Both these comments appeared for my first book Redemption on the Barnes & Noble site:
“a terrible book!
This book was well written and placed in an interesting time period with a great plot. However, I would not recommned it to anyone unless they do not mind extreme profanity and colorful descriptions of sex. I stopped reading this book about halfway through. The descriptions of how a man in the story is raping a woman are sickening. I would not recommned this book to anyone. I can't believe that people read, let alone write, books like this these days.” -- Anonymous
AND
“A Classic for everyone to read!
This book was an amazing classic tale of one girls courageous fight to survive her journey through the new world. It has very ironic twists that you won't want to miss, a page turner and an evolving romance!” -- Anonymous
So, wait a minute, which one is it? Terrible, or a classic? I didn’t even know there was sex and profanity in my novel! I mean, not really, I mean, not much. Maybe I need to reread it. Should it be banned? Aren’t a lot of the classics banned? I was trying to stay faithful to the time period and characters in the book. Wouldn’t a pirate curse? Did females not get raped in the 1500s? So, like, as writers, should we only write nice? But then no one will read us ‘cause we’re not being faithful to reality. We’re not reflecting life as it is, which is our job – to write the essence of life so readers, and we, can understand it better. Without Huck Finn, we couldn’t, 100 years later, understand the relationship between a small white boy and an older black man. Without Holden, we wouldn’t get the misery of a kid after a war, whose life is in shambles. We would forget. And to me, a historical novelist, that would be the worst travesty of all.
