Loree Lough

As I've been combing through vintage (and maybe vintage-adjacent) ChristFic novels a good deal lately to find ones to try, I pretty much jumped at this one. It's especially rare to see brown faces featured on the covers of these older books. Also, though it's a small thing, the fact that this title uses "Soft" instead of "Softly" heightened my interest as a book title geek.

Yet, it seemed to me that the further the story went along, the more the characters' actions/behaviors, their styles of speech and expressions they would use, and what they would specifically say didn't have the truest ring to it all. At first I figured I was just having trouble getting a clear sense of the characters' personalities, but the characterizations and their development felt a little off and scattered. Also, the various pieces of commentary on race, racism, and social responsibility in the story seemed to be shoehorned in, in a rather unnatural, didactic sort of way.

I didn't find out until after I stopped reading that this book with a chiefly Black cast of characters—a story that endeavors to present different aspects of the Black experience—was apparently written by a ChristFic author who isn't Black, using a one-time pseudonym.

Do I think that authors must only ever create characters with whom they share the same race/ethnicity? Personally, no. I don't. But I also think it depends on the writer as a person, the particular story, the story's purpose, and the characters' specific roles, among other factors to consider. It seems that in this case, the author used Black characters (and a Korean character with a pretty caricatural feel) to present a social lesson to, in significant part, point out what's wrong with the Black community. It wasn't anything I've never heard before, but the blanket criticisms came off as deficient in empathy—and underinformed. Criticisms that may be the easiest to make about a disadvantaged community if you've lived outside of their experience as a people and have gotten an oversimplified, incomplete picture of their collective story. A collective story that's long, layered, and complex.

From what I can tell, this novel was an inappropriate setup for the racial messages in it. It seems to me that for an author apparently writing outside of their race with the use of Black characters, at the least, the author could have left out the particular racial and socioeconomic commentary in this book, and the plot about familial and romantic love and healing wouldn't have lost anything it needed.

Speaking of the plot, I'll admit I thought this book would be a romance, given the publishing imprint. But it isn't. It's a contemporary family drama written from the perspectives of three main characters, not solely a romantic couple. While the novel's overall premise is interesting, the story develops awkwardly.

Different important events and turning points in the various characters' lives rush by in the background, including key stages of the romance. Because the author would "tell" a bit about a turning point after the fact rather than "show" the process to the reader as it happened, it felt like the story kept having to play catch-up after sudden changes in the characters.

On a more minor note, using exclamation points in a novel's narration comes off as a storyteller shouting at the reader. It can be funny in comedies, but otherwise in adult fiction, it tends to feel over the top when a narrator exclaims (!) parts of the story, as it felt to me in the case of this novel.

I got almost 3/4 of the way through this book before I decided not to finish it.

However, I did have a favorite part, when the heroine reflects on the way she once handled being jilted at the altar. Her untypical choice on that score made me smile.… (mehr)