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

Ink Exchange begins with another look at a scene from Wicked Lovely in which Aislinn, the heroine of Wicked Lovely, sees a faery walk into the local tattoo parlor and touch a steel case, something that faeries are not supposed to be able to do. In Ink Exchange, you find out who that faery is, and why he can touch metal and not be sickened by it.

Leslie is a friend of Aislinn’s, and in the prologue, Irial, the faery from the tattoo parlor, is watching her. He calls her a “lovely broken toy.” That pretty much sums up Leslie: she’s desperately trying to recover her own health and happiness after an assault perpetrated by someone she ought to be able to trust. Her attempt to reclaim herself centers around acquiring a tattoo, and she’s frustrated in her efforts to find the perfect image. Like many women who pursue ink, she wants to reclaim her body for her self. She wants something unique, that won’t appear on the skin of anyone else, and when Rabbit, the tattoo artist, shows her a book of drawings of his own design, one image speaks to her and, in a way that alarms her slightly, demands that she choose it. Ultimately, that tattoo links her in a dangerous, addictive, damaging and symbiotic relationship with Irial, and in the course of identifying what that relationship is and whether she wants it, Leslie realizes how weakened, and how strong, she truly is.

Leslie’s choice to use a tattoo to reclaim her body is understandable, but when that tattoo and the forces behind it turn on her and claim her body for the use of someone else, her own choice becomes another assault without her consent. Exploring consent and assault through the tattoo allows the reader to examine the larger issues of consent and assault operating within Leslie’s backstory, and the whole book is layer upon layer of parallels.

One of Henderson’s concerns was whether 12 year old girls ought to read this book. My answer: “Without equivocation: Fuck, yeah.” The story explores themes that will give a young woman entering puberty a buffet of crucial topics to think about, topics that become particularly important because around 12 years old, my hormones hit the highway to Pueblo Loca and I was batshit miserable through most of it. This book is about so many layered and devastating things that affect teenagers, including sex, sexual assault, autonomy, addiction, strength, power, powerlessness, and how easy it is for damaged children to be taken advantage of by those with agendas of their own.

The skilled depth and layering of the story is unfortunately undermined by some aspects of the execution. The dialogue can slide from enigmatic to pretentiously vague with disturbing ease, and there’s a dramatic self-consciousness to the narration and the characters themselves that reminds me of teenage angst and drama, which made the already-painful storyline a bit more difficult to read, though the tone is in keeping with the age of the protagonists. The mortal ones, anyway.

The mortal wrongdoers who harm Leslie also for the most part disappear, and no closure is granted for the reader or for Leslie - at least, none that is disclosed - and while the paranormal characters do experience their own denouement and conclusion. The significance of the fact that Leslie wants very much to return to the mortal world from her involvement with the faery world is diminished by the focus on the faery characters, (spoilers ahead: highlight text to read it) and in the final scenes, Leslie is a background character, once again used to highlight and underscore Irial’s significance. Relegating Leslie to the background, to be commented on by other characters, did not sit at all well with me since the story is as much about Leslie’s recovery of her self and her autonomy as it is about the faery courts operating around and through her.

The other aspect that irritated me was that so many of the ancillary characters knew what had happened to Leslie before the novel began, and did nothing. They just knew, and watched her suffer, and did nothing. On one hand, their inaction was somewhat understandable seeing that, faery-involved or not, the protagonists of this series are teenagers, who are not powerful by any stretch, particularly these teenagers who operate largely without sound parental guidance or presence.

On the other hand, even within powerlessness, there is the opportunity to help her, and not one of them took it. I may be picturing my own teenage life through tinted happy glasses but I’d like to think that if I knew a friend had suffered the way Leslie did, I would have found some way to help, or at least let that person know I would help them find safety.

Finally, a word of warning to those who come to this site looking for romance reviews. This isn’t a romance. (spoilers ahead: highlight text to read it) There’s not a happy ending for Leslie in the sense that a romance reader may be looking for, though the situation in which the book leaves her is entirely appropriate and optimistic. This is not the same style of faery tale as Wicked Lovely and readers expecting more of the same of that novel will not necessarily find it.

It’s hard to describe concisely what this book is about. On the surface it’s about a girl who gets a tattoo and finds herself mixed up in multiple faery courts. But it’s also about a girl recovering her autonomy after assault, and her right to choose to feel overwhelming pain rather than have it taken from her without her consent. It’s about addiction, and about how choosing pain often means choosing to live, but it’s mostly about how brave, adult, and courageous a decision it is to make that pain-full choice for yourself.

Henderson’s assertions that 12 year old girls ought not read this book because of her mistaken perception as to the sexuality within the story are infuriating in light of the manner in which this book explores profoundly important issues. I can think of few books that should be required reading for teenage girls, but this is certainly one of them. It’s painful, and it’s important.

Virginia Sauter is the newly-appointed drum major at her rural Alabama high school. She’s also a former beauty pageant queen who rebelled, cut her hair off, pierced her nose, quit the majorette squad and went band. WAY band. So far band that she was voted co-drum-major.

Unfortunately for Virginia, she shares drum major responsibilities with Drew Morrow, who held the position solo last year, and who has some degree of resentment about sharing the position with a girl this year. There’s never been a girl drum major, and to make matters worse, in their first performance, they suck.

Even worse: Virginia has had a crush on Drew for a long, long time, and he refuses to acknowledge that she exists - a decision that certainly contributes to their suckiness as drum majors.

Seems that drum majors, and I didn’t know this, keep the time and tempo of the band through their conducting. If the drum majors don’t work together, they sound like crap - or, as one character says, like a symphony warming up before a performance begins.

Fortunately for Virginia and the band, the new band director, Mr. Rush, intervenes, and lays down the law. They will work together or they’ll both lose their positions. And further, Mr. Rush has ideas about how they can work their differences to the band’s advantage in competition, beginning with a new, feminine drum major costume for Virginia, and a ballroom dance-style dip for both of them to begin their performance.

The challenge of working together forces Drew and Virginia to become friends, despite or perhaps because of the enormous attraction between both of them, and while there are complications - Drew has an evil girlfriend, and Virginia doesn’t feel sure enough of herself to make any move on Drew - the story gets it’s drama from so many clever, interesting characters and plot points that serve to set this book apart. From the guy who’s harbored a crush on Virginia since forever, to her African-American best friend and beauty queen who cannot wait to leave small town Alabama behind her, to her parents and their secret that Virginia’s keeping from everyone, there’s plenty of drama to keep the book moving.

One of Echol’s gifts in this novel is keeping the story very contemporary without making it seem like she’s name-dropping. Like the writers of a really good teen television drama, she’s able to portray a high school teenager’s thoughts (the book is told from Virginia’s perspective in first person) without sounding like she’s trying too hard. Authenticity of tone and setting come easily to this author.

The two best points of this book for me are Virginia herself, and her friendship with Drew. While it might be difficult for me, a 31-year-old schlubby lady living in Jersey to relate to a teenage beauty queen and drum major in rural Alabama, it is not hard for me to relate to someone feeling like they have been dropped into a situation that seems like too much, too fast, and too emotionally difficult. It’s a mark of brilliance on Echols’ part that the character who doesn’t fit in is a beauty queen who quits the pageant circuit to join the band. One doesn’t think beauty pageant contestants suffer often from feelings of awkwardness, low self-confidence, or alienation.

The other delicious part of this book is the dramatic sexual tension between Drew and Virginia. Forced to work together and talk to each other on long-ass bus rides all over the state, they form a friendship of sorts, and become each other’s confidantes, revealing the truth behind their public images. Virginia shares with Drew the secret she’s been hiding from everyone, and Drew tells Mr. Rush and Virginia why he’s gone from being a laid-back relaxed high schooler to a stressed-out responsibility-driven drum major obsessed about being perfect and getting the highest possible score on his SATs.

The one problem I had with the story was that the HEA didn’t seem 100% guaranteed, because one question -the financial security of Drew’s future - is left unanswered. There’s a throwaway comment by the band director that seems to indicate that everything will be fine, but I wasn’t sure at all by the end, and I wanted a complete happy ending for these awesome characters, because I was rooting for them the entire time.

I have a serious weakness for YA romances, from the 1-800-WhereRU stories to vintage SVH, and this one is a definite keeper. A full band salute to Jennifer Echols from this very giddy Smart Bitch.

(Side note: This sounds good in theory, but unless the girl keeps her head completely still AND takes care not to mess up the lip-prints of the girl(s) who blazed the trail before her, I don’t see how this would work.)

Gin invites various classmates, all of whom serve as stupendously wooden archetypes. Here’s a quick run-down of several of them:

Sandy: Good-two-shoes girl who’s best friends with Gin because… actually, I have NO IDEA why she’s friends with Gin. Sandy has no idea either. Neither does Gin. This is one of the book’s many mysteries.

Jade: Skinny, hot, popular, smart, into championing causes such as getting rid of the dress code. In short: a tiresome paragon.

Ash and Rose: GOD. These two are so annoying. Every time they came on the scene, I was overcome by an urge to smack ‘em in the face with a two-by-four. They’re the perfect couple and obviously meant to be the book’s moral center. They’ve been dating for over a year, but they haven’t done more than kiss and they don’t plan to do more for a while yet. They’re supposed to be different and cute and inspire admiration for a) their moral and physical purity, and b) their fearlessness about Being Different and Defying Norms and all that, but really, all they inspire in me is heaving nausea.

Hunter: Handsome, amoral asshole with a peener that burrrrrrns, oh how it burrrrrrrns, but oh boy, he sure loves getting head.

Perry: Closeted gay boy who’s allegedly snarky and smart, but more often than not comes across as petulant, delusional and mumbly. I’m not kidding. Dude mumbles all the time in this book, even when Hunter’s dick isn’t in his mouth.

Skye and Rod: The archetypal Teenage Couple Who Has Sex Before They’re Ready. Teenage Premarital Sex: Don’t Do It! Only marginally less annoying than Ash and Rose.

All these characters have about the liveliness and realism of marionettes being worked by a puppeteer on quaaludes. Their motivations are opaque at best and downright puzzling at worst. Gin, for instance: why is she so sexually precocious? What little we see of her family life seems stable, and we’re never provided with any believable reasoning for why she’s so promiscuous.

Also, all those people screaming about how obscene this book is, how it appeals mostly to the prurient interest? Hate to destroy these people’s lurid suck-n-fuck fantasies involving hot, hard-bodied teenage boys getting blowjobs from barely pubescent girls (oh, you KNOW some of that outrage was fueled by a lethal combination of displaced horniness and the accompanying guilt over that horniness), but Tod Goldberg said it best: “The book is about as titillating as a bowel movement.” Well, assuming you’re not the type to be titillated by bowel movements, that is—there does seem to be a terrifyingly large number of these people in certain newsgroups.

At any rate, rest assured there are no explicit sex scenes. There are exactly two scenes involving oral sex in the whole book. The first one takes place off the page: We basically enter the scene as Hunter is zipping up. The other involves Skye and Rod, and…. OK, there’s no way I can do justice to Ruditis’ deathless prose, so here’s a quote:

Her breathing intensified. She grabbed a clump of the comforter in her hand, squeezing tightly. She was feeling all the things she had read about in the trashy romance novels her mom kept hidden under the bed they were on. Skye’s bosom heaved. Her loins burned with desire. Waves of pleasure washed over her body ready to crash on the shore.

The sad thing is, while that scene deliberately attempts to skewer romance novel sex scenes, the rest of the book is written every bit as clumsily. To give you an idea of how clunky it is: Think of an episode of Saved By The Bell. No, not back when it was even remotely amusing and featured Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani-Amber Thiesen and god knows what other hyphenated teenybopper hottie. I’m talking the recent seasons in which Screech is, like, 42 years old and STILL a creepily underdeveloped buffoon amidst a host of bland Hollywood hardbodies trying their best to look like teenagers.

OK, so can you picture one of those episodes in your head? Good. Because seriously? This book bears an eerie resemblance to one of those episodes. The writing is so goddamn stilted that should all the global warming alarmists prove to be right and Earth is flooded in a sea of melted icecaps in the next few years, the prose in this book will remain high and dry.

And while the book isn’t titillating per se, you can tell that Ruditis tries to be all nudge-nudge wink-wink with the occasional double-entendre, and most of these attempts just don’t work. For instance, check out the opening paragraph:

Gin took the slender shaft of the tube in her palm. She gave a gentle tug along the base and watched as the lipstick extended to its full length.

Admittedly, it’s been YEARS since I’ve worn lipstick, but as far as I know, you twist the base to get the lipstick to extend. I’ve never encountered a lipstick that required you to tug on the base; if nothing else, it makes no sense. Tugging the base would logically mean the tip would retreat, unless the lipstick manufacturer created an unduly complicated and completely counterintuitive mechanism that would extend the lipstick when you pulled. Either Ruditis has no idea how lipstick works, or he knows and decided to describe it inaccurately in an effort to preserve this truly pointless (and execrable) lipstick-as-penis imagery.

The book does get the core messages through, and they’re good messages for teens—or anyone, for that matter: oral sex carries real risks and consequences, and having sex before you’re ready isn’t that great an idea. Too bad the message is delivered by such a boring, clumsy messenger. Several other YA books have dealt with teenage sex and relationships with much more depth, grace and readability; the memorable ones for me were Deenie and Forever by Judy Blume, but I’m sure these are pretty dated by today’s standards.

In short, the book and the subject matter had lots of potential, but ended up with all the depth, believablity and complexity of an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers—that is, if the Pink Ranger got all humpy with the Green Ranger and decided to give him a hummer between costume changes, then infected the rest of the team with gonorrhea.

(Actually, there’s probably pornographic MMPR fanfic involving just such scenarios. And what’s worse, I’d much prefer to read this fanfic than watch an actual episode of MMPR. Oh, the humanity.)