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

Zoe Drake is a New York City cab driver. She arrives at her great-aunt’s apartment to fetch some items for said great-aunt’s funeral and finds Nick Giroux, a park ranger and hot nature man, camped out in the hallway waiting for Ms. Drake. Nick is looking for his father, who abandoned his family when Nick was a little boy. Zoe is looking for the black Vuitton shoes her great-aunt specified in her funeral plan. Nick last heard from his father in a note mailed a few days prior with the return address of Xenia Drake’s Manhattan apartment, and he’s sure that his father is there, or was recently enough that he might come back. Zoe doesn’t know what the hell Nick is talking about, but against her better judgment, she lets him stay in Xenia’s apartment with her. He’s hot, he rescues wounded pigeons, and he’s kind, dedicated, and also, hot. Also, Zoe can take care of herself admirably, and has both sharp judgment of people and the ability to kick literal ass. So if he tries anything funny, she can mess him up like whoa and like damn.

Ultimately, this novel is about finding your family, or discovering who your family really is, and what unconditional love really means. Zoe has to overcome her own feelings of hurt and isolation, brought about by her family’s habit of judging her against the perfection of her sisters and finding Zoe substantially lacking. Nick has to overcome his abandonment issues, and both Zoe and Nick have to take sizable personal risks to be together, changing a little bit of themselves in the process, though that little bit is enough to alarm each of them plenty. And really, honest to crapping damn shitcakes, this book takes on a whole list of major issues, and uses them to layer the characterization to the point where only a handful of pages in, I had a better grasp of Zoe and Nick than I have of other characters in other romances after a few hundred pages of superficial description. Zoe and Nick are original, flawed, but honest and noble people who have real and enduring pain in their lives, and the issues they face in order to seize their happy ending are not contrived or shallow. My only disappointment with the book was that I wished some of the familial issues weren’t all resolved off-screen, but even then, the issues of family are never resolved neatly with a bow and a perfectly-folded seam of wrapping paper.

The conflict between and surrounding Nick and Zoe - and there are several little ones that combine into one big mess - is compounded by the fact that both characters are also grieving. Zoe has just lost her great-aunt, who she felt was the only family member who understood and appreciated her. Nick is still grieving the loss of his father and of his own childhood. Because each character helps the other heal as well as grow, their happy ending is fiercely earned, particularly because Nick is used to being a loner, and Zoe guards her autonomy deliberately and without compunction.

Cohen is a strong and marvelous storyteller in a panoply of ways. The layered characters and genuine emotions and reactions of the characters are just part of the collective awesome,. Cohen is particularly strong at showing, not telling, and uses that skill to her hero’s advantage. For example, at one point, Nick ponders the fact that he’s attracted to Zoe, despite the fact that she’s pretty buff, because until Zoe came along, Nick had only been attracted to frail, delicate women who needed his care. Zoe didn’t need his care, though she welcomed his attention. And when, later in the book, Nick figures out why he’d been attracted to delicate women, his attraction to Zoe becomes that much more telling, and, in both Nick’s and the reader’s understanding, much more significant.

So let me get back to how short the US title sells this book. I could think of any number of better options, even options that include the ever-present hook words. Heck, Cohen’s working title, which I heard was “I Left My Clothes In the Bronx,” is a hoot. The UK title and cover image are sharp - she’s a cab driver, so she literally does “drive him wild,” and those cover models look like real people. But “his for the taking?” It literally makes me sad that a ferociously independent, funny, sharp and charming character like Zoe is being sold behind a title that speaks of passivity, sexual submission, and inertia. Zoe is in the driver’s seat of her life, even after Nick lands in the middle of it, and the idea that she’s in one place long enough for anyone to take her is insulting to her character. So ignore the title, and enjoy the book.

And if anyone has the ear of the title-bestowing folks at Harlequin, tell them I’d really like a word with them. Three words, actually. And the third one is “fuck.”

The tycoon, Rhys, is slowly divested of his comforts - his luggage, his suits, his Blackberry, his laptop, and his credit cards - leaving him with Trae, who is accustomed to winging it on a thin budget, and leaving him forced to allow his younger brother to assume the helm of the family company immediately before a very tricky and delicate merger or acquisition. That’s the thing with these tycoons, you know? You’re not really sure what they’re a tycoon of. But given the comments made by Trae and by Rhys, I’m assuming his family business is a diverse holding company of some sort, as they own a bunch of random stuff.

The title doesn’t at all do justice to the adventure of the book. They go from Miami to New Orleans to LA, back to New Orleans by car, then to St. Louis, and finally back home, and by isolating a strong, stubborn hero and a strong, stubborn heroine in the car, on a motorcycle, and in dingy hotel rooms together, the author allows each character to be truly revealed to the other. While they have years of assumptions to undo, they simultaneously have a hell of an attraction to address, and it was delicious, delightful reading.

I have to say, the names were a bit of a distraction. At one point, “Trae’s gaze went to Rhys,” and I mentally filled in Rhys saying to her, “BITCH YOU STOLE MY VOWEL.”

There were also the secondary characters who didn’t add much except convenient plot progression or development, and while I know that the category structure allows only for the primary protagonists, I always feel bereft of the secondary character’s stories, especially when they are resolved so easily. For example: Trae’s roommate is the inspiration for their “Just Say No!” vow in the opening scene, as she dropped out of college to marry some guy who beat the shit out of her. The JSN friends chipped in to get her on a bus to a shelter where Beaty McShit couldn’t find her, and when said roommate appears near the end of the story, she is miraculously healed and healthy from her abusive cycle relationship, now that she’s escaped from Beaty McShit and has had his daughter away from him. Yeah, because that’s not a complicated situation or anything. She’s just so beamingly healthy, like she could march up to the heroine and say, “I’m a plot device, and as such must wrap up my angst as neatly and inspirationally as possible! I’m only permitted a handful of pages by law, and I’m much too close to the end of your story to mess up the joyful ending by including any unresolved angst!”

Now that’s a guarantee that you don’t have to worry about someone. It’s like the opposite of the James Bond Ancillary Character Rule, wherein if a character shows pictures of his children to James Bond in ANY Bond film, that character is going to die suddenly and irrevocably, without question, usually in the next 5 minutes. The Harlequin Ancillary Angsty Character Rule, if after reading two books I can be permitted to make up a rule, would be the opposite: if a character in a precarious or vividly emotionally horrid situation appears hale and resolved at the end, count on that resolution, because extraneous angst is not permitted to intrude upon the protagonists’ happy ending.

Pat expressions of autonomy and perfectly rational runaway brides notwithstanding, I reveled in reading this book, and it went a long way toward reassuring me that my naughty prejudices about the category genre were very much unfounded. This book made me happy, and I thank Ms. Benedict for reminding me how much I love love LOVE a road trip romance, particularly since she did so with characters that were delightful and real. 

The hero, for one. He is a species of romance novel hero who is as far away from compelling for me as it gets without actively inciting revulsion. He’s the bestest warrior in all the land. He’s supernaturally patient with the heroine and her spunky shenanigans. He won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women. He’s loyal to his king. He’s a good Christian and won’t tolerate the destruction of churches. Children love him. Animals adore him. He’s so perfect, I wouldn’t be surprised if cartoon bluebirds fly about and twitter musically every time he takes a crap. He is, in short, a Gary Sue. I hesitate to use the term “politically correct” as any sort of pejorative in a serious sense, because all too often I’ve seen it being used by assholes who want to spout something sexist or racist while attempting to couch their opinion as unpopular but universal truth, but here I am saying this anyway: Wulfric is a politically correct hero, and hot damn, does that ever make him tiresome.

On one hand, I really appreciate the move away from asshole rapist heroes in the genre. I really, really do. If I had to choose between a violent assmunch like the hero in The Flame and the Flower or a paragon of all things virtuous like Wulfric, I’d still pick Wulfric, tiresome though he is. On the other hand, he’s not a human so much as he is a Ken Doll, except instead of plastic, he’s molded from untempered wish fulfillment. This Plastic Perfect Guy quality to Wulfric makes Bindel’s mention of Virgin Slave, Barbarian King in the article in The Guardian rather ironic; her accusation that this book is one of the examples of “misogynistic hate speech” is completely defused by the fact that the book opens with the hero saving the heroine from being raped. (Sarah Frantz noticed this, too.)

The Gary Suism is merely a symptom of the fact that the book attempts to play with the idea that the so-called barbarians aren’t the truly barbarous ones, and that the civilized world is often uncivil. This is worthy territory to explore; alas, that’s been covered many times before by many different authors, most of them writing execrable Indian romances, and Allen doesn’t provide anything new or meaty to ponder. In fact, her portrayals of the Visigoths vs. the Romans create caricatures worthy of old-school Westerns in terms of which group we’re clearly supposed to root for and which ones we’re supposed to boo. What I did find interesting, however, is how the Race to be Resuscitated in this particular instance is tall, blond and Germanic. The rather condescending “but they’re real people, REALLY” tone is usually applied to Native Americans and sundry non-whites, especially in Romancelandia. That inversion in race and racial expectations was somewhat interesting, and God knows there was a lot of potential for stuff that, if not comprehensive in scope, at least feels emotionally real, but the cultural differences and attitudes aren’t so much skimmed over in this novel as flown over at the height of several thousand feet; you can see a sea of interesting issues waiting to be plumbed, but all you can do is wave to its pretty contours from the double-paned window as the story whooshes by at high speed.

And as an auxiliary consequence of the facile treatment of the culture, you get what I have dubbed the People in Renn Faire Drag effect: the characters are essentially modern people in costume. I realize that there are real difficulties in creating convincing characters from a distant era; so much of our conception of acceptable behavior has changed over the past 1600 years that it can be hard to create characters who are both sympathetic to our modern sensibilities while remaining authentic to their era in history. I don’t expect--or want--complete authenticity. I do expect, however, that the characters will not engage in musings that smack of modern psychoanalysis, philosophical conceptions of self and freedom that were first popularized during the Enlightenment, or 20th-century embracements of pluralism and multi-culturalism. (As a side note: This book, besides being irritatingly modern in tone, also had a hilarious habit of self-consciously pointing out that the characters had been lost in thought for a long time; the hero or heroine are forever starting themselves out of reveries. Authors, please don’t do this. It interrupts the flow of the story, and it makes your characters look retarded.)

Some authors have successfully written book set in Ancient Rome that featured characters that, if not necessarily 100% authentic to the times (and I’d argue that there’s really no way for us to ascertain that, given our distressing lack of time machines), are still convincing for works of popular fiction. Rosemary Sutcliff is, in my opinion, the queen of the Historical Novel Set in Ancient Times. I’m somewhat hard-pressed to put my finger on what she does that convinces me that her characters are true to their times, but part of it is how none of them display the hallmarks of what I think of as modern thinking (such as attempts to engage in what amounts to talk therapy), even though we are privy to their rich, complex internal lives.

Strangely enough, Allen gets a lot of the historical trappings right; she seems to have done a decent amount of research into the setting of the times, and she’s convincing enough that I don’t feel the need to fact-check her. But this, coupled with the anachronistic attitudes of the characters, intensifies the feeling that they’re actors in costume on a well-designed soundstage.

This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for me. Mary Jo Putney is absolutely terrible when it comes to writing modern characters into historical romances. However, she’s also very good at making them flawed, detailed and interesting, and when she’s at her best, I don’t care that her characters are in Renn Faire drag. This book doesn’t even come close.

All that being said, however, the book really isn’t all that bad. It’s boring, it’s trite, it’s facile--but the prose is competent, and the characters likeable enough. It didn’t piss me off with its awfulness, which is when books start falling into the D- and F category, and while I don’t find it quite as repulsive as, say, Dark Lover by J.R. Ward, it’s also not as compelling. Ultimately, I have to agree with Sarah’s grade: it’s a D. It’s a passing grade, but barely.

By far the biggest disappointment was the heroine. Julia Livia is kidnapped by Wulfric just as she is about to be raped by two Roman men during the Visigoth’s sack of Rome. The two men, hoping their crime won’t be noticed, kill Julia’s servant and are about to assault her when Wulfric cracks open the Romance Hero Can of Whoopass , takes care of their lousy selves, and rides off with Julia. He needs a home slave and decides this woman he’s just saved from assault is the one for his hearth and home, nevermind her incredulous protests to the contrary.

As Julia is riding out of Rome behind Wulfric’s teenage apprentice/cousin, she makes a stunning realization of the inequality within her own culture—before she’s even out the gate as a kidnapped war prize.

Is that what I am? His enemy? What have I done to him to deserve this?

One of the groups of slaves trudged past and she looked down at them, seeing for the first time what a mixture they were, the people who made life in the Empire run with the smooth efficiency of a water clock.... What have they done to deserve it? These barbarians have learned from us and now we reap what we sow.

That would be page 26. Enlightenment on the back of a horse, take one!

Julia moved into global understanding of the flaws of her own society with such ease, I was hoping next she’d set up the first Visigoth soup kitchen. And speaking of kitchen! She learns to cook savory-smelling tummy-happy food that satisfies Visigoth warriors like Hungry Man Meals from Swanson satisfy your favorite lumberjack, and all in a matter of days. Does she suffer from culture shock? Does she attempt to preserve her own culture in midst of Visigoth nomadic wagon-life? Any prejudice against their group for their rustic, nomadic lifestyle consisting of tents and wagons and farm animals without a bathhouse or shower to be found?

Nope. She blends in and gets comfy immediately, and has no problem learning the ropes of cooking, mending, and generally being handy with knives within mere days. The apprentice is half in love with her,Wulfric tries to resist her, and with the exception of some hot girl-on-girl fighting with her man’s aspiring fiancee, everyone looooves her. She’s pure and noble and cute, too.

Julia so easily embraces the increased power she has within her new community, she longs to stay even when she knows plans are being made for her return to Rome. It’s not Stockholm Syndrome. It’s effortless integration. I hate to make the comparison, because this book was poor but a significant jump away from the Cassie Edwards F Line, but Julia’s ease of adjustment reminded me of Savage Moon where Mishi blithely became a Shoshone with absolutely no backstory detailing her adjustment.

Another oddity I wasn’t sure how to reconcile is the use of words in the ruminations of the characters that were far, far too modern. At one point Wulfric is having a bath, and massages a sore leg: “trying to give proper attention to the condition of his muscles and the feel of the tendon he had strained two weeks before.” “Tendon?” Would there be such anatomical knowledge? The Online Etymology Dictionary lists a usage dating back to 1374 but not to the sack of Rome.

Later, as Wulfric rides to sack another Roman town, she is told to “get the medical kit out.” “Medical kit?” Seriously?

Speaking of Wulfric, he’s rather delicious, but still, his long-haired hotness and effortless leadership skills are still subject to lines of dialogue that are too pat and too perfect. Wulfric’s tribe of Visigoths sacked Rome because the Roman emperor repeatedly promised them land of their own, and did not honor his promise. The Visigoths value their word and their honor is a very plain and simple thing: you say you will do something, then you will do it.

But after conversations with Julia, Wulfric suddenly realizes and understand her culture, that the Romans act within honor as they define it:

“...The public face is what matters, what goes on behind the scenes --” [Julia] shrugged. “The ends justify the means, I suppose. But for you, and for your people, I do not think there is that separation—you are the same at your own hearth and at the king’s Council, making love or making war.... I am only just realising that. Forgive me.”

“No, forgive me. I think we should begin again. I thought your people treacherous yet they are acting within their concept of honour.”

HUR? Leaving aside the utter saccharine blooey of “making love or making war,” what the crap is this crap? He’s going to put aside or amend his understanding of honor just because Julia’s people define it differently, using terms that are the opposite of his own definition? I can only rest with a deeply confused look on my face that I hope passersby will mistake for one of profound contemplation.

Oddly, the forces acting against the couple are merely cultural, which of course are easily resolved as each comes to Simple and Truthful Realizations about their own society. The other conflict caused by the imbalance of power - created by the fact that he slung her over the back of his horse and rode away with her during the sack of Rome - is resolved by his decision to return her to Roman society, which would soothe his honor and allow her to return to him on her own terms. There are sizable questions of Wulfric’s kinglyness, or, his ability to inspire people so that they depend on and look to him for guidance and safety, and Wulfric’s role in the Visigoth tribe after the death of their current king, but all of those issues are resolved without Julia’s presence, and therefore are told, now shown. Much is made of Wulfric’s natural leadership and inspiring qualities, yet little comes of that buildup of tension.

Beyond the cultural differences, which are easily mended with the Superglue of effortless assimilation and blithe acceptance, there is no villain, no issue to be overcome except that of choice and geography. Would Julia choose to be with him if she had the option to select her mate? And where would they go since she’s damaged goods as far as the Romans are concerned, and a slave to the Visigoths? These questions aren’t really answered so much as assumed to be solved, and as a result I didn’t feel there was a truly believable happy ending.

But really, the lack of struggle to accept a completely different culture on the part of both protagonists - Julia’s ease of integration into the Visigoth community and Wulfric’s easy conquest of Julia’s Roman habits and expectations - made for a limp and tensionless storyline. Thus I was yawning, not reading, and had little to no reaction when I was done.

The Professors Brillliant have many links to other reviews of this book, and Dr. Frantz’s analysis of the concept of honor within the novel, and Dr. Vivanco’s examination of the mythologies referenced in the story are particularly fine reading. And today Dear Author’s dueling reviews will feature Jane and Jayne battling it out over their own impressions of the novel.