Sad Jane Austen vibes

Nice writing, nice characterisation, not much plot. I read books like this and keep longing for a bomb to go off, literally, or for someone to look out the window and see a dragon flying past, or for Regency Bath or Gilded Age New York to be attacked by aliens, or zombies or time-travelling Babylonians. Stories like this barely deserve to be called novels, in my book. Just--what's the point of even writing *fiction* if everything that happens in your book could plausibly happen in real life? It just seems such a waste of the potential of the medium. After all, the greatest advantage the page has over the screen is there's no limit imposed by budget or technology. The only limit is one's imagination. So it's sad that most writers of literary fiction seem to have so little of it. For so long in our culture there's been a division between books that are well-written and books in which things actually happen. But there's no need for that to be the case at all. Why couldn't someone write a book that has prose as beautiful as this, characterisation as in-depth and compelling, that also has a dramatic plot and fantastical concepts?

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