Le Mariage in Fragments

I’m having a hard time. With a summer book. Phrases masquerading as sentences. Without verbs.

“She had felt love before, though not often, but this was different and holy. (new paragraph!) Which was how she knew something had gone wrong, some problem, he wouldn’t just disappear like this leaving her stranded in this French hotel without explanation.”

I wanted a fun read and Le Mariage by Diane Johnson promised “a lively romp.” However the use of sentence fragments, some even broken by separate paragraphs, is bothering the part of my brain which pays attention to grammar. It’s an intrusion on what the jacket touted as “playful, a splendid entertianment.” So far, Johnson seems like a great storyteller and the setting is Paris – so I’ll stick with it a bit longer.

Do you mind. Sentence fragments? Standards for “beach” books different than literature. Which lends a breezy quality or bothers us wordsmiths.

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