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

Celia Fussell loses her father, and suffers through a gaudy, rainy funeral and through the venomous behavior of her sister-in-law, who is all too eager to see the spinster sister as marginalized in their household as possible.  But when her father’s will is read, it is revealed that Celia has inherited a castle in the Black Forest of Germany - AND that her brother’s estate is double-entailed so meanie sister in law can’t enjoy herself much. Nanner-nanner, you selfish wench. Of course, Cissy has a catch to deal with as well: she has to marry the son of her father’s friend, the man from whom her father bought the castle.

So off Cissy goes, all the way to Germany to go live in her castle. Because even being alone in a country by herself in a castle facing marriage to a stranger is better than being the spinster sister under the same roof as the new Baroness. When she meets her father’s friend and his wife, they’re lovely people, so there’s some safety and shelter, but the son in question, Fenris.... He’s a tortured gothic hero who wants nothing to do with her and is horrified to learn his family hasn’t owned the castle for years, despite the fact that Fenris has been living there in solitude, nursing a healthy and damn near heaping dose of misanthropy and a horrific war injury that left him without one of his legs. He lost his leg when he ran off to fight Napoleon before the German government thought that was a good idea, and as a result of his “treason,” his family had been stripped of their titles and status. Fenris blames himself for his family’s downfall and is crushed to learn that his father had to sell the castle secretly, and that they no longer own the home he’s been living in for years.

Fenris decides that he needs to get rid of Cissy so she’ll run home to England, and that’s where the best parts of New Skool Remixed Gothic Romance as interpreted by Schwab are shown off. Schwab has a great prose style, and a deft hand at blending humor and horror, mystery and mayhem. There’s a good number of layers to this story as well, which I can’t celebrate enough because nothing makes me happier than seeing an author creatively and innovatively turn an established subgenre upside down, then right side up, after inserting a few new concepts. I never appreciated Old Skool Gothic romance, but I appreciate this book and the new ways it looks at gothic romance.

I loved Cissy, because she was innocent and idealistic, but not at all stupid. Her father, a student of mythology, was her closest friend and mentor, and even in her grief she finds soothing peace in the stories and myths they’d read together. In some novels, the heroine is a student of something, or a devoted follower of a particular philosophy or intellectual movement - but over the course of the story the reader receives nothing in the way of instruction or information about that alleged interest of the heroine’s. It’s all lip service performed solely to make the heroine seem deeper than she is. (The modern corollary, of course, is the heroine who is supposedly excellent at her job yet during the course of the story reveals herself to be a complete and utter idiot at her profession).

Cissy is a student of mythology, myth, and folklore, and that fact is woven throughout her character, and throughout the story itself. Her knowledge of fairy tales is a consistent subtext to the plotline, and Cissy’s knowledge of languages both dead and living reveal that she’s no ninny. She’s freaking brilliant. And yet, because her passion is fairy tales and myths of love and happily-ever-after, Cissy is very innocent, and exceptionally fanciful. That unending optimism and pursuit of happiness for herself fits brilliantly into the darkness of the setting and of the mystery and horror of the plot, and it’s no mystery at all why Fenris is ultimately drawn to her. 

Moreover, the book takes place in an entirely new setting for me - in a forest in Germany, which is both fanciful, creepy, and a refreshing change from merry old England.

Schwab’s storytelling also has tight turns that drop the reader like a rollercoaster from merry heights of whimsical happiness for Cissy into plunges of holy shit terror and uncertain fear - which make it bloody hard to put the damn book down. The mix of nefarious characters, mystery, intrigue, and deep, churning sexual attraction don’t help either when you might be trying to get something else done.

My disappointment was slim - but to my mind there was not enough retribution for all evil betrayals, though the revenge taken on the primary villain is freaking creepy. Moreover, the plunges from prose to melodrama, particularly in the interludes between the chapters at times left me feeling as if the paranormal element to the story were being wedged in, almost as if it were an afterthought to the story.

However, when I picked this book up to flip through it again for this review, I found myself putting it BACK in my bag to read portions again, something that rarely, if ever, happens. Schwab’s use of multiple legends and fairy tales to parallel the protagonists’ story is particularly brilliant, and this is a book that I will certainly revisit again, as the innocence of the heroine and the dark brooding woundedness of the hero are enticing and inviting. Well played, Ms. Schwab, well played.

Her grandmother, a Cherokee Indian labeled a witch by Asshat Stepdad, isn’t home, and Zoey goes looking for her, only to feel herself getting sicker and sicker as her body begins the initial change far from the safety of the House of Night. She runs looking for her grandmother, but instead trips, knocks her head on a rock, and finds herself on an out-of-body journey to a meeting with Nyx, the Goddess of Night and the Goddess of the Vampyres. Nyx marks her again as her own, this time by filling in what had been an outline of a moon on Zoey’s forehead - something that shouldn’t happen until much much later in the changing process - and tells her that she is special, the eyes and ears of the Goddess in the world. Zoey refutes this idea. Loudly. But since much of what has happened to her is out of her control, she accepts this idea of being a Goddess’ chosen daughter, and when she wakes up, Zoey finds herself safely at the House of Night, her grandmother beside her. Once recovered from her fall, however, she faces life in a new boarding school on her own, with the requisite challenges of avoiding the psychotic bitch queen bully girl, and making new friends who are at least as interesting as she is, while knowing that she doesn’t quite fit in at this school, either.

I’ve said before that I’m a big YA fan, and love a lot of YA books, and this is no exception.

Do I like Zoey? Yeah. She’s subject to a lot of forces that she can’t control or even remotely understand, but she operates on instincts that come from a good heart and an intelligent and strong moral code. She gets feelings that tell her clearly when to conceal things she knows, and while she doesn’t know why she’s being told by unseen forces to keep her mouth shut, she does it, and figures she’ll get the answer eventually. She’s been dropped into a world that’s much more powerful and scary than the world she’s used to, and she doesn’t whine about it. Zoey possesses enough self-confidence to navigate her new environment, but not so much self-confidence that she begins to irritate. The only thing that’s odd about Zoey is her very firm and outspoken stance that drugs of any kind are stupid, and those that do them are beyond morons. I was more expecting her to have a live-and-let-live kind of attitude, since most of the time she herself would like to be left alone, but her perspective is a theme throughout the story, and while it matches with her strength and her moral compass, it comes across almost abrasive - and I can see why other characters would find it a drag to listen to.

In the larger picture, though, this is a story of a teenager who is different for magical reason, but then becomes even more different than her already-different peer group. Add to that a boarding school, a whole lot of magical training, and there’s a very Obvious Comparison to be made. But fortunately, both writers Cast are aware of the similarities and do it all much better in this book.

Marked is different because the book is told in the first person and Zoey’s narration possesses a very unique voice. As I said, she isn’t much of a whiner, unlike some male marked-on-the-forehead characters I know, and she’s strong. The friends that she makes at school are believable in themselves, and aren’t just reflections or foils for Zoey. They’ve got their own problems and their own charms.

Further, one of the most unique aspects to the story is the world that Cast & Cast construct. Everyone knows there are vampires, but not much is said by Zoey or her friends (vamp or human) that indicates how or how much the vampires interact with humans. The humans know they could be marked as teenagers, and they know about the process and the existence of the school, but there isn’t much detail about how these two words interact, if at all.

Most obvious among the mentions of these parallel societies is the idea that prominent celebrities (to wit, Kenny Chesney and Faith Hill - Zoey’s roommate Stevie Rae is a country fan) are vampires. Interesting concept - and one answer as to why some people seem so incredibly talented AND good looking, if the excuse of digital vocal tuning and rampant airbrushing weren’t satisfactory.

In addition to that world are some nefarious elements that aren’t quite identifiable yet. The evil in the book, and the forces working against Zoey, and possibly against Nyx, are layered, mysterious, and of course not at all satisfactorily worked out in this, the first book of a series (dammit).

And yet again, I find myself butting heads with my frustration with series books. There are big threads left hanging that don’t allow the book to stand full on its own. It’s clearly a Book One, not just a book in and of itself. I do know from many a source that publishers who want a series want the books in the series to be clearly and obviously part of a larger whole, even if that means the individual books issued in the story need crutches to hold up a piece of the storyline. At this point I do expect to encounter a character saying, “And visit the bookstore next month when....” Seriously, publishing folks? It gets old. It’s stringing the reader along and this reader don’t like it much.

In this particular series, the larger questions that are left so very unanswered are very large indeed, and seem to encompass several entwined mysteries, leaving Zoey and the reader to question who is trustworthy, and what is happening to some of the students who don’t survive the complete change into full vampiredom? Yet even within those questions, the revelations of Zoey’s character, the development of her friends, and the potential for the future of the story arc in this series definitely cause me to look deliberately towards book 2 with an eye to read and enjoy. 

Lookit, this book not only features a secret baby, but a secret baby that’s reunited with the heroine by a string of highly unlikely circumstances, AND it features an ending that smooths over the difficulties and minimizes the impact of what happened. I’m not talking about the social consequences--though that was handled in a rather distressingly facile manner as well--but the emotional impact on the family. From the father (who’s been lied to for over ten years not just by his beloved daughter, but by his wife), to the child himself--come on, the boy’s concept of who he was and where he came from has proven to be a complete and utter lie--the book dealt with all that juicy conflict in the space of a couple dozen pages. Double you tee eff, mate?

Let’s face it, the secret baby device is pretty damn hackneyed, even when done well--and I speak this as somebody who’s actually enjoyed secret baby books in the past, despite my tendency to treat it like a piñata--so why exacerbate it by making everything so pat? So easy? So--dare I say it--treacly?

It’s not as if I’m especially bothered by predictability or spoilers; in fact, I’m the sort of sick freak who’ll occasionally sneak a peek at the ending of a book and continue happily reading. But once the secret baby was introduced, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that the kid was going to show up later in the book, probably as a plot device to allow things to come to a head.

I didn’t especially enjoy being proven right on that score.

I’m not saying the heroine got off scot-free, or that the father didn’t display distress at being lied to. It’s just that the consequences weren’t enough, especially given the fantastic job Chase had done building the father’s character up and his connection with Charlotte--and really, the father, together with the villain were my two favorite characters in the book. Charlotte and Darius pretty much walked out of Casting Central in this one; in fact, I kept thinking of Charlotte as Whatsername from the moment I set the book down until I looked it up just a few minutes ago. They’re decent characters as far as they go, but they didn’t do much to make themselves memorable, and Charlotte, frankly, exasperated me when she started fucking Darius without agonizing over the consequences because GOOD GOD, WOMAN, HOW DID YOU THINK YOU GOT PREGNANT THE FIRST TIME? BY EATING TOO MUCH STRAWBERRY TRIFLE?

I also didn’t especially like the way the two of them fell in love so fast and so hard, given how the two of them are set up as these cautious characters who are all wary of love and marriage. The two of them really don’t get to interact all that much before they’re all goo-goo eyed (and loined) over each other. This aspect of the book, as with so many other aspects, felt rather slapdash and rushed. Not to say that there aren’t well-written whirlwind romances, some of them even featuring rather cynical characters, but I didn’t feel the spark in quite the same way I did with, say, Jessica and Sebastian in Lord of Scoundrels, or Daphne and Rupert in Mr. Impossible.

The rest of the book is passably well-written, because this is, after all, Loretta Chase we’re talking about. The banter is decent, and Charlotte and Darius spar amusingly, with a rather memorable scene in the library making me chuckle out loud. I just couldn’t help but feel that the book would’ve been vastly improved if, say, Charlotte had had to suffer the rest of her life not knowing what had happened to the child, or she and Darius had sparred more and had a relationship that had developed more slowly, or if we’d seen more of the fallout as a consequence of the bastard child Charlotte bore--in short, if the book hadn’t taken the easy way out so many damn times in a row.

I do have to mention that Chase did a great job with the secondary characters, because they take on a life and vividness that most other authors can only dream of for their main characters. Chase pulls off her characteristic inversion-of-expectations with the villain, a military man who, unlike the other suitors Charlotte has successfully brushed off, is smart enough to see through her tactics and deploy some novel tactics of his own. (Oh, would that Chase had done the same on the secret baby plot. Cry.) You’re set up to think he’s going to be an evil, evil bastard, but no, he ends up being a human. Fancy that.

When I put this book down, I thought “Meh. Yet another readable but predictable romance novel. Disappointing. B-.” But when I thought about the secret baby plot, the outrage at its squandered possibilities eclipsed my other reactions to the book, so I knocked it one down another half grade to C+. Then I re-read the irritating portions, and though still irritating, they really were quite well-written, so: back to B-. Verging on a C.

I checked a couple of other review sites and Amazon before making this review live, and it looks like most people loved this like it was their mama. So bring it, bitches! Tell me how wrong I am.

Candy: Working for the Devil is much more polished than Dark Watchers, which was the first book of Saintcrow’s that I read and reviewed--and funnily enough, the hero of that book was named Dante, too. Ultimately, Working for the Devil was too flawed a read for me to give it anything more than a B-. Why? Mostly because Dante got on my tits too much. It’s not that I didn’t like her, because I don’t have to like somebody in order to read about them--or even root for them (witness my love of the Flashman novels). Mostly, it was because I didn’t find her convincing as a bad-ass warrior and martial artist, and here’s why:

She’s too angry.

No, more than that, she’s utterly lacking in any sort of calm. She keeps making assumptions and turning into Berserker Woman Who Will CUT CHOO LIKE A PIG, BITCH. Now, that could work to keep her alive for a while--a good long while, even, especially if you have the psi advantages Dante does--but I don’t buy that she can be THAT GOOD. The best martial artists learn to work with their surroundings and to go with the flow. One of the cornerstones is striving for clearheadedness--and Dante is anything but. She’s a royal mess, and she spends all the book literally in knots from stress and fucked-up headspace issues.

I mean, I can see why she’s a ball of neuroses, based on the glimpses of the past we’re provided, but her consistent inability to communicate clearly and her refusal to listen reminded me of those feisty old-skool heroines. She’s not stupid, she’s just impatient in a really irritating way, and I felt that her frustrating refusal to just slow down and listen was sometimes a way to artificially prolong the conflict.

Another problem I had with the story was how I felt strangely distant from Dante. I had ready access to her mental and physical space, but not really her emotional space. I find this difficult to explain, because on looking back, it’s difficult for me to pinpoint what exactly is keeping me from how she feels, because this is a first-person narrative, and it’s not as if Dante held back on what she really thought about things, even when she was obviously being an unreliable narrator.

It’s one thing for me to not like a character. It’s another for me to not be convinced by her. And for large portions of the book, Dante just didn’t strike me as being true, and having her be the sole voice of the book started to grate on me after a while.

Oh, and Japhrimel’s reason for falling in lurrrrve with Dante? Didn’t totally buy it. What he did was wildly romantic, but there was too much telling ("You treated me like an equal!") and not enough showing, especially given the incredibly short time span of the book--the bulk of the action takes place in, what, a week? Dante was a dick to Japhrimel for a good proportion of that time, and when she finally softened up--well, I just didn’t buy that a demon, and not just any demon, but SATAN’S RIGHT HAND AND GODDAMN ASSASSIN, would soften up after such a short time, and for so little. If we’d had Jaf’s perspective, I might’ve bought into the scenario, but on the other hand, the emotional punch of what he did wouldn’t have been as great.

So really, if we’d had more time with Dante and Jaf to see their relationship develop, and if Dante hadn’t been such a stressed-out freakball, this book could’ve easily been in the A territory. Because it was a pretty good adventure yarn, and it says quite a bit that I was able to finish it in only a few days despite not being convinced by Dante as a character.

Sarah: I concur about the book’s readability. It definitely kept me interested, even as it kept me irritated.

YES and insert used of “Pwned” here re: Japhrimel’s sudden fall into the liquid hot magma of luuuurve™. I would understand a lot of dark fearsome lurkery from him, as Satan’s hot dude, with some inexplicable kindness out of nowhere that seemed to physically pain him because dude he’s a DEMON and he cannot be NICE, but the sudden, “You treat me like an equal!” was way too pat and said too much about Dante too easily. She treats him as an equal! Ergo he loves her! Ergo ergo - she is just too amazing for words and look at the generous river of honey-flavored love that flows through her soul that she treats a Demon who is, again THE RIGHT HAND OF SATAN, as an equal!

My problem was how the book dealt with the Obvious Comparisons. This book will Obviously be Compared to the series about Her Royal Humptyness, Anita Blake, and it marks an opportunity for a talented author - and this is not a throwaway compliment because Saintcrow is damn hell talented like damn hell whoa - to do a necromancer heroine Differently without so much damn sex. A wise friend of mine, and I’ve quoted her before, said that one of her chief complains about Blake was that she “collects magic powers like charms on a charm bracelet,” and that the acquisition of greater talents comes far, far too easy.

For Dante, she doesn’t easily walk through the book and pick up additional talents without consequence or effort, but there’s a similar sense of “it comes damn easy, don’t it, honey?” when it comes to her psi powers. She can animate a very dusty dead dude for an unheard-of amount of time and there’s no explanation as to why - where that surge of ability is coming from, whether it’s attributable to the presence of a Demon augmenting her already-strong ability, or whether it’s a sign that she has untapped depths of talent. When someone has powers that extraordinary, and then even among those with that set of strengths she’s even MORE extraordinary, I want to know WHY. I’m tired of psychic and psi-talented heroines just being extra more gooder just to set them apart as admirable. It’s like Harry Potter Syndrome: identify the hero by his/her extra more gooder specialness, even in a world where s/he is already special!

And here, a lesson for the copyeditor of this book on motherfarking comma splices because deeeeYAM was that distracting.

Note: I don’t actually blame the author. I blame the multitude of people whose freaking JOB IT IS TO KNOW THE RULES OF GRAMMAR WHEN PUBLISHING A BOOK THAT PEOPLE PAY FOR. If I can teach the concept of comma splices to remedial college composition students, surely someone whose JOB IT IS should not need a refresher. But alas, it seems it is true.

The official definition on Wiki:

A comma splice is when two independent clauses are joined by a comma.

This means two complete sentences that are strong enough to stand on their own are joined by a comma. A COMMA is NOT STRONG ENOUGH to JOIN THEM.

Here is a test as to whether your clause is independent:
1. It has own car, or job.
2. If you walk up to a stranger and say the clause aloud, it is a complete thought on its own.
3. If you walk up to a stranger and say the clause aloud, you still look like a treebat crazy person, AND the stranger waits for you to complete your crazy thought.

E.g.: Comma splices are the devil, I can’t stand to see them repeatedly in a novel.

EITHER you need an “and” or some other conjunction to join those two clauses, or you hook yourself up with another punctuation mark. As I told my students: the comma, it is not strong enough. Your comma needs to lift weights. Consider the semicolon: ; A comma that is lifting a barbell to PUMP IT UP. *clap*

I did not ever say I was not a completely dorky professor.

/ end rant

Candy: Yeah, the comma splices were pretty distracting. Thanks for the lesson, perfessor. Hee.

And good point about Dante getting superpowers and hot demon mens with amazing ease (and hot human mob boss mens of unspeakable wealth and power, for that matter). And actually, the ease with which Dante seemed to attract people, given she was about as cuddly as a titanium cactus, kind of puzzled me--until it occured to me that Dante is a sub-species of Mary Sue. Instead of being perfect and saving the world and having everybody in the world lurrrrve her, Dante is imperfect and angry and often downright awful to the people who care about her, but everybody in the world still lurrrrves her and she still saves the day. An Angry Sue, if you will. But the very fact that she’s so difficult to be around makes me wonder why she’s so compelling. She’s apparently a charismatic bitch, but I didn’t feel the pull of her personality the way I have other charismatic bitches in romance who did things that made me uncomfortable, like, say, Melanthe of For My Lady’s Heart.

Speaking of Mary Sue: Jace Monroe. I liked the fantasy of having this extremely hot and hugely wealthy bad-ass dude in the wings--and motherfucker had unlimited resources in the book--but I did wonder how in the hell he got this far. And the Big Misunderstanding between him and Dante was rather laughable but, given what an incendiary asshole Dante is, actually kind of believable.

OK, so we’ve bitched on and on about the book, we should probably talk about something it did right, yeah?

I really, really liked the action scenes. They’re some of the best I’ve read, and I’m in awe at how Saintcrow conveyed the chaos of being in a huge balls-out all-or-nothing fight while still keeping the action coherent. Fight scenes are freakin’ hard to write, and much respect to Saintcrow for pulling so many of them off without losing or confusing me.

The plotting was tight, and the twist was quite excellently twisty. And extra special bonus points: Saintcrow even had a decent excuse for Villain Exposition. None of that “And now, Mr. Bond, before I kill you in this unnecessarily elaborate way, let me explain to you in excruciating detail why I’m doing this; I do this not because it’s essential for my plan, but for no discernible reason other than I adore giving my enemies time to collect their senses and attempt an escape” nonsense.

I mean, I still rolled my eyes a little when the Big Reveal came, but it actually made sense for Santino to reveal what he did to Dante, so all was forgiven.

And speaking of Santino: I liked that he was a thoroughly despicable villain with very little to recommend him, but he had utterly convincing motivation. Very few people get villains right, especially romance authors, and Saintcrow did a great job.

And this one’s sort of spoilerish: I also really liked and was intrigued by the glimpses of the love story between Dante and Doreen that we sort of got to see via flashback. OMG HOT LESBIAN PSION SEX? One can only hope so, but we’ll see.

The world-building was really interesting, despite a tendency to infodump and an over-fondness for tacking the word “synth” in front of a buncha crap to indicate it’s something from the FUTAR. I like the concept of an Awakening for humankind; I’m curious to see what triggered it, and I hope the future books will elaborate on this.

Sarah: While I wish that the individual members of her posse were more developed, I like that Dante surrounded herself with people who in small ways took care of her, but also had a substantial amount of their own backstory to be revealed. They weren’t pawns for the present story but seem to have large story arcs of their own, which is always enticing.

And like you, I really dug the blocking and the pace of the fight scenes. Writing action is probably as hard, if not harder, than shooting it for film, and being able to see the action in my mind while ALSO getting a sense of the quick emotions going on at the time - well, Saintcrow did a damn fine job mixing tension and terror and her fight scenes kick ass.

Yes on the reveal, yes on the twisty twist, and yes yes on the larger story of Awakening that hasn’t been fully explained yet. But equally intriguing to me were the current-day themes of evil/good and the status thereof as very mixed up in wealth, privacy, and talent - such that this Awakening created a new hierarchy but enough of the “old” one remains to confuse things. So the reader doesn’t really know where anyone stands, and that fluidity in society is both chaotic and scary but intriguing and addictive to read about.

My grade on this book: C+. It was eminently readable, and certainly there is room for the series to pick up as a whole, but it was entirely too easy for me to identify what I perceived as flaws even after some time past my reading it.

Candy: I found the writing too compelling to drop it to a C. Most of the time, I take forever to finish B- and C+ books; they’re not bad enough to fascinate me with their trainwreckiness, but they’re not usually good enough to suck me in and keep me engaged. This was an exception, because once I got past the first 50 pages or so (which took me a couple of weeks to read), I finished the rest of the book in two big sittings, which is a rarity for me nowadays. I’m-a stick with the B-.