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

This is partly due to the lack of urgency (Jax isn’t on the run any more), and maybe partly because, due to a biologically improbable mechanism of salvaging her brain from the ravages of grimspace navigation, Jax isn’t feeling too hot.  It makes a lot of sense for her to run and hide every time there’s a fire fight, but it doesn’t necessarily make for very exciting reading.  Especially not when she fills up the time with introspective thoughts on her likely death, and her relationship with surly telepathic pilot March. 

I’m not a big fan of the angsty relationship, but if you are, you will find much to love here.  Jax and March hooked up in Grimspace, but the course of true love, she is not running smooth.  Jax has Issues.  She’s clearly not over Kai (her lover who died just before Grimspace began), but she’s getting there.  She’s ill.  She’s skinny and weak and crippled, and she’s railing against that.  March is a psychic pilot who used to kill people with his brain.  He has issues too.  He can’t cope with the fact that Jax was practically raised to have a death wish (grimspace navigators die young), his abandonment issues are pretty huge.  He really wants Jax to need him.  Neither of them come off particularly well.  They clearly love each other, (both go nuts if they think the other is hurt or dead – this happens more often than you might expect) but neither of them seems to be in a place where a day to day relationship can really work. 

While all this makes Jax seem like a rounded, flawed, and realistic person, and I felt for her doomed love, I was rather wishing there was less of it; that things had moved a little quicker, that maybe they could get to the fireworks factory plot points already. 

There are good things to be had in this book; the Morgut are as delightfully creepy-awful as they were in Grimspace, as are the critters who live on Lachion (and you can really feel why Jax is afraid of the dark down in those tunnels).  The last fifth or so is fantastic.  New characters Jael and Hit are both welcome additions to Jax’s crew, even if they do cement its position in the Dysfunction Junction hall of fame.  Dina has always been a little one-note, and while that doesn’t change here (her job is to sass Jax), she is a nice counterpoint to our heroine, because she remains sassy in the face of anything at all.  Dina does not know how to spell the word ‘mope’.  Dina has forcibly removed it from all dictionaries in her vicinity.  And Vel is still here.  There are hints that back in the motherland, he’s as messed up as everyone else, but he does a good job rising above it, and he’s always fun to read.  Jax is usually surprised when Vel offers some deadpan commentary on the situation.  I take this as a hint she’s not as perceptive as she wishes she was, because Vel does this all the time, and I love him for it. 

I liked Wanderlust.  I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to; it kept me reading, but not up until three am.  I’m still on board for book three, the end of this one left me wanting more. 

There are myriad issues surrounding their relationship, from letting go of their high school impressions of one another, and of the “jock” and “nerd” roles they played at that time, to determining whether acting on their attraction is worth the risk should they be caught, not to mention the obvious “is this a passing fancy or is this permanent?” wondering on the part of both parties. It’s been a while, now that I think about it, since I’ve read a story that includes the “does s/he like me, or does s/he like me like me” uncertainty. In this case, it was quaint and effective.

The story is told with a lot of head hopping between Brandon and Jake, so the reader experiences the story through a rapidly shifting point of view. That switching can be distracting, as there were moments when I wanted more of Brandon’s impressions or more of Jake’s perspective. Overall, I thought more of the story was explored from Brandon’s point of view, but Jake was a slightly more fascinating character to me: a silly, casual guy who loves sports, loves his job, and misses the opportunities that might have been his had his health and his joints not been sacrificed too early in this lifetime. But that is no slight to Brandon, who is quiet, adorably dedicated in the same way that Jake is to his job and his life, observant, wickedly smart and adaptable in most situations.

Two things that I noticed, one a minor nitpick. I wonder if one of the writers isn’t Australian, because I caught a few instances of Aussie idioms ("What are you on about?” and “good on you,” for example) that I couldn’t quite imagine folks in Georgia using - though one of my friends who lives in Georgia is an Aussie ex-pat, so maybe she’s influenced the world of gay romance. But if I go down South and hear someone ask me if I want a cuppa, I’m more than happy to admit I’m wrong on this one.

The other thing was a potential scene that I kept waiting to materialize but never did. Brandon is a former med student with two Masters degrees in various sciences. When Jake’s shoulder is seizing up on him, causing him considerable pain, Brandon (in a scene of electric sexual tension like yowzer boy howdy) gives him a massage, and explains where the injury is, revealing both his own understanding of human anatomy, and his ability to translate that in to a practical understanding for himself and the reader of how much pain Jake tolerates on a daily basis to simply do his job. Because Jake had surgery on his shoulder, knee, and ankle, and was pushed to keep playing by coaches and his own need for continued scholarship, his body bears a good amount of painful damage, and with Brandon’s explanation, Jake’s dedication and commitment to his teaching job and his coaching responsibilities become more than his joking, laid back persona reveal.

Brandon then offers Jake a massage, using equipment that he has at home from his med school days, and Jake grudgingly accepts - but no massage scene!? What what?! But, but! I was anticipating that scene for many reasons, and was so disappointed when it never arrived. One, hot hot! Two, electric tension, they has it. And three, the power dynamics in Brandon’s and Jake’s relationship are constantly shifting, but most of the time, Brandon is the fish out of water in Jake’s athletic world, and Jake is the individual with the most power, control, and authority. If Brandon gave Jake a therapeutic massage (or a non therapeutic one, nudge nudge, wink wink!) then the authors would have had the opportunity to show off even more of the depth of Brandon’s knowledge (which is holy shit considerable) and his dedication to his own medical school career. At the beginning of the novel Brandon mentions his doctorate, and when his overloaded schedule reaches a breaking point, he has to decide what to do with all his commitments, but I really missed this possible opportunity for these two characters.

However, I have to say, my goodness, I really liked this book. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of angst or “Oh, oh, the anti-gay lynch mob is after us!” fear, but both men acknowledged the reality of being gay within their community that seemed appropriate without being overwhelming. Caught Running grabbed me, and left me with a big fat smile on my face. Those who reject gay romance out of hand would do well to try this story, as it balances well the sexual, emotional, and social elements of contemporary romance between two very real and very captivating men. 

But when Dani’s mom chooses the beach town of Heaven, Dani finds herself longing for things she hasn’t allowed herself to articulate before: she wants to stay. Have real friends. Who use her real name. And who aren’t potential targets for her mom’s next theft. That’s a tall order, because autonomy is one subject in which Dani’s mom hasn’t really given her a great deal of instruction. One of the most descriptive passages of Dani’s narration explains:

For silver I learned to read,write, work numbers. For silver I learned the name of every plantation from Virginia to Florida.... The story of my life can be told in silver: in chocolate mills, serving spoons, and services for twelve. The story of my life has nothing to do with me. The story of my life is things. Things that aren’t mine, that won’t ever be mine.

That one line makes me think of Prufrock.

There’s a good number of romances that glamorize thieves, but if you’ve ever had the violated feeling of being robbed yourself, knowing someone was in your home, helping themselves to your things and invading without your knowledge or permission and stealing what’s precious to you, it’s not too glamorous. And while Dani’s mother has a very concrete and distant way of looking at her potential victims, and at humanity at large, Dani finds herself at an intersection between her growing desire for something different and more in her life, her growing shame and consciousness of what it is that she’s doing, and her growing sense of panic that she’s not suited for or even good enough for anything, or anyone, else. That intersection creates a challenge for the author, and Scott admirably balances Dani’s past crime and her present moral crisis so that the reader can root for her and want her to want to change for her own good, even while acknowledging that Dani is really, really good at what she does.

Dani is the center of the novel, and since it’s YA, the first person narrative is mostly about Dani’s learning to choose her own path and figuring out who she is and wants to be in the period of a few weeks just before she sets her feet in motion down that path. There is a romance, but the person she finds herself falling for, Greg, is as much a catalyst as he is a foil, though he’s a marvelously sweet and considerate guy.

Scott has some great comic skills, particularly in the dialogue. Dani struggles to remember to keep herself, well, to herself and answers Greg with questions nearly every time they speak. After a few meetings between them, their dialogue was so snappy and sharp I wanted him to find her and talk to her, no matter what it meant for the plot. Plot progress? Acquisition of autonomy and self-reliance? Pah! Want sexy dialogue!

One interesting element I just realized: the reader never learns her mother’s name, and all the way to the end of the story her mother never lets go of her life and her dream of shopping for target houses, shopping for opportunities to steal other people’s stuff, then shopping with the money she’s fenced. That points to my biggest frustration with the story, though it is realistic: Dani’s mother doesn’t ever truly recognize the depth of her selfishness and neglect – which is, as I said, totally in line with the behavior pattern of a selfish person. While there are small moments where Dani’s mother does demonstrate that she might be thinking of Dani and her future, most of the time Dani lives her life according to her mother’s wishes because without her mother, no one would want her. The degree to which she doubted her mother’s love made those small moments seem small and brittle in comparison to the true, though brief, overtures of friendship Dani navigates in her first weeks in Heaven. No one, but no one, has ever stood up for her, or made her feel valued for who she was, not what she could steal.

Ultimately, Dani pays the bigger price for her mother’s choices in their lives, and has a good bit of harm to confront when she finally decides that she can be in control of her life instead of her mother. Oddly, her mother is half of the reason Dani ends up in the driver’s seat literally and figuratively, but her mother never fully appreciates what makes Dani happy. She mostly insists on reminding Dani that whatever it is that Dani might do, it won’t make her mother happy.

But because Dani’s decision to own herself and her future comes so close to the end, and the change is pushed by such draining circumstances, I’m left not entirely confident in Dani’s self-ownership. I’m hopeful, and I want her to ride off into the sunset with Greg but I’m not sure that she will. And I wished any one of the people who hurt and neglected Dani had experienced at least one moment of ownership of their own responsibility.

While the ending is hopeful, it’s not a bonafide happily ever after; after being on the outside for so long, Dani’s focus is simple: home and belonging, with belongings that are her own, in her own home. The price that Dani has to pay for that home of belongings is a high one, and it’s a powerful story. Acquiring those things when it means rupturing everything she’s known until then is akin to stealing – stealing her future from her mother, the one who taught her to steal.

I’m (personally) rather turned off by characters whose names I cannot pronounce. And let me tell you (although I’m sure you already know), this book was a smörgåsbord of irregular triphthongs and incompatible consonants. And as with any decent Swedish buffet, everything was interesting to look at, but didn’t inspire quite enough confidence to actually put in one’s mouth.

My usual tactic of calling any character with an unpronounceable name the first letter of his/her last name did me absolutely no good on Barrayar because (again, as you know), nine out of ten characters on that planet have last names beginning with V.

I’m still not sure exactly which V character it was that attempted the coup. I’m sure I had been introduced to him earlier in the book, but by the time he was facing execution, he was just another V to me.

All in all, [Bujold] spins a good yarn. The book didn’t force me to read. It allowed me downtime. But it certainly didn’t allow me to forget that Cordelia was waiting for me to continue with her adventures.

Wow! Lois is going to be the Guest of Honor at Denvention 3! Next time I stop at Barnes & Noble I’ll see if they have a copy of Young Miles and pick it up. It would be interesting to see what familiar characters are up to.

Again, I enjoyed the book, and I think you very much for having sent it. I’d give it a B-. I enjoyed the book. An “A” book would have forced me to read it in one sitting. A “C” book I doubt I would have finished. So Cordelia’s Honor gets a B (B Minus only because there were too many unpronounceable names - but who am I to nitpick?).
---

Thanks Robert for the review, and glad you ultimately picked up Bujold as another author to follow. One person down, a few hundred bazillion to go in my quest to introduce the best of the best in romance and romance hybrids to everyone on the earth. Mwaaahahahahaaaaaa. 

Yes, it totally does. And it works pretty well. You need to change the angle of the book at first, and futz around with distance, but once you figure out how the software likes it, you can buzz along at a good clip. If you get a false hit, you can search using the ISBN, which is by far the quickest and most accurate way to search. Books without ISBNs, such as very old books or ARCs, can be entered manually--you can conduct a search by entering keywords such as the title and author and it’ll search through Amazon.com’s database for hits, or you can create a blank book and enter everything by hand. It’s all quite ridiculously easy to use, and it pretty much has fields for just about every goddamn thing you can think of--edition notes, whether or not it was signed, whether or not it’s a rare edition, the condition of the book, whether you bought it used, etc. And if you misenter something, deleting or undoing changes is a snap.

So that’s the good. What’s the bad?

First of all, if you’re scanning in mass market paperbacks and use the UPC on the back, it’s going to read the barcode, but it’s not going to pull up accurate information, if it can find anything at all. Seriously. This mofo was convinced that all my Neil Gaiman books were sparkly pink butterfly hairclips, and it flat-out couldn’t find the information for most of my science fiction and romance collection. This had me incredulous at first--are you shitting me? Did these people have no idea how many MMPBs people buy and keep? The vast majority of my collection consists of MMPBs. I was ready to stab a bitch.

But before the stabbings began, we asked tech support what the hell was up, and it turns out that if you scan the UPC in the inside front cover of the paperback, all is well--it’ll pull the right information. And what do you know, it worked like a charm--of the hundreds of books I scanned last night, I got one false hit from using the UPC on the inside cover, but the rest of the time, it behaved beautifully. As far as annoyances go, it’s pretty minor, but it still slowed me down, and it irritated me that it couldn’t just accurately read the UPC on the back to begin with.

Another annoyance resides with the search function. Assuming you’re not entering an ISBN for your search, you’re going to get a list of hits. However, all you get is a cover image (if it has one, and if you have to enter the information manually, odds are incredibly high that you aren’t going to get a picture), title, author and publishing year (the publishing months are wildly inaccurate, which is not their fault, necessarily, because they’re using Amazon’s database). You don’t get any other details, such as binding or publisher. This isn’t a problem with new books, but if you’re scanning in obsolete editions of, say, Georgette Heyer, there are fifty hojillion hits even if you’re reasonably specific and include the publisher name in the search terms. You can click on the More Info link, which will shunt you to the Amazon.com listing for that item, but again, that slows me down. I want to see the binding and the name of the publisher, because I’ll have a reasonable certainty that I’ll be entering the right item into my library.

Also, it automatically enters the date you scan the item in as the purchase date. This is annoying; I’d like to have a “date entered into library” field instead, and if I’m anal-retentive enough to enter the actual date of purchase (and really, I’m not), I’ll either enter that myself, or check off a box that says “Assume date entered into library is date of purchase.”

But back to the good:

Once you’ve scanned in your books, you can create custom bookshelves. So far, we’ve created a bookshelf called “Candy” that filters for books with “Candy” in the notes. And no, you don’t need to type in a note for every book you scan in. After each session, you can sort books by purchase date, shift-click to select multiple books and mass edit the sumbitches. I imagine you can create all sorts of custom bookshelves, such as genre, binding or author. (I’m probably going to create an Anne Stuart shelf just to see how many of her books I own; goddamn that woman is prolific. Is she even human? Does white android blood run through her veins? Am I sounding kind of creepy right now? I am, aren’t I?)

All in all, though, this piece of software is a good value for its money, and so far it blows its competition out of the water--I tried a free version for Windows machines called Libra, and the webcam barcode scanner bit couldn’t work worth a shit. The closet librarian in me cackles with glee and satisfaction because I’ll finally have all of my book collection catalogued, and the annoyances are definitely, well, annoying, but not deal-breaky. If you have a Mac, you should totally give it a whirl. Just remember to scan the UPC on the inside of the front cover if it’s a mass market paperback, otherwise it’s going to think your Emma Holly novels are copies of the Velveteen Rabbit, when really, the other sort of rabbit would be a much more apropos mistake.