Ruth Ann Nordin, $2.99, ISBN 978-1301130986
Sci-fi Romance, 2013

I don’t want to be rude… well, that rude, but sometimes, it’s very obvious why some stories are best left unpublished, kept somewhere until the author has had developed enough polish to revisit these stories and give them the necessary glam-up. 

Ruth Ann Nordin’s Runaway Bride is one such story.

Now, sometimes, an author may not be the best writer, but their rough-on-the-edge style can still be engaging and fun. However, here, the author writes like she has only mastered English Composition 101 a few weeks ago and this story is her ambitious practice exercise. Every sentence, every paragraph here reads like a painfully amateurish effort to string words together.

Mark Tanner had hoped for a chance to talk to Lexie Rogers, and his friend’s wedding reception at the all-you-can-eat buffet was the perfect place. It was a good way to be with her without arousing anyone’s suspicions. He sat with her and a few other guests at one of the large tables in the place. He’d made a point of sitting next to her as soon as she sat down. But her mother sat on her other side, and he found himself competing with her for Lexie’s attention.

The entire story is written like this.

Everything is told, not shown. There is no variation in cadence of pacing, so the entire story feels like an overlong telephone book. Characters talk like robots instead of humans. I can go on and on but that will be like beating the poor horse after it’s long dead, so let’s just summarize the whole thing:

This story is lethally boring. It is written like the author has zero concept of scene building, character development, cadence, pacing — nothing. The best thing about it is that the English sentences are coherent, for what that is worth.

Oh yes, the story. Mark Tanner, some alien from somewhere, knows that Lexie Rogers is his destined life mate or whatever, so he’s going to tell her not to marry her fiancé. Everyone else agrees because the heroine has to be an idiot to marry an obvious Mr Wrong for the plot to happen.

Unfortunately, in this case, Mark being an alien means he is so unfamiliar with even basic human concepts that he… well, he resembles the kind of person that would have written a story like this, come to think of it. 

He’d already decided that Lexie would marry him instead of her fiancé, but the trick was convincing her of that. He wasn’t gullible enough to believe she loved her fiancé. His friend Chris might believe it, but he knew better.

Don’t worry, Mark is hot, so this kind of behavior isn’t creepy, it’s sexy. We only scream “Creep!” and “Stalker!” if the man doing this is ugly.

Anyway, this is a terribly inept display of the author’s style. I’ve read some other stories by her, and they are not this amateurish, so I can only assume that this story must be some early attempts at writing that somehow got published by mistake or misplaced confidence in the quality of this thing.

At any rate, I’d strongly recommend that the author take this down and give it a much-needed polish before republishing it, because yikes, this is just embarrassing to read.