Nora Roberts, generous soul that she must be, kindly provides a quick and efficient test to determine whether a potential reader will enjoy Spellbound:
“`We’re proud of our dreamers here. I would show you Ireland, Calin. The bank where the columbine grows, the pub where a story is always waiting to be told, the narrow lane flanked close with hedges that bloom with red fuschia. The simple Ireland.’
Tossing her hair back, she turned to him. `And more...The circle of stones where power sleeps, the quiet hillock where the faeries dance of an evening, the high cliff where a wizard once ruled.'"
Admittedly, it would be the mark of a more generous soul if Roberts had dealt up this particularly representative example of her prose at some point earlier in the narrative than page 47, but that’s the great part, actually. One need not work their attention halfway through the book to decide whether it is for them or not. In fact, a similar test greets potential readers even before Chapter 1, at the start of the Prologue:
“Calin shifted restlessly in sleep, turned his face into the pillow. Felt here there, somehow. Skin, soft and dewy. Hands, gentle and soothing. Then drifted into dreams of cool and quiet mists, hills of deep, damp green that rolled to forever. And the witchy scent of a woman.”
Hoo-haw! It won’t take most readers until page 47 to make the determination that Roberts made for them the moment she began putting words to paper. Here’s the deal: there some who will try to convince readers—likely without putting much effort into the process—that these excerpted passages from Spellbound are textbook examples of "bad writing." Some of those people get paid very good money to make that determination while others are willing to do it for free. Frankly, it seems like a rather pitiable way to spend an hour either way, but who’s to judge? Except, of course, for, well, those people. They are sitting in judgment of the literary quality of Roberts based upon a premise that is distinctly unsound. Is the above prose an example of the best that can be wrung from the available opportunities offered by the English language? Of course not. But then Roberts isn't writing for an audience that can more easily recognize exhibitions of literary genius. Nor is she offering Spellbound as the recently discovered sequel to Ulysses that nobody knew James Joyce ever wrote. She puts her name on her writing with the expectation that readers know what they are getting and are profoundly satisfied with the result.
Spellbound and the other similar fictions of Roberts are not for everybody, but the sales figures of her novels (or novella in this case) prove well enough that she is writing for somebody. To sit in judgment of her writing skills (divorced, for this purpose, from the quality of the story it is engaged to tell) with a blanket statement that suggests examples such as those offered above represent a low quality ignores one very substantial element: context. In this case, the context is reader expectation.
It is probable—indeed, it is likely—that the fans who eagerly gobble up each new book Roberts writes range across the full expanse of the educational spectrum. It would be ludicrous to assume that fans of Roberts’ fictions do not include other writers, English majors, scholars and critics. Whether high school dropout or Ph.D candidate, those readers have come to expect a certain type of story told in a certain type of way. And if in satisfying those expectations the prose which the author produces is not exactly going to be confused with that of Faulkner or Welty or Woolf or even Tolkien, so what? At least, as noted, she is generous about letting brand new readers know right up front what to expect. Millions of people read the novels of Nora Roberts. Which is several hundred thousand more than can be said of that James Joyce fellow.
