The Ratings Game, Part V

What makes a 6.0 book? According to the RITA guidelines, this is a below average book. We’re getting into questionable territory here. If you actually power through reading a below average book from cover to cover, you’re bemused as to how it got published in the first place. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t interesting, either. It’s a bunch of words thrown on pages and that’s about all it has recommending it. These are the books that I don’t mind if my dog gets to and rips up before I’m finished, because she ends up getting more entertainment out of them than I did!

In all honesty, if I’m reading what I suspect to be a 6.0 book, I won’t finish reading it (at least if I’m doing so solely for my own entertainment, and not for the RITA judging). It probably initially reeled me in with a lovely front cover, or an intriguing synopsis just like an average 7.0 book, but unlike that average 7.0 book, I quickly realize I’ve wasted my money after reading only a couple of chapters.

The hero and heroine are little more than paper dolls without any depth. There’s pages upon pages of boring narration or lackluster dialogue. There’s no conflict. Or, if there is, it’s resolved far too easily. While reading a 6.0 book, you often wish the author would have invested in a thesaurus. Or, if nothing else, at least utilized the thesaurus in Word to avoid using the same adjectives over and over. There might be one or two scenes throughout the entire book that capture your interest, but that’s all. You’re tempted to skim vast portions of a 6.0 book just to find those potential scenes, but you’re not overly surprised when you don’t find more than one or two.

Overall, a 6.0 book bores you to tears, and you chuck the thing into the recycling bin without even wincing.

Next week, we tour marginal territory, or a 5.0-5.9 book.

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