Voices

I was just reading a book that I had started, and then set aside for some reason.   I often do this, because when I take up the book again, I'd have forgotten what caused me to give up on it, and I can often connect with it fairly well, and even finish it. 

This particular story was strange and interesting.  The main character was a little obsessive, and she was in love with a girl who wanted to study abroad.  She found that she could not even sleep at night, thinking about what her girl was doing.  The girl, meanwhile, had broken up with her, probably not wanting to continue a relationship with such an obsessive lover. 

I had taken the book back up sort of in the middle, where I had (presumably) left off reading it, so I was suprised to discover that the main girl was in beauty school.  I had to think about that for a while.  Of course, there are people in beauty school, and they fall in love, sometimes with other girls, but it was just that I had hardly ever picked up a story about such a girl. 

Presently, she begins to date a girl who was in culinary school.  This was amazing, except that the girl from culinary school seemed to not be of very stable character.   (The main girl just mentions that she had thought about her former girlfriend, now back from abroad, and her new lover freaks out.)

By this time, I was fascinated by the story.  What was more, the author sometimes dropped into using the same careless grammar that the characters were using!  So the speech she was placing in the lips of the two protagonists was not just to make the narration and the dialog more convincing; it was the author's natural idiom. 

Well, on one hand, I was full of admiration that a clearly working- class girl who I would expect to have had trouble with writing and story-telling had surmounted these obstacles, and become an author.  On the other hand, I was upset that I could not expect her (the author) to be able to give a variety of voices to her characters, or create pictures of these characters, using voice as a tool. 

Is it a weakness in me,  as a reader, that I'm going to be distracted by this author's errors in grammar for this entire story?  Because I am; I'm dying to learn how the story ends, but the character is so dreadfully weak-minded that I'll be cringing continuously while I read.  But I have to finish this book. 

Kay