Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Yes, product placement in novels is a great marketing opportunity and another way to generate revenue, but frankly, I live in a society already saturated with marketing messages and advertisements; the possibility of one of the few ad-free spaces in my life being actively taken over makes me want to cry.

Yes, novels aren’t entirely ad-free and haven’t been for ages. I own several Harlequin, Leisure and Zebra books with those cardboard book club advert inserts. The back pages are often dedicated to advertisements for other books and excerpts for upcoming books. The difference is, I can skip through those without a beat and without ever missing the story. When the product is mentioned within the story, I can’t avoid it.

Many contemporary novels of all sorts often mention specific brands and products during the course of the story, and like I mentioned in Kate’s blog, I think it often serves as convenient shorthand more than anything else. For example: A pair of white Nikes vs. a pair of white Keds vs. a pair of white sneakers all offer different mental images. And sometimes, items like these can even offer insights into characters. Think of a heroine whose favorite shoes are a pair of battered hot pink Converse All-Stars decorated with glittery Transformers stickers vs. a heroine who wears only high-end Nikes or Reeboks—if she bothers to wear sneakers at all—vs. a heroine who deliberately removes or defaces any obvious logos on her sneakers so you can’t tell what brand she’s wearing. Of course, one can omit the brand name entirely instead and spend a bit of time describing the footwear instead; more words may be expended, but I think this method is oftentimes much more effective than just shooting out the brand name. I mean, think of Min in Bet Me and her shoe fetish. I had a wonderfully concrete impression of all the shoes she wore, and to this day I can remember that the pair Cal gave her was white, fuzzy and featured a bunny face, while she owned a pair with fish on them and another pair that had cherries. I’m pretty positive no shoe designers were mentioned in that book. Betsy from Undead and Unwed? She wore Manolo Blahniks, and that’s about all I can remember.

Too much name-brand dropping can also become a distraction, and it assumes that the reader will get the reference. That’s not necessarily the worst part; a skilled author should be able to work the references in without making it too clunky. What bothers me the most is the compulsory nature of the deal. Just thinking about it makes my stomach ache. (NOTE TO SELF: May very well be the chili dogs I had for dinner talking.) Maybe I’m too much of an idealist when it comes to the notion of maintaining a certain amount of artistic integrity. And hey, I admit it’s also a lot easier for me to rabbit on about the importance of artistic integrity when I don’t make my living with my creative pursuits—I sell my soul other ways instead, mwaha. So I guess my paranoia right now centers around scenarios like this: what if Microsoft pays mega-bucks to an author to mention its products in a flattering light in a book featuring a hardcore computer geek, when many hardcore geeks would rather cut off their left nut than install anything Microsoft-related on their computers?

I mean, what if the heroine is really, TRULY a Coca-Cola girl in a Pepsi-sponsored novel?

Yes, questions like these really do keep me awake at night. And yes, in a very odd but very real way, I think there’s a substantive difference between an author choosing on her own free will to create a heroine obsessed with collecting Hello Kitty figurines vs. Sanrio paying the author money to make a previously Hello Kitty-free heroine into one who won’t rest easy until she has every Badtz Maru coffee mug ever created.

Excerpt number 1: “The ghost road is written by a woman who thinks she knows the details of a man’s life in WW1. (...) Overall, I didnt enjoy this book mainly because pat barker of all people wouldnt know about WW1 anymore than high school history students, and above all, a woman talking about male sexuality like she knows. And the grand daddy of them all...... air raids in London. LOL”

Ahhhh. I see. She should maybe stick to topics she would be more familiar with, like cooking, laundry and raising babies? And air raids did occur in London in WWI. They were conducted by none other than zeppelins (of the non-Led variety). From firstworldwar.com:

Throughout the remainder of 1915 the Zeppelins raided London frequently, and with impunity.  They flew too high for most planes, and when they were intercepted by aircraft the ammunition in use at the time had little effect. (...) The Zeppelin attacks had a profound psychological impact on the Allies.  The Germans were ordered, under the treaty of Versailles, to hand over all their airships, but their crews preferred to destroy as many of them as they could.

Even a silly little girl like me who did literally learn all she knew about WWI in high school history class remembered enough about this to look it up with no trouble. But maybe it’s because I’m a silly little girl who actually paid attention in class.

Excerpt number 2, from a review entitled “This book is an abomination”: “Near the end of the book I finally figured out what the point of the entire exercise is. There is one scene where a drunken soldier confides to Wilfred Owen that the horrible thing about the War is that it is depriving them of “Beethoven, Botticelli, beer and boys.” There it is in a nutshell. Pat Barker’s series conveys the strange sense that World War I was senseless because it upset a number of gay British poets and killed a fair number of their potential lovers.”

Yoicks. Think this guy might be homophobic? This book has a bisexual protagonist, and his homosexual encounters make up a very tiny percentage of the book--if I remember correctly, there are four very, very brief sex scenes in total, two hetero, two homo. Siegfried Sassoon is a secondary character in this novel, and as most of you probably know, he was gay as the day was long, but we don’t see him gettin’ down and dirty in the book. So I’m not sure which book this guy was reading, but it takes dedicated reading-between-the-lines to come up with the conclusion he did. Perhaps he should look into a career that involves playing records backwards while listening for Satanic messages? Or looking for pictures of the Virgin Mary in the burn-marks on grilled cheese sandwiches?

Panty-bunching Excerpt number 3: “What the heck does Pat Barker know about World War One? Only what she’s read in her ‘Eye Witness Picture Guide To The Great War.’ She knows nothing. Really nothing. She talks about ‘air raids’ in London!!!! This is the FIRST World War. (...) The cliches are unbearable: she’s writing from a man’s point of view and thinks that she’s the first one to discover the male sex-drive. The worst crud is when one iof the characters has these flashbacks to when he lived in an ‘African Village’. I live in Africa, Barker obviously doesn’t.”

First of all, as I already covered: Air raids DID happen in WWI. That these men are ignorant of this facet of the war while criticizing Barker for being dum female who dont no nuts about the Great War LOLOL is sweet, sweet irony indeed. Also, none of Barker’s characters even come close to Africa in her books; W.H. Rivers (a real-life character like Sassoon) spent significant time in Melanesia, specifically the Torres Straits islands, which lie between Australia and New Guinea. The flashbacks in the book take place there, not Africa. Different. Continents. Entirely. There are lots and lots of dark-skinned tribal peoples living in places other than Africa--whodathunkit?

So yeah, reviewers can oftentimes be wrong. Horribly wrong, in fact. Not us Smarty Bitchypoos, of course. Remember: we’re AWESOME.

Secret Babies
E.D’Trix brought this up in the Comments, and oh my, I am reminded of how very, very much I hate this plot device. Hatehatehatehate. Beth hatin’ on Gaelen Foley kind of hate. I can sort of understand it in a historical, because having a baby out of wedlock was something most people tried to keep quiet and hidden, but the majority of secret baby books are contemporaries. Most of these books make me go “What the FUCK are you thinking, you stupid cow?” much more often than is conducive to a pleasant reading experience. Because first of all: Raising a child is hard. There is no shame in asking for help when you need it. FUCK that pride, there’s a new life to take care of. And most of the heroines raising these secret babies aren’t exactly Paris Hilton (financially, at least; there is definitely more than a passing resemblance to Paris in the IQ department), so add financial hardship to everything. Bottom line: if the heroine is not all that well-off, alone and pregnant and she doesn’t make an effort to track the babydaddy down and at least inform him that he’s about to be a dad, much less get him to help her on child support, she’s not heroine material, she’s a dumb whore who needs to learn that Planned Parenthood offers free condoms and Ortho Tricyclen at only $17.00/pack.

There may be the occasional secret baby book that’s worth reading, but most have made me actively wish the heroine had an abortion instead. The worst is when the heroine acts all pissy because the hero finds out he’s been a father lo these many years and wants to be an active part of the child’s life and she uses that as an excuse to act like a psycho hosebeast while humping him without birth control YET FUCKING AGAIN. That just makes me wish the heroine’s mom had had an abortion.

Big Misunderstandings
Much has been said about this. Let’s just say I’m not fond of books in which the conflict could’ve been resolved with a simple query, like: “Hey, is that your long-lost half-brother I saw you hugging in that garden the other night? Oh, cool. Whew. For a moment there I had the crazy idea that you were cheating on me.”

That said, I’m pretty sure quite a few of my favorite books feature Big Misunderstandings in one form or another. The Windflower, for example. I mean, Merry has a pretty good reason to perpetuate it, but still, at one point I did fervently wish she’d confide in Devon, except he WAS an asshole to her on more than one occasion....

Older Couples
This isn’t any fault of the books or the plot device, it’s strictly a personal prejudice. If the couple is older than 45 years old or so, I picture my parents making out and kissing. I can’t help it. Buzz. Kill. I’m sure as I grow older I’ll stop being such a stupid bitch about this type of story, but until then, I generally like my protagonists to be between 18 to 40 years old.

Enemies Into Lovers
I’m talking blood enemies, not merely pointed sparring like, say, Jessica and and Sebastian engage in in Lord of Scoundrels. I’m talking “He killed my father and I’m a sassy Scottish lass who will hate his piggish Sassenach self forever and ever, nyah!” kind of stories. These stories usually feature some truly appalling behavior on both the hero and heroine’s parts. But again, some of my favorite books and authors feature this sort of story. Shana Abe does them quite well, for example, but that’s because she doesn’t have the hero or heroine acting like assheads all the time.

The Sudden Realization of Lurve­™
This well-worn plot device was utilized in older historicals and is still somewhat frequently used in certain types of category romances. This plot device is frequently used in conjunction with Enemies into Lovers. Hero and heroine fight, fight, fight, fight and hate, hate, hate, hate right up until page 398 of a 400-page novel. Then all of a sudden, one of them realizes: they’re fighting because they LOVE each other. This revelation typically comes out of nowhere and makes me wonder what kind of crack the character was smoking. Everything is then resolved at warp speed. I close the book fully expecting more insane fights in the couple’s future and a host of poor little crack-babies being born to the heroine.