly address that review right here. Laboriously. Why? Because you do not ‘diss’ my collaborative partner, without whom this beautiful, epic love story would not exist. You do that, and I do rear up to give strong reaction and objection. So, for those of you looking for a nice short, happy post, a pleasant post, maybe it’s best to move on to Carole’s delightful posts immediately preceding this one. Why? Because I, D. L. Keur, am not known to hedge …as Carole Hill can truly attest. (She’s had the dastardly job on a writer’s forum of trying to moderate me.)
First, let’s talk about Sophia, the character to whom the dissing reviewer took strong objection.
When I, D. L. Keur, first ‘met’ Sophia—Carole’s character—I admit that I was startled. What I thought Carole and I were going to write—a simple boy-meets-girl, American-meets-English-person romance—became immediately clear was not going to be the case. What I thought would be a one book story turned quite quickly into three, because Sophia was complex—very complex.
The more complex a character, the more story is needed to substantiate them. That’s just the fact of writing fiction. No reader, except another world and/or Olympic champion female athlete, would understand Sophia—none. While I qualified for the Olympics in Combined Training years past, in truth, it was the horse who is and was the athlete, I the aid and lesser partner. While equestrian sports require a partnership, the rider is, at most, 40% of that winning combination. For performance sports like singles figure skating, though, it’s 200% the skater. It’s not the coach, it’s not the support team, it’s all-plus the skater, especially in women’s skating.
Because of who Carole wrote—Sophia—I spent hours listening to interviews with world champion figure skaters, and, on the Deep Web, searching out actually who they were when not ‘performing’ for the camera and microphone, ‘playing nice’ in publicly aired interviews. I had to, because I had to figure out who Aaron had to be in order to, not only appeal to Sophia, but to be someone who she could, in the final throes, actually truly love. These women figure skaters are, to a person, much like Sophia in almost every way—a force to be reckoned with—arrogant daughters of privilege (this was before it became popular to court the underprivileged, a recent manifestation), mouthy, strong-willed, win-at-all-costs to themselves and all others. They are, in a word, contentious, contentious in order to be contenders on the world stage in a cut-throat game of win-at-all-costs or go down in the ignominy of absolute obscurity. As Carole, who has children who did compete at the world level in skating, so aptly put it, nobody remembers second place.
So, Sophia is REAL. She is archetypical of a world champion figure skater. Well, the reviewer …and many readers do not like Sophia because she is real. Some, admittedly, don’t like her because, as one reader who emailed me put it, “I saw myself and didn’t like it.” ← Now, there’s honesty, and I can honor that. For a reviewer to rant off about Sophia and Carole because ‘they didn’t get it’ and are offended that we didn’t give them the perfect persona they craved and desired to identify with as a heroine, someone in whom they could vicariously insert themselves, I will not accept as valid. For a reviewer, instead of reading the story and understanding who and why Sophia is as she is, to diss the book and/or its author(s), especially and pointedly my collaborative partner who, in her own right, is a brilliant writer, because they didn’t ‘get it’, I will not accept as valid. You, Ms. Reviewer, dissed it because YOU didn’t get it …probably because you didn’t want to get it …or didn’t have the capacity to get it; don’t blame us for that failure, and, seeing as how you diss just about every book you read except books I consider twaddle, that says more about you than ever it does the authors whose work you belabor.
Book 3 of this epic love story is coming out very soon. Probably around the first week in April. If you thought The 1st Promise was ‘something’, and The 2nd Promise was ‘startling’, you’ll find Book 3 of this epic story of love to be a virtual roller-coaster of a real man/woman romantic relationship under a pressure cooker …that, (spoiler alert) yes, ends well and very well, despite Sophia’s willfulness and volatility and Aaron’s pride and dogged resistance to compromise.
When my daughter and French son-in-law suggested we lunch at a rustic, Alpine high-altitude restaurant with stunning views located in the heart of the Chartreuse Nature Park, I naturally said, “Yes, please!” 
One of the joys when crafting a novel is that no rule demands you to be tied to a desk – or at least not that I’m aware of. Whether writing while on the beach, at a cafe, enjoying a sunset drink, waiting at the airport, on a plane, or even on top of a mountain – I write.
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