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

There are plenty of reasons why I should choke on the green-eyed monster over this book, too, and specifically want to snarl at the author. The first draft was a Nanowrimo book. People actually Finish and then PUBLISH their nanowrimo manuscripts? It’s enough to make me think, “Well, shit, I can do that.” Ha. In November of this year, G-d willing, I will have a newborn. Ain’t no novel writing going on in my house unless the world wants sleep-deprived Sarah between early-am feedings writing a screed about the completely insane thoughts in her head.

Lani Diane Rich’s first book, which won the RWA Best First Book RITA award, is a cleverly constructed novel that explores the process and ramifications of changing your life around entirely, and reconstructing it after finding yourself in misery with a life you don’t enjoy. Wanda, the heroine, lies in a coma in the first chapter after trying to punch a smarmy attorney in the head after he calls into question her integrity on the witness stand. Wanda, never one to have a thought and leave it unexpressed, awakes from her coma and finds another attorney has been sitting by her bedside, offering her the opportunity for litigation in response to the accident in the courtroom. She has had more than enough of lawyers and sends him on his way, even though he’s really freaking cute.

Wanda is a fabulously faceted character: she’s got at least six dimensions, and is what I call a Cilantro Person. People either love cilantro in their salsa and Mexican food, or think it tastes like soap. I’ve never met anyone who thought, “Meh. Cilantro.” I’m sure no one in the backstory of this novel ever met Wanda and thought little about her afterward.

Let me tell you how much I dig Wanda, and Rich’s writing style. It’s taut – not a word wasted in revealing Wanda through Wanda’s own first person observations. And she’s freaking funny, too. For example, Wanda ponders the possibility that a former classmate has found happiness as a stay at home mom with her children:

The possibility occurred to me, for a brief moment, that it might be actually attainable, this sense of purpose and fulfillment that Dr. Phil and Oprah keep talking about.

And then Bill O’Reilly came on, and I realized the whole world was a bottomless pit of crap, just like I’d always known.

From writing the dialogue of people who speak? In questions? By ending their sentences with question marks? to locating the plot in popular culture references that highlight how hard it is to embark on honest and difficult self-discovery when it’s the stylish thing to do, Rich’s writing is fun, savvy, and genuine, and I loved it like I love chocolate chip cookies.

If you read the Amazon reviews of this book, some people loved it, and some people found Wanda monstrously unlikable. I made the mistake of looking at the Amazon listing before I got into the book, and worried that I’d react to Wanda like I reacted to Seinfeld. I hated that show – they were all so unlikable! They were mean and petty and self-centered and stupid and yet they were the…heroes? What the damn hell? I spend most of my working day with 9 million largely unlikable people; why would I spend my leisure time with four more hateful butt-munches as well? So if Amazon reviewers, who I should know better than to listen to half the time, thought Wanda was a heroine that they couldn’t root for, would I feel the same?

Nope. She is not often nice, and it’s frustrating to see her repeatedly push away people who are trying to be kind to her, but once you understand the motivations driving that habit, you empathize with her and, in my case, cheer her on, particularly as she starts to rebuild her life.

Wanda leaves the hospital, returns to work only to find out she’s been fired from her job selling television advertising for really stupid ass reasons, and then receives more phone calls and threats from her abusive ex-husband. She sinks into a dramatic depression and resists any and all attempts of help from Walter, that cute attorney in her hospital room, until he realizes she’s in danger and has her move into his apartment for safety.

Rich constructs several clever and thought-provoking events to drive the plot, not the least of which is a newspaper ad that says, “Do Something Meaningful.” Wanda responds with an ad of her own, asking who the hell would say such a thing, but through the course of over-editing, Wanda ends up not with the answer to her question, but phone calls from random people telling her who they are. One of them, Elizabeth, becomes Wanda’s friend and guide as she navigates herself back into a life she wants instead of the life she finds herself in, and gives her the tools to constructing that new life.

As Wanda moves from task to task in that reconstruction, the reader gets to know a person who is very, very prickly on the outside, who the reader might want to smack upside the head for her obstinate rejection of all overtures of friendship and kindness, but who at the core is a good person trying to overturn a lot of injustice in her life. It’s almost like watching someone meander through a 12-step program, only instead of following a prescribed set of steps, Wanda has to pick the issues she most struggles with, and correct them. From finding a job to patching up relationships, Wanda goes on the attack to adjust a life that seems to have attacked her from all sides. Of course, part of that rebuilding is acknowledging her own responsibility in what happens to her, and recognizing the motivations that drove her there.

As with any book that deals with a character’s self-realization and personal growth, the difficulty comes in finding balance between the need for making changes to one’s attitude, and the realization that one’s attitude towards oneself might have been the only thing that needed changing in the first place. Wanda’s choices that led her to a life she didn’t like stemmed from a critical element of her attitude toward herself, and once she adjusted that, she learned to act differently. 

ARGH! Here Be Vague Spoilers:

My problem with the ending, and what prevented me from giving this book a solid A, was that her realization to restore the balance between “keep fixing me” and “I’m damn fine as-is” came out of nowhere, it seemed to me. Without giving away the ending, she never acknowledges that she realizes she was worth the many gestures of friendship all through the story, but at the end, in the final scene, pronounces herself a fool for pushing herself towards a goal of self-recreation when from the start was a good person as-is. She needed to adjust her attitude certainly, but to stand up suddenly and say “Oh, I was fine all along and I never realized it!” had a patina of afterschool special moralizing to it that seemed to come out of left field instead of developing from her growth and increased self awareness in the last few chapters of the book. After such a fight to get from misery to happiness, I didn’t expect Wanda to take that happiness so quickly and wrap it up in a nice bow to finish it off.

Two, unless I missed it, there’s a storyline left unfinished, where the reader doesn’t find out what happened to Elizabeth and her ex-husband. The ex hubby has the same problem as Wanda – he destroys his happiness because he doesn’t think he truly deserves any and is more content to fail than risk not succeeding as everyone expects he will. But while Wanda realizes correctly she is responsible solely for her own life, Rich leaves Elizabeth’s storyline unfinished in such a way that I didn’t feel invited to create my own ending so much as I thought, “Hey, wait a minute, what about…?”

Arrrgh! Here End the Vague Spoilers!

I’ve been asking myself since I finished this book if someone with a different attitude would find Wanda unredeemable. It is difficult to set the limit for a character who has to descend into a miserable situation and then climb back out, I would think, because some people would find the actions that led to that descent so distasteful that there’d be no redeeming her, while other readers may be able to relate to shooting oneself in the foot repeatedly before eventually learning better aim. I related to Wanda because I have done some seriously boneheaded things in my life based on a belief of self-worth that was completely incorrect, and I can appreciate how hard it is to change a fundamental value of one’s attitude.

So while the ending seemed neatly drawn together from very ragged seams at the very last moment, I truly wanted to see that happy ending. Especially because it is a difficult thing to take a cranky, ornery, and very unfiltered person and have them find happiness and embrace it without having that same happiness change their entire demeanor to pink throbbing hearts and fluffy bunnies. Wanda remains who she is, only better. Well done. 

(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.)

Then Dunnan gets his fool self killed. (But of course he does. He’s mean to horsies! And he enjoys killing other people! Such a character cannot be long for the world in a romance novel, particularly if he’s married to the heroine.) Moncrief also finds out that his brother has died, making him the Duke of Lymond. He resigns from the army, returns to Scotland, and though he knows it’s a bad, bad idea, finds himself paying a visit to the widow.

Catherine Dunnan is a royal mess. Harry’s death has sent her into a spiraling depression, and along the way she’s developed quite the laudanum addiction. When Moncrief finally meets her, he finds her condition disturbing, but she’s still attractive, of course—drug-addicted romance novel heroines still look good even if they’re sallow and skeletal. When he returns the next day to deliver a spurious last letter from Harry to help comfort her despair, he finds that she’s deep in the throes of Happy Overdose Land.

He immediately takes steps to shock her back to consciousness, but in the process sees her in nothing more than her nightgown, and even worse, has to undress her. This, of course, is an unacceptable state of matters, so he marries her on the spot.

The problem is, Catherine remembers none of this when she regains consciousness. The overdose, the measures Moncrief took to drag her out of her drug-induced coma, the hasty wedding—none of it. But for better or worse, she’s now the Duchess of Lymond and a newlywed when she hasn’t even reconciled herself to being a widow.

Moncrief’s aloofness and autocratic manner irritate Catherine, while Catherine’s obsession with Harry’s letters chaps Moncrief’s hide. Gradually, though, Catherine learns that the real Harry is quite at odds with the man she had fallen in love with in the letters. Since Harry left for the Lowland Scots Fusiliers a mere month after the wedding, it’s not as if she had much time to get to know Harry’s true character.

Overall, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. The characters were engaging, the plot was interesting, and Ranney’s writing style is quite beautiful, but it lacked that special punch that would’ve made it a keeper. Catherine’s drug addiction was particularly interesting to me. It’s not very often that romance novel heroines are allowed such self-destructive behavior, but her descent into it and her recovery are skimmed over when I wanted more grittiness. And ultimately, in a weird twist provided by an out-of-nowhere suspense side-plot, we find out that her addiction wasn’t necessarily her fault anyway. That struck me as sort of cop-out; I would’ve found Catherine a much more interesting, nuanced character if the dependency (and her insistent denials that she wasn’t an addict) had been all her.

Also, the way Catherine handles the revelation that Moncrief truly was the letter-writer was just a bit too calm for my tastes. This is a situation just begging for some high drama, and Ranney has certainly demonstrated that she can write these sorts of things with a very deft hand—my two favorite books by Ranney (actually, these are two of my favorite romance novels, period), Upon a Wicked Time and My Beloved certainly didn’t shy away from drama—so I’m not sure why Ranney avoided it this time. Like To Love a Scottish Lord, a bit more Sturm und Drang would’ve been appropriate. This is ironic because many romance novels have the exact opposite problem: too much melodrama over small, inconsequential issues.

Catherine’s relative calmness when she finds out the true identity of the letter-writer is a contrast with her far more believable reaction when her former in-laws, Harry’s parents, come for a visit and start making insinuations about her lack of devotion to Harry’s memory while praising his name to the skies at every opportunity. She loses her temper and tells everyone off who has been giving her a hard time, and it’s one of the most entertaining scenes in the story. If Ranney had been able to impart that level of energy, snappiness and depth to the rest of the book, I would’ve liked it even better than I did. As it stands, though, this book is certainly no slouch, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re a sucker for stories involving unrequited love.

The Viscount Who Loved Me is the story of Anthony Bridgerton, the Viscount of the title, and Kate Sheffield. It’s the second in the Bridgerton series, after The Duke and I, which is probably my favorite Quinn and is the story of Anthony’s younger sister Daphne. Daphne, being a girl, would marry before her older brothers, if one follows the standard age timeline of the Regency period, where debs marry titled gentlemen 10 or so years their senior, so it makes perfect sense that Daphne is first, then Anthony.

Anthony assumed the title upon the sudden death of his father, whom he adored. The Bridgertons enjoyed an abnormal-for-the-time family relationship, with all the children in the household seen, heard, and spoken with by their parents at all times. The Bridgerton children don’t hide in the nursery until they come of age; they are part of the family from the beginning, and as the eldest, Anthony enjoyed a marvelous relationship with his mother, and his father.

When a bee sting kills his father instantly, Anthony, 18 years of age at the time, is left devestated and utterly convinced that he cannot ever think to surpass his father in any way, including age. He assumes the mantle of responsibility with appropriate gravity and seriousness, and sets to helping his mother raise his seven brothers and sisters. Understandably, Anthony matures into a very serious, emotionally quiet man, and after seeing his sister Daphne married off, decides it is time he found a wife, sired an heir, and ensured the inheritance of the title before his demise, which he remains convinced will be at his 38th year.

His requirements are simple: must be attractive, relatively intelligent (can’t have stupid heirs, after all), and not anyone with whom he has the remotest chance of falling in love with. Oh, the mighty, how they fall.

Upon querying his younger brothers, Colin and Benedict (have I mentioned, as a reviewer of this series ought, that the Bridgertons are named in alphabetical order? Indeed, they are!), who the “diamond of the season” is that year, he decides to marry said diamond, a lovely young woman named Edwina Sheffield.

The problem is, of course, Edwina’s stepsister, Kate. Edwina announced that she would not marry without her sister’s approval, and so all the foppish dunderheads of the ton, including Baron Dunderhead himself (I’m kidding) waltz poor Kate around the dance floor, hoping to make a fair enough impression to be allowed to continue courting Edwina.

This is the point at which I find one of the many reasons I love Quinn’s books: unique twists on common situations. Consider Edwina and Kate.

Edwina is gorgeous. Perfect in every flawless way, a vision to behold, in fact. She’s also kind, clever, smart, and adores her sister. Kate you might expect to be jealous, bitter, and spiteful towards her beautiful younger stepsister. In fact, Kate had to delay her own coming-out because her family could only afford one season for the both of them. So Kate is edging towards spinsterhood while Edwina came out in her prime. It would be passing easy for an author to make Edwina stupid or spiteful or self-centered and nasty. But she’s not. It would be equally easy for Kate to be mean, petulant, and suffering from deep and unmanageable self-esteem issues because of her incredibly good looking stepsister, with whom she must attend functions and alongside whom she must seek a husband. But she is not.

In fact, Kate and Edwina are genuinely friends as well as sisters. Just as the Bridgertons are a delight to read about for their close family relationships, Kate and Edwina aren’t annoyingly frought with sibling rivalry. It’s true that Kate cannot stand empty headed compliments comparing her with her sister, it’s not just because they hurt her feelings and cause her to become a green-eyed monster of fury and plots for revenge. It’s because she knows the person offering the compliment is so full of shit his eyes are brown. Kate is attractive, but Edwina is stunning, and she knows it. Foppish liars are stupid and not to be tolerated.

After Anthony sets his future on the shoulders of Edwina, hilarity ensues. Forced to interact with Kate more and more frequently, he realizes he is attracted to her, even as she gets under his skin in ways he would rather not think about. In turn, Anthony bugs the hell out of Kate, particularly as he begins his address of her sister by doing the one thing she cannot respect: comparing her to her sister.

The relationship between Kate and Anthony during their courtship is satisfying for so many reasons. First, the sparks, oh, how they fly. One of the reasons I like Quinn’s writing is that her character development rests mainly on dialogue, which I love, and so the conversations between Kate and Anthony reveal each individual, their relationship, and, as witnessed by the reader, their increasing feelings for one another. It’s not just “I hate you!” “No, I Hate YOU!” though there is some fighting involved. The bickering between them isn’t stupid; often it’s part of the larger sibling banter that involves his family, especially when one or more brothers are at a ball with them, and it slides back and forth between meaningful conversation that reveals much, and snide comments that spark equal replies in the other.

Further, there’s no lightning bold of “Holy Crap I’m in Luuuuuurve (tm)!” Anthony might wander around a bit too much cursing about his growing feelings for Kate, but he also is forced to acknowledge them, which I appreciate as a reader. The development of his feelings is a gradual increase that the reader can see, and the same is true for Kate, though her feelings also conflict with her regard for her sister, whom she knows is the real object of Anthony’s attention. Being jealous of her sister is a feeling that doesn’t sit well with Kate, though one wonders that she hasn’t deep down had more practice.

So if I’m so high over the moon about Julia Quinn novels, and I keep and reread them all the time, what are the flaws of this book, and why did I give it only a B+?

Candy and I once discussed our grading rubric, and what the lowest cutoff point grade would be for a “keeper” book. We both agreed that it was probably B+ and above. This book, while I love to reread it, suffers from some flaws that make it delicious for the first half and “ok, time to finish this book” for the second. And that’s what keeps it from getting in to the A-territory.

As I mentioned previously in another brief rumination, the hero and heroine get married just past the middle of the book. And this is a serious let-down for me. For one thing, the conflict between the hero and heroine is largely resolved by marriage - you know they aren’t going to split up, and though you know they will ultimately end up together when you start reading the book, to have them get married in the middle, without some major force of division overhanging them, just pushes the happily ever after too far forward for my tastes.

Further, I knew what the forces acting against the hero and heroine were, and they were largely personal demons that each has to face. I knew they’d face their problems and I knew they’d grow as characters, but to have one half of the expected conclusion neatly sewn up halfway through makes the rest of the book, for me, a bit of a drag. I know what’s going to happen. It’s a romance: there will be a happily ever after. That’s why I like them so much. I know there’s a happy ending. So if you locate the happy ending somewhere that isn’t an ending, it cheats me, because I know what to expect and know that no major forces of division will really and truly come between the heroine and the hero before the end of the book. Sure, she might get really pissed off and leave for a time, but without that ironclad security of marriage in the Regency time period, coupled with a lot of hot, sweaty coupling, a LOT more can happen between the couple to make their happily ever after seem more tentative.

Further, their personal demons served as part of the reason they were brought together, as it was something they had in common. But the problem with personal demons on the part of both hero and heroine is that they are personal - it’s not like she can crawl inside his knotty little brain and straighten that mess out. It’s not a question of behavior or overcoming a trauma to Looove and Trust again. The nature of their personal problems goes a bit deeper, but it’s a place of depth that exists in the character’s minds. So can one really help the other, aside from holding a hand and biting lips in an empathic fashion? Not so much.

The resolution of the novel was the problem for me: they got married, were forced into close quarters and had lots of sex, yet had to remain separate protagonists when it came to facing their own demons. They each earned their own happily ever after, but did they earn one together? I can’t really answer, because the sum of their relationship with one another was tabulated for them by the circumstances under which they married.

However, I do like Kate and I like Anthony, and while the denouement and resolution of the book is a let-down, the scenes with Kate and Anthony, and with Anthony’s family, are marvelous and wonderful and make me, the reader, a happy happy re-reader. It’s not so much that I have to read the entire story over and over again, though once I start a re-read I usually end up reading the whole story. It’s more the scenes and smiles I miss from particular segments of the story that I want to revisit, particularly the characters who I liked a great deal, like Daphne, her husband Simon, and Anthony’s other brothers and sisters. I like to visit this book frequently for the specific parts I remember fondly. So back on the keeper shelf it goes.

Would you have them locked in a dungeon? Kidnapped and held for ransom? Would you make them neighbors and then have one of the pipes in an apartment burst, forcing the other to take refuge in the dry apartment while repairs are made? Cause a rock to fall on the heroine’s head leaving her with partial amnesia where the hero is concerned, allowing him to date her under false pretenses? Have one of them become superglued to the other and then to a chair so they can’t call for help, nor can they get to the bathroom to pour nail polish remover all over themselves? Or have a zany uncle leave them his entire estate, to the exclusion of a host of other relatives,provided the hero and heroine move into said estate for six months’ time, not leaving the presence of the other for more than 48 hours?

If you picked the last one, well, you must have read this book. “A Will and A Way” places Pandora and Michael, the not-blood-related niece and nephew of a goofy and now deceased Uncle Jolley, owner and multi-billionaire inhabitant of a catskills estate called...wait for it… come on… you can see it coming...Jolley’s Folly.

Yeah. So down the road of predictability we go: Michael and Pandora stand to inherit a bajillion dollar estate if they live in the house for six months; the rest of the relatives are left with inconsequential things like books of matches to light fires under one’s ass, or the exact sum needed to buy wheat germ for life. If they can’t agree to move in to the giant, hulking mansion for six months, then the estate will revert to the other relatives in equal shares, along with some institute for the study of carnivorous insects.

I’m not kidding.

So Michael and Pandora are pissed because they don’t want to live with each other, and while Pandora is wealthy in her own right, neither is comfy with inheriting billions of dollars (whyever not I can’t even figure). The relatives who got the shaft are pissed and now in the position of hoping Michael and Pandora kill or run out on each other. But ultimately they agree to try living in the vast multi-winged expanse of the house together, much to the displeasure of the rest of the kooky family, and away the story goes.

It doesn’t get much more believable than that. I got the feeling Roberts sat down with a trading card deck full of common romance plot devices and frequently used conventions and shuffled them together to create this book. Usually, even operating with the most common of plotlines, Roberts can create a character, usually the hero as I love her men, who is so fascinating I’d put up with kidnapping, amnesia, witness protection, or God forbid even a secret freaking baby, so long as Roberts wrote at least one good character.

Neither of the characters are even remotely interesting to me, and nor are they too smart. First, it’s a huge house. Go live in separate wings. Don’t talk to each other. Don’t see each other. You already know that she designs award-winning jewelry by day, while he writes Emmy-award-winning television scripts by night. You don’t even have to same schedule. Just don’t talk to each other!

Look, I have to go to Passover Seder with an entire wing of my husband’s family that I find less than lovely to be around. If I can put up with them, and their merry ingestion of the four cups of wine that are part of the Seder service, then you can live six months in a mansion with someone you don’t actually have to see.

Second, what is all this animosity based on anyway? I mean, she designes jewelry. He writes scripts. Both creative professions. You’d think there’s some common ground there, but no, they actually snipe at each other by criticizing one another’s creative efforts! She designs “ugly baubles for rich women;” he writes “mindless entertainment for idiots.” Gosh, I know there’s professional jealousy in the artistic community but that’s a little extreme.

It’s not as if they are jealous of each other’s relationship with their dead uncle. They call a truce of momentary duration while talking to each other about how sad they are, will and inheritance nonsense aside. So where the animosity comes from is peculiarly unexplained. I know plenty of people who get under my skin, and I know why they do. And either I put up with it or I avoid them. I don’t go after them for more insults and fighting. Usually there’s a root source, a larger reason why they would be so pissed at each other. In this case, there’s none. It’s one more invented plot contrivance to draw the story along towards the final page. The characters don’t lead the story; the plot doesn’t either. Roberts drags them along and pushes them forward with the tip of her pen, forcing them together, forcing them into Grave Danger That Forces Admissions of Emotional Attachment, and wrapping their ending up neatly at the final page. I am amazed one of them didn’t say to the other, “Oh, now it’s time for me to get ‘accidentally’ locked in the basement so you can worry that someone is up to no good!”

The worst is that the source of all this ire is supposed to be because they are secretly in love with one another. If you love someone, even secretly, why would you put yourself in a position repeatedly such that the object of your adoration puts down your very personal creations that, coincidentally, pay your bills, thus allowing you to live on doing exactly what you enjoy doing. Wouldn’t the criticism do lasting, painful damage, coming from someone you purportedly love?

Aside from the woefully contrived conflict between the hero and the heroine, the external forces working against the protagonists are sketched with one of those inch-wide Crayola cubby-hands crayons. The relatives, who, DUH, of course are going to try to interfere with the terms of Michael and Pandora’s cohabitation to force them to be apart for periods of more than 48 hours, are all caricatures of various types, from the earthy-crunchy health duo, recipients of the lifetime supply of wheat germ, to the harshly inconsiderate brother, recipient of not a thing, and his ineffectual sister, who received a house in Palm Beach. You know they’re bad news, even the attorney thinks they’re kind of creepy, and yet the protagonists think the rest of the clan is going to go merrily into the evening without a worry or concern that, should the two of them be apart for two days, they suddenly receive an enormous inheritance, each.

So of course weird shit starts happening - ransacking, tampering, accidents that are two convenient for accidental cause, and false information being acted upon without proper verification on the part of the hero or heroine. Jeez. These two are dumb as hell. And even as the weird shit starts to become more menacing, not that it didn’t start with a rather frightening event in the first place, they agree NOT to call the police. I’m guessing there was a sentence edited out where the heroine says, “No, we should not call the police, even though millions of dollars of my personal property was tossed on the floor and left there. To call the police would mean a much too quick resolution to the drama, and we have two hundred pages to go!”

Further, the two servants, loyal and true of heart, are perfect in every way, serving as plot devices to push the two together, faking fainting spells and colds and general old agedness, causing the hero and heroine to clean, cook their own meals, and be around each other frequently.

The kicker moment is the climax of all the drama. The hero and heroine gather the family into the house and...oh it’s too stupid. Dare I tell you? Dare I spoil this marvelously predictable mess?

The hero and the heroine gather the family in the mansion, tell them that the gig is up, they know who has been causing all the problems and trying to kill them both, and then - the lights go out! People scream! And when the lights come on, there’s the heroine in a pool of blood, a bloody letter opener next to her, while the hero calmly stands over her and says that one of the family is a murderer. I shit you not. It was like one of those bad plays acted out where YOU are part of the DRAMA, and you have to go solve the MURDER in your own HOME.

And of course this whole melodrama wrings a confession out of the appropriate people and they all live happily ever after, as the hero and heroine have fallen marvelously in love with one another and will now cohabitate as Husband and Wife in their mutually admired artistic endeavors.

But wait! Before you rush right out and buy this thing, I never told you the very best part! The most wonderous, marvelous, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious next best thing?

This book is a two-novel set!! There are two books in one as Silhouette tries to milk the last dollars it can out of Nora Roberts, since she did not renew her contract with them. The next one? Oh, you’ll never guess. The hero and heroine are the younger members of two familes who are long time rivals and neighbors. You will never guess what the families’ competing interests are.

No really, give it a try.

Diamond mining? Software development? Hardware stores? Flower shops?

No.

I’m not even kidding.

Ranching, cattle, and oil.

Cue the “Dallas” theme.