Tilting at Windmills

I’m stuck in the airport for a few hours waiting for a delayed flight, so I thought I’d write about Frozen Heart, The 12th book in Neva Altaj’s Perfectly Imperfect series. This is a series I have enjoyed very much, so much so that I’ve reread the fifth book in the series, Stolen Touches, a couple of times.

I stalled out on Frozen Heart for a couple of reasons, mostly because like the 11^th book, this is just too long. The first book in this series was a tight 240 pages while this one is a flabby 440 pages with too much KU-scene-stuffing*. Instead of rising action, it’s repetitive action, the characters having the same interactions over and over again with little to no forward momentum in the romance. I like to grumble about it, but unfortunately, that’s so common these days that it’s not even interesting to discuss.

But I was VERY interested in two narrative choices Altaj made that seemed to be working at cross-purposes for the reader’s experience, and you’ll be shocked to know (lol, no you won’t) that the problems I’m going to describe are created (or at least compounded) by her use of first present POV.

The book opens with a prologue at a church. It’s a mafia wedding, and Iris is about to marry Adriano, a man she thought was not like other mafiosos until something opened her eyes. Iris sees her groom at the altar and marvels at how wrong she was about him; now she knows he’s the biggest, baddest, scariest dude of them all. Down the aisle she goes, and when Chapter 1 begins, the heading reveals the timeline to be “several months earlier.” On first read, this all felt basic but unremarkable, we’ve all seen this kind of set up before. Readers will recognize that we’re now in the mafia romance version of a you might be wondering how I got here meme.

But then we get the meet cute, which I am not lying y’all, a BANGER of a scene. Iris is from a lower-caste mafia family, so she has a job as a maid/server in the home of Don Spada (the guy from Book 10). Iris has been crushing on Adriano for a while, but in the same way that a teenage girl in Nebraska crushes on a movie star—from a distance and just happy to exist in the same universe.  It would never even occur to Iris that he has a chance with him, especially because he’s already married. Anyways, she walks into a private office only to find Adriano there, CLEARLY having just murdered his wife.

Ope!

What will happen? Iris just witnessed this man doing a crime and she’s a nobody with no one to protect her. Her life is in danger, and Adriano is either gonna kill her or do something equally dastardly to keep her quiet. This should have readers ON THE EDGE of our seats, wondering how Iris is going to get herself out of there. This is the kind of scene that really slaps in present tense.

Now, let me play English teacher for a minute. When the reader (or viewer) knows something the characters don’t, that’s a literary device called dramatic irony. When deployed correctly, this is incredibly effective at heightening the emotional experience of the reader/viewer. In Othello, people in the audience know that Iago is the bad guy while Othello remains ignorant of Iago’s plotting and scheming. If only Othello knew what we in the audience know, then he’d be alive and happy and banging Desdemona like a patio door in a hurricane! But he doesn’t know and we can’t tell him! And let me tell you, if you’ve ever seen Othello performed live, this is an almost unbearable feeling.

But back to our hero standing over the body of his dead wife. The book shows us Adriano’s POV, we know that he’s thinking of killing Iris, but all the air is out of the balloon, and the prologue is the fucking problem. Readers know what the characters do not: this man is not going to kill her, he’s going to marry her. Instead of creating or heightening the tension, the dramatic irony eliminates the tension. And I would further argue that continues to be a problem throughout the text. The prologue taught the reader that the wedding is important, and so now readers are primed and ready for that wedding to happen. But instead it felt like nothing was happening….so much so that I actually peeked ahead to find out when the timeline catches up to the prologue. The wedding does not happen until 60%! I’m not one of these people who hate prologues, I love a good prologue! But this is a case where the prologue does more harm than good: It undermines all the tension of the book, both by deflating the inciting incident AND by setting up the reader to anticipate something that doesn’t happen until the final third of the book.

You’ll remember I said there were two narrative problems. With the prologue, Altaj is telling the reader something they don’t need to know, while this next narrative choice does the opposite, not just misdirects the reader but lies to us in a way that doesn’t make storytelling sense.

In baseball parlance, the prologue issue felt like an unforced error, but this next thing is completely illegal, a narrative corked bat, if you will, a whole lot of pine tar on the storyball. Whatever.

Later in the book, and I’m not going to even get into why, Iris has occasion to be blindfolded and in the presence of a mysterious man who just wants to listen while Iris talks to him.

Fam, you’ve been reading romance for a long fucking time, right. WHO DO YOU THINK THIS MYSTERY MAN IS? It is not even a spoiler alert to tell you that it’s Adriano, because literally a baby romance reader who just discovered BookTok yesterday will know that it’s Adriano.

At this point, under the rules of first present and the world of the book as it exists so far, Altaj has two choices:

1. Keep this from the reader by resolutely sticking to Iris’s POV every time she’s blindfolded. This may or may not annoy you as a reader, but it’s a valid way to play this and is an acceptable differential between us as readers (we know that the mystery man is Adriano because we know how romance works) and Iris as a character (she has no idea it’s Adriano because she’s just living her life and doesn’t realize she’s a character in a romance book).

2. Confirm for the reader that it’s Adriano by writing some of these scenes from his POV, which we have already experienced. Could be interesting, right? We’d see why he’s set up this circumstance with Iris, and learn what he has to gain by literally keeping her in the dark.

Instead, Altaj introduces a third narrator, identified only as “Silent Guest.” This narrator, also speaking in first present, mind you, is purposefully written to deceive, to sound like not-Adriano to the readers. This narrator only knows things about Iris that he learned in that room and even refers to Adriano in 3^rd person: What is up her sleeve that makes a man like Adriano Ruffo so obsessed with her?

This is a book that has already revealed the future to the reader, but now in the same book, the author is hiding something from the reader, but in a way that MAKES NO SENSE. This is first present! Does Adriano have amnesia when he steps into this room? Is this a Three Faces of Eve situation? This is such a fundamental violation of narrative logic that I don’t even know what to make of it, but even worse, I don’t know what it’s meant to achieve. And I would like to be clear here. This isn’t an unreliable narrator situation. Adriano knows who he is and why he’s there and what’s going on. He has his own reasons for keeping his identity secret from Iris and to keep it secret from the reader, all Altaj had to do was stick to Iris’s POV.

So why lie to the reader? I have a suspicion that Altaj could tell there was no narrative tension and she wanted to raise the stakes. What if there’s another player in the picture? What if there’s competition for Iris’s affection? At the end of the day, Altaj would have been better off honoring the narrative boundaries of first present: killing the prologue and staying out of Adriano’s POV while Iris was blindfolded. Maybe there’s a world where you can fool romance readers into believing that a blindfolded romance heroine was talking to anyone other than her true love—but unless it’s multiple personality Adriano or Amnesiac Adriano, I’m afraid that this is not a world you can write in first present.

But the truth is, I am seeing this kind of disconnect more and more. Since first present is now functioning in most cases as the romance default, we’re either going to see authors continuing to blithely break all rules of narrative logic, or we’re going to lose the kind of stories that could easily flourish in a different narrative style.

**KU stands for Kindle Unlimited, and in the system, authors are paid by page read. There are lots of great books in KU, but the system does encourage authors to write longer as a way of earning more $$$.