I don't think it's any crime to write a boring book, so long as the author is getting something out of it (Not money, I mean on an emotional level), but to write something downright bad is different entirely. Like Water For Chocolate was painful to read—there's such a thing as a good romance, and this isn't it. At times the writing was just plain awful, (though that may have been the translation), and I simply did not care about a single character presented therein. The magical realism feels boring & forced.