It is not mawkish or sentimental or commonplace. It is certainly not a romantic or sentimental piece. Wills largely sang blues and sentimental ballads. Melodramas typically concentrate on dialogue, which is often bombastic or excessively sentimental, rather than action. By the late 1940s, Holiday had begun recording a number of slow, sentimental ballads. Gere thought the ending would not work because it was too sentimental. She emerges as both loving matriarch and wounded adolescent, sentimental and devastatingly clear-eyed. Firstly, it may present itself as a sentimental and benevolent gesture. Treatments of subjects in a heroic or sentimental manner were equally rejected. Fat, funny, sometimes loud, often openly sentimental. Hopper considered himself more subtle, less illustrative, and certainly not sentimental. It comes off as bold, ambitious, yet intimate and sentimental all the same. My wife's health is much more important than sentimental reasons. Johnson wrote on a variety of sentimental, didactic, and biographical topics. The novel has been described as a style between slave narratives and the sentimental novel.