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

1. Writing such as the following:

The duchess was as responsible… for Mary’s desperate predicament. Jared could not forget that, no matter how bloody innocent she seemed.
No matter how much he wanted her.

Just hit me over the head with it. That same sentiment is expressed repeatedly. Just in case you forget. Calantha = scheming whore who caused the death of Mary, and Jared is angry about that, except that he also wants to bone Calantha into the middle of next week. Such a predicament.

2. At one point, Calantha debates with herself furiously because she is jealous that Hannah, the little girl, is Jared’s daughter by adoption: “The child that should have been Calantha’s.”

This is so fucked up on so many levels I don’t know where to start. Calantha just learned that her late husband raped Mary, begetting Hannah and prompting Mary to run away from their household to the safety of Jared’s estate. And Calantha has spent many, many pages wringing her hands and attempting to preserve her icy reserve and detachment because the abuse of that late husband has left her unable to trust men, or people in general.

So thus Calantha weeps that Hannah should have been hers… instead of the bastard daughter of her late husband, who raped his defenseless employee. Never mind that her husband HELLO RAPED YOUR SERVANT but the child that resulted from that assault, that child should have been Calantha’s.

Oh holy shit. This woman is batshit.

3. Precocious child alert! Seriously, nauseating child who I felt sorry for, as she’d been orphaned, but had a hard time tolerating when she says stuff like the following passage:

“Papa said that you are going to be my mama, and he is my papa. I want a mama again, but I still love my first mama. Papa said that was all right.”

3.5 And what precocious child would be complete without a Virgin Widow?! Calantha? Untouched? Like, duh. And guess why? Her late rapist husband said she was too frigid. Funny how wood can be frigid.

4. But oh, Lord have mercy, then there’s my very favorite part of this book. Blissfully for me, it came early on, and it was so funny I had to bite my lips to keep from howling out loud on the bus:

Calantha watched the huge man cross the small ballroom toward her with both anticipation and dread. His black and white evening clothes clung alarmingly to his well-muscled, oversized body.

His clothes clung...alarmingly? What the almighty hell? His shirt is screeching at him?

I asked Candy, and she and I immediately identified the need for a terror alert level associated with just how alarmingly the hero’s clothing might be clinging. It really is a pubic, I mean public service, should you, the reader, be unaware of the danger of a hero’s alarmingly clinging clothing. Think of the children.

Lucy Armstrong, a successful director especially known for her work with dog food commercials, is called down to the Savannah River swamps to finish the last four days of filming an action flick after the original director keels over from a heart attack. Lucy is perfectly happy to direct dogs; dogs are better-behaved and a hell of a lot more predictable than actors. But her sister Daisy, the script supervisor, wants her working on this film, and what’s more, Daisy’s five-year-old daughter, Pepper, really, really wants to see her. And really, nobody says no to the cute kid, especially in a romance novel.

The sinking feeling in Lucy’s gut intensifies when she finds out that her ex-husband, Connor, is also the stunt coordinator for the film. The sinking hits rock bottom once she actually takes stock of what a monumental mess the whole project is. Daisy is almost literally sleepwalking, Pepper is anxious and starving for attention, Connor is acting like even more of a shifty asshole than usual, key personnel have quit, most of the crew doesn’t seem to know or care about what’s going on, the few who do care are actively hostile, and people are strangely reluctant to hand her a complete copy of the script.

And when her lead actor hires his own body double and stunt advisor, a taciturn but OMGHOT Green Beret named JT Wilder, all hell breaks loose--or, at least, key pieces of equipment do, and when you’re on a movie set, that’s close enough.

JT Wilder is on leave when he decides to pick up some easy money by being a nimrod actor’s stunt double. Shit, he’s jumped out of plenty of helicopters into REAL enemy fire; this should be a cakewalk. What he didn’t count on was being dragged into a CIA operation involving international terrorism, money laundering and ancient jade penises. Complicating things even further is the movie director, who looks far too much like Wonder Woman for his peace of mind. And there’s that one-eyed alligator hovering around the swamps surrounding the set....

The whole story takes place over four days. There’s not a timeline so much as a time squiggle that’s then squished into something vaguely dot-like. A LOT happens, and very fast. An inhumanly fast pace isn’t normally a problem with an action book, because hurry-up-and-wait, while no doubt more realistic, makes for a boring read. It’s all very entertaining, but I feel like plot and character development were shoved to the wayside as a consequence.

And for a romance novel, that warp speed isn’t so good. For myself, I really, really enjoy watching the love develop and the tension build. Four days from “Hello, you’re kind of hawt,” to “Happily Ever After”? That’s not romance, folks. That’s creepy. That’s JT-having-to-issue-a-restraining-order-because-Lucy-won’t-stop-stalking-him wacky. The love story is even more strained when you consider that JT and Lucy get almost no time alone at all because they’re both working on a movie set, and the romance doesn’t even start looking like one until about halfway through the book. Yes, JT’s a motherfucking hero, and Lucy gets to watch him do all sorts of hot, hero-ey sorts of things like save the day and shit, but they don’t really get to sit down and interact meaningfully--interaction that doesn’t involve their squidgy bits, at any rate.

This is strange, because reading the book, you get the feeling that both JT and Lucy are, well, sane people who think things through, more or less, before acting. They’re both assertive, organized and logical, which makes some of Lucy’s romantic decisions by the end of the book somewhat puzzling.

What disappoints me even more is that previous Crusie novels have featured protagonists who fall in love incredibly fast, and I bought into those scenarios with little problem. Both Manhunting and Getting Rid of Bradley, for example, have the hero and heroine falling in love rather quickly (though not four days fast); however, in those books, the hero and heroine spend significant amounts of time alone together. So, this sort of thing can be done, but it just wasn’t convincing in Don’t Look Down.

Other conflicts in this book, especially the tensions between Lucy and Daisy, were resolved in what feels like a similarly slap-dash fashion. (Be warned: Here Lie Spoilers, so highlight the area for the Supah-Secret text): One moment, Daisy seems to be nursing a burgeoning barbituarate habit and some very interesting resentment towards Lucy and her heroine complex, and the next, BAM, they’re more-or-less peachy keen. Crusie is usually stellar at handling tensions like these, and to see this go nowhere made me a bit of a sad panda.

The other parts of the book worked quite well. The secondary characters are memorable and worth noting. Pepper, in particular, is adorable and believable, and I’m speaking as somebody who has a pretty low gag threshold when it comes to the portrayal of cute children in fiction.

The action/suspense portion of the book is a blast, and somewhat more convincing than the love story. I know nothing about the military, guns, tracking enemies or killing people, but I have a sneaking suspicion Bob Mayer does, and it shows.

Overall, the book is a rather insubstantial bit of fun, which is a shame because Crusie always managed to sneak a lot of interesting subtext into her books, even the ones I didn’t particularly care for. This time around, there wasn’t sub-text so much as hurriedly resolved emotional issues. It’s still worth reading, and I enjoyed it, but it lacks that punch that makes it a true keeper.

Jamie Riley, a young man from York, arrives on the doorstep of the Earl of St. Joseph, ready to assume his post as tutor to the young heirs to the earldom. But he arrives to find a severely attitudinous butler, and beyond him, a single man who says he’s the earl. Jamie had been hired by the current earl’s older brother, who perished with his family in a boat accident. Jamie is heartbroken to learn of the deaths of the family he was eager to work for, and horrified to learn there is no similar post available to him for the current earl, as he has no children to tutor. Jamie, to put it mildly, is flat broke and needed the position to survive.

Stephen St. Clair is the somewhat newly-minted Earl of St. Joseph, and is dealing with his overwhelming feelings of loss by spending whatever of his allowance he can get his hands on, nearly bankrupting his household in the procees. No one in the household has approached the earl about this problem, but they are all aware that they haven’t been paid, and that they probably won’t be come the next pay quarter. Stephen’s friend and valet, an astute man named Charles, figures out quickly from the initial introduction that Jamie is too valuable to be allowed to leave, and presses Stephen to hire him on as a personal secretary under the guise of correcting Stephen’s social calendar.

In his new position, Jamie soon finds that the earl’s library, the household finances, the staff responsibilities and the earl himself are in need of fixing as well. Stephan’s house staff are a collection of misfits, from card-playing valet-cum-friend to the earl, the cook who is far too good looking to be safe from the roaming hands of a master and the jealousy of a mistress in any other household, to the stablemaster who is a tactiturn but brilliant woman, and her gangly 10-year-old son.

In the beginning, this book reads as a clever, well-plotted Regency romance, and if you didn’t know from THE COVER that this was a gay Regency, you’d be waiting for the heroine to show up in her pelisse or riding sidesaddle in a stylish new riding habit with a jaunty feather in her hat. But no, Stephen, he is Teh Gay, and is quite open about it. Almost shockingly so. Everyone in the household is aware that Stephen is gay, as is Charles, and in some cases, Stephen’s homosexuality is what keeps them safe in their current positions. Stephen has no interest in Rebecca, the cook, and if people are going to gossip about him, it won’t be because his stablemaster is a woman. As a result of their safe haven in his home, his servants are delightfully loyal, and one of the most interesting features of this story is the seamlessness between the upstairs and the belowstairs communities, and how they end up blending together as a family of sorts. 

Jamie slowly begins to feel as if he is part of the household of misfits, and finds that he has plenty to keep him busy, particularly if he himself wants to be paid. By far the biggest problem to Stephen’s finances is his contractual relationship with Julian Jeffries, an actor and self-important wastrel who imagines himself the center of the universe. Julian is ever eager to spend as much of the earl’s money as he can, and when he realizes that the earl has noticed and is becoming attracted to his new personal secretary, Julian has to go through great lengths to restore himself as the sun around which the earl and his wallet should orbit. Enter seriously flaming obstacle to the happily ever after to the growing relationship between Stephan and Julian.

What was fascinating about this book was the honesty Pearson used to approach difficult subjects. Pearson does not shy away from or easily dismiss situations that would deeply affect the characters. For example, the death of the earl’s brother, his wife, and two small boys was a source of a great deal of pain for everyone in the household, particularly the earl, and Pearson didn’t allow there to be a happy resolution that easily dismissed the significance of the loss. Instead, Stephen’s grief was used to illustrate the differences between Julian and Jamie and used to make the members of the St. Joseph household real and multi-dimensional characters in their own right.

Further, there are real social consequences for being openly gay in the ton depicted in his novel, and Stephen’s admission of feelings for another man lead to a real and, I am led to believe, historically accurate social penalty. Even though there is a happily ever after, the reader receives that HEA while knowing there will be real difficulties ahead for the protagonists.

What stopped this book from receiving a higher grade was more of what I felt were shortcomings of the character development.

First, much of the story is told from Jamie’s perspective, and the reader knows he is quite innocent, especially in the sense that he’s not had any sexual experience with either gender, despite recognizing his own feelings of attraction for men in his past. He’s lived with his mother, been tutored by a vicar, and emerged an amateur historian of sorts, only to find difficulty making his own way once his mother dies. He makes himself inestimably useful in the St. Joseph estate, creating budgets, streamlining expenses, and assisting the earl in figuring out how to rid himself of Julian’s expensive contract to serve as his escort and lover. But Jamie is completely lost when it comes to dealing with his growing feelings of attraction for the earl, and while Stephen is the more experienced of the two, I would have liked to know more about how Jamie dealt with (a) realizing he was attracted to a man who was attracted to him in return, and (b) the idea of what had been socially and emotionally unattainable suddenly becoming available and possible. I mean, the very idea of being able to live in the same house and openly kiss another man, let alone have that other man explicitly attempt to seduce him, must have rocked Jamie’s little world - I would have liked to have known how he came to terms with this discovery.

Further, social levels being what they were at the time, a relationship between two social strata would have been a challenge for a man and a woman; adding homosexuality to that social inequality still does not change the fact that Jamie is a secretary and Stephen is a titled earl. But what troubled me more than the social inequality was the emotional inequality of the characters. Jamie is relentlessly noble, trying as hard as he can to stay in good spirits and to do the best he can with dogged commitment to being of use and value to the household. Stephen, on the other hand, starts the book as a wastrel, deep in mourning for his brother but unable to deal with the emotional pain of his loss. He attaches himself to showpiece playboys, contractually guaranteeing him sexual services, while neglecting the financial security of the people who depend on him. I wasn’t entirely sure his turnaround in attitude was sufficiently explored for Stephen or for the reader to seem genuine and meaningful.

But the character I had the biggest problem with was Julian: with creative characters all over the place, Julian was a one note, vain, completely conscienceless villain, whose motives aren’t fully explained, and who was at core unsympathetic. The reader understands why he wants to protect his contract with Stephen, but why and how he is willing to go to such depths of behavior to the point of risking lives isn’t explored. The reader is told he is cold, unfeeling, abusive to his servants, and generally a pompous egomaniac, but there isn’t really much development beyond that, leaving Julian a very one-note character. And his comeuppance leaves no satisfaction that he really is paying for his actions - there is a hint that he might, but for his crimes, this reader wanted confirmation of a reservation at the Hotel Asswhuppin’.

Pearson’s strengths, however, are certainly in the prose, the historical settings, and the secondary characters in the story. The writer’s voice is unique, and the story itself is rather groundbreaking - Regency gay romance? Who’d a thunk it? And by virtue of being a gay romance, it forces the reader to reconsider the preconceptions one may have about protagonist relationships, male and female roles, and the like. While at times it seemed the plot veered sharply toward camp, especially the Scooby-gang-like activities of the belowstairs staff, Pearson’s exploration of gay themes was both straightforward and gentle. While the cover may hit you over the head with the fact that This Is a Gay Romance Check Out Those TESTICLES, the writing within repeatedly lulls you into forgetting that there is something dramatically different about this Regency. That in and of itself is quite an accomplishment, because the reader is then able to acknowledge, through experiencing romance in a different manner, that love between two people doesn’t necessarily have rules that rest on gender.