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

Benedict Carsington, Viscount Rathbourne and oldest son of the absolutely terrifying Earl of Wingate, is bored senseless at an Egyptian exhibit where he’d acompanied his nephew, Peregrine, who has an absolute passion for all things Egypt, when his eye is caught by a gorgeous woman. Unfortunately, his eye is soon compelled to move off her and on to a fracas--one involving Peregrine, no less, and girl about his age.

The girl turns out to be the gorgeous woman’s daughter; his interest is intensified and his hopes dashed when he finds out that she’s the scandalous Bathsheba Wingate, a member of the notorious Deadful DeLuceys. Years ago, as the story went, she managed to seduce Jack Wingate, younger son of the Earl of Fosbury, into marrying her, an act that caused Lord Fosbury to disown Jack; as a consequence, she is persona non grata with the ton.

Benedict doesn’t associate with social pariahs. Benedict never does anything wrong, because he is Lord Perfect. Benedict, however, is about to get his ass kicked by Lurve.

Bathsheba Wingate hates being a Dreadful DeLucey. She hated her rattletrap upbringing and the way her parents never met a dodgy scheme they didn’t like, and she wants nothing more than to escape the stigma of her family’s past and forge a respectable future for Olivia. To that end, she paints and teaches art lessons for a living, but she’s barely scraping by as it is.

Enter Peregrine and his uncle. Peregrine is in dire need of drawing lessons. Bathsheba is in dire need of money. And Benedict, though he won’t acknowledge it to himself, is in dire need of some excitement. An arrangement is struck up, with all parties taking some pains to disguise the fact that a Carsington is associating with a Dreadful DeLucey, and things go swimmingly for a while--until disaster strikes in the form of Peregrine’s parents, who decide he’ll be much better off in a boarding school in Scotland.

This throws Bathsheba and Olivia into a bit of a tailspin. The exorbitant rates Benedict was paying were a significant factor in the two of them making some progress in their hardscrabble life. While Bathsheba ponders more conventional routes of action, Olivia comes up with a Scheme, and when Olivia has a Scheme, mayhem is sure to follow.

In short, she plans to journey halfway across England to the DeLuceys’ ancestral estate and look for buried treasure. When Peregrine finds out, he intercepts her with the idea of slowing her down long enough for either her mother or his uncle to catch up--except, by hilarious increments, he finds himself becoming more of an accomplice than a saboteur. And once Bathsheba and Benedict figure out what the two children are up to, they have no choice but to chase after the two children--alone, since alerting the authorities would necessitate revealing the fact that the Earl of Wingate’s heir is associating closely with a Dreadful DeLucey.

And you know what happens once you throw two hot people on the road alone in a romance novel. Aw yeah.

There is much to like about this book, and I have only a few nits to pick, which I’ll get out of the way so I can explain what Chase got right, because as is her habit, she hit most of it dead-on.

First of all, what’s up with the weird chunklets of telling instead of showing? The story will be flowing along seamlessly, showing me the action, making me chuckle, drawing me in and investing me in the characters’ conflicts, when BAM, there will be a couple of sentences like “And so he told her XYZ, and yea, she was amazed” or “And thus they spoke all night long and gazed soulfully into each others’ eyes” and the like. These sorts of shortcuts are necessary to one extent or another when writing a book--you can’t bleeding well show every damn thing that happens--but these transitions were especially jarring in this book and they yanked me out of the story every time they popped up.

And then there’s the fact that the main characters, while likeable enough, didn’t have the usual...I don’t know, spark of vigor that most of Chase’s characters provide. See, one of the many things I enjoy about Chase is her constant ability to subvert my expectations when it comes to her characters. Rupert Carsington of Mr. Impossible, for example, is presented something of a cheerful, insolent dolt; someone who’s not all that sharp, a man much more happy defenestrating villains than debating philosophy. We’re told this repeatedly: by the narrator, by Rupert, by his family, by the people he meets. But what we’re shown, and what the heroine eventually realizes, is that Rupert isn’t stupid, not even close--he just likes to play that way. Similarly, Sebastian Dain of Lord of Scoundrels is a high-strung, vulnerable mess underneath his blustering alpha façade, and Varian St. George of The Lion’s Daughter really IS a horrible wastrel, and not a faux-wastrel who actually has pots of money squirreled away somewhere. Chase does this over and over and over, and not just with her heroes--she does it with her heroines and with her villains.

And she does it to a small extent in this book. Benedict, for example, was a bit of a hellraiser when he was a child, before the weight of being the heir of a distinguished earldom fully descended upon him. But we don’t get to see this subversion the way we do in the other books. Benedict and Bathsheba are perfectly likeable, and I was very happy and satisfied with the way things turned out for them, but out of all of Chase’s characters so far, I’d say that these two have been so far the most conventional. They were sometimes, well...just a bit boring.

The kids, on the other hand...oh my. I’m not kidding when I say that I wish Lord Perfect had been a YA novel that tracked Peregrine and Olivia’s adventures. They were pitch perfect. Peregrine is a somewhat difficult child, and his parents and teachers don’t know what to do with him. He’s eminently logical and he refuses to take anything on faith--including the words of those with authority over him. This is not really a recipe for success in Ye Olde English Public Schools. Underneath the brilliant, stubborn, analytical boy, however, is a child who longs for parents who can provide him with a stable foundation.

Olivia is similarly wonderful. Fast-talking, quick-thinking and devious, she has more than little bit of Dreadful DeLucey in her, and the letters she writes Peregrine are brilliant--they are, in fact, the best letters I’ve read in a romance novel. Everything, from the description of Olivia’s handwriting, her melodramatic turn of phrases, the Capitalization of Important Words, the underlining of Facts That Should Not Be Missed, is bang-on. But once you get past the minx, Olivia is a big-hearted girl who wants nothing more than to see her mother happy.

The plot itself is excellent. There are a few twists and turns, all of them quite logical, and Chase doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of making a somebody break out of character just to move things along. She also doesn’t take the easy way out for some of the resolutions--the way the treasure hunt was resolved, for example, is quite ingenious.

And as always, Chase’s narratorial voice is quite wonderful. It’s very distinct, wry and witty, and I’m a big fan of it. If nothing else, Chase captures the rhythms of nineteenth-century English--or at least, what I imagine nineteenth-century English to sound like--better than any American author I know. Authors of historicals who think they can make their characters sound convincing by tossing around a couple of ‘tis-es and ‘twas-es and showing off some random slang like “micefeet” or “mushroom” would do well to study how Chase does it.

If you see this book in the store, what are you waiting for? Grab it. It’s worth full price, even if it’s not Chase’s best--but then Chase, even when she’s not at her best, is still a formidable force.

Alessandra Cecchi is the daughter of a prominent fabric merchant in Florence at the end of Lorenzo d’Medici’s political dynasty during the 15th century Renaissance. Born with an unstoppable curiosity and considerable artistic talent, Alessandra understandably chafes at the restrictions placed on women at the time, and The Birth of Venus chronicles her life from her early teens as her sister marries and her brothers continue to torment her, through her own marriage and life outside of her parents’ home. 

Unable to study painting as she would have were she born a male, Alessandra tutors herself in secret, reading books on technique and hiding her contraband art supplies in various places in her room, supplies purchased for her by her slave, Erila. She sketches on scraps of paper, making her own paint tints from household by-products like egg yolks and burnt copper scrapings, while dreaming of her own studio, her own teacher, and her own commissions to paint.

Her father brings home a painter from northern Europe to paint the walls and ceiling of their family chapel, and Alessandra is unable to stay away from him. Intrigued and attracted to not only the painter himself, but his talent - what she calls “God in his hands” - Alessandra sneaks out of her room, creates fictional reasons to find him, and breaks just about every rule of daughterly propriety for just a few seconds of his time and for his evaluation of her untutored but enthusiastic artistic efforts.

Alessandra’s story is set against the swift, almost pendular political swing that occurred in Florence after the death of Lorenzo d’Medici. Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk, orchestrates from his pulpit an almost complete reversal of the culture of Florence. Savonarola overthrew the Medici’s rule, and established a democratic republic focusing on moral rectitude, religious observance, and fear. Instead of the flourishing artistic development present under Medici, Savonarola subtly attacked the standing of the rich and opulent, creating laws against personal vanity, and sending out teams of boys to bully and cajole women into parting with fur collars, silver buttons, and anything else that would cause them to stand out apart from anyone else. Women were forbidden to attend church, and were forbidden from being present on the street without their husbands.

As her world is shifting, Alessandra is married off to an older gentleman, and is betrayed by her family and by her new existance as a wife when the future she had envisioned as a married lady is revealed to be built on lies. Worse yet, the freedom she had yearned for from her locked position as an unmarried female was taken away from her by the political shift in the climate of Florence. But Alessandra continues to attempt development of her artistic talent, and tries to ignore her attraction to the painter while seeking his opinion and perhaps his instruction, unable to stop fueling the curiosity and talent within her.

Alessandra is a marvelous character- she is foolhardy and brave, impetuous and clever, wicked smart and talented, but prone to nearly shooting herself in the foot on several occasions. It is Alessandra’s character that prevented me from putting the book down. While I grew irritated with her stubbornness at times, her negotiation of a changing society that no longer welcomed her gender or her passions as an artist or as a woman was inspiring and fascinating.

Further, Dunant’s writing style is lyrical, almost poetic, and evokes a tone appropriate for the memoirs of a Renaissance lady, the device used to tell Alessandra’s story. In online reviews and discussions I’ve found, more than one reader has mentioned that they went back to the beginning after finishing the book and started again, and that more was revealed in the second reading. Since this is a borrowed copy and I have a TBR pile that wants to pimpslap me into next year, I don’t have the indulgence of a second read, but the moments of foreshadowing and pieces of early story that mirror the ending were noticeable in my first reading, so much so that I put a post-it where I thought something significant had been referred to, only to flip back and find that I had been right. Dunant is a big fan of foreshadowing through symbolism. And, in case you are a member of a book club, there’s a reader’s group list of seriously softball questions in the back of the text I have - from “To what extent is Savonarola the villain of the novel?” to “To what degree is this novel about a city as much as a character?”

I won’t bore you with my answers.

But I will try to explain why this book, as addictive a read as I found it to be, did not merit an A: the ending. I don’t want to get specific because the experience of reading The Birth of Venus is worth borrowing your own copy, and I don’t want to spoil the finale, but suffice it to say that Alessandra’s choices at the end of the book, especially in regard to her opportunity for a happy ending, are infuriating and don’t accurately represent her character - at least, not the character in the first three-quarters of the book.

I laid awake last night thinking about the difference between a romance structure and the structure of this novel, and found myself asking in frustration why she didn’t make different choices when it was within her power at the end to do so. After seizing every chance to crack the border defining the limits of women in society, to see her take a seat one inch from the edge of her own completion was beyond frustrating and seemed to be an incomplete ending and a betrayal of her character.

Several reviewers in online discussions raised their own frustrations with the ending, wondering if the author phoned in the finale because she was done writing, and it’s comforting to know that other people found the Alessandra at the end to be a shadow of the Alessandra of the beginning, though no one could attribute the change in her character to any traceable reason.

Regardless of how the book ended, the middle of it and the characters within, from Alessandra’s mother to her husband Cristoforo (both magnificently infuriating and yet sympathetic creations on Dunant’s part) will stick in my brain for awhile as I chew over the fascinating elements of the story. With the obvious parallel to the increasingly conservative and religiously-fueled culture forming in many societies right now, the questions inherent in the balance of art and religion, creativity and divinity, are still valid and of importance then and now. Certainly The Birth of Venus has given me a lot to think about, and has left me with the feeling that I learned quite a bit- something every good historical novel should do.

But the best part of the book was reading the reviews when I finished, particularly this quote from the Reader’s Paradise Forum (beware: spoilers at site)

This story reminds me of what Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in “The Third Man” said:

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Substitute Florence for Italy and the Medicis for the Borgias and it would still be an accurate assessment.

The status of women, the value of art, and the question of the role of religion in society and politics are still subjects that have not been adequately explored or resolved, but within books like the Birth of Venus, the reader has the opportunity to learn from history and, with the exception of the readers guide at the back of the book, ask some very important questions. A poor ending to a fictional account cannot take away from the vital duty of repeatedly confronting these questions.

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.

Getting Rid of Bradley details the creation of a love story out of the unravelling of a marriage, along with some embezzlement, larceny, and attempted murder, and some crazy-ass and adorable animals.

Lucy Savage Porter has just been stood up by her ex-husband, Bradley, who asked her to meet him at the courthouse so he could explain everything. Lucy’s well-meaning but overbearing sister is in her usual position of taking care of Lucy, who is beginning to realize she’d prefer not to be so taken-care-of all the freaking time. Perhaps it would be good for her to fall down and bruise her ass every once in awhile instead of having her sister tell her what she needs to do.

Seeing a heroine decide to break out of her routine because she’s tired of it is one of my favorite methods of character development, because it means she has to evaluate where she is presently and why it sucks booty, make changes, and charm the reader into accepting her as she is, and as she will be by the end of the story. In the hands of a skilled writer, this method works brilliantly on me. I’m a sucker for a heroine’s self-reinvention.

After being stood up in divorce court, the newly-divorced Lucy persuades her sister to take her to lunch in a dingy restaurant, again because Bradley said he’d speak to her there.

Coincidentally, due to being tipped off by anonymous caller, Detective Zach Warren and his partner Julian are also in the restaurant, waiting for Bradley. Is it the same Bradley, or a “more different” Bradley?

Zach operates mainly on instincts, and he’s sure that something is up with Lucy, and that she has information he needs. So he follows her out of the restaurant, only to end up saving her when someone takes a shot at them. But she doesn’t take kindly to being tackled, and assaults him with a mammoth physics textbook to free herself, and runs home. 

He is convinced that she’s key to his investigation of the embezzling Bradley, despite her assurances that there is no way her ex-husband Bradley is the droid they are looking for. Zach decides she needs round-the-clock protection, an idea she mocks until her car blows up right in front of her.

Here’s where I began to quirk a brow: in order to keep an eye on Lucy, and wait for Bradley to show up, he decides to move in, thus forcing them into close and constant contact. I’ve seen worse methods of shoving the hero and heroine into close quarters, but it was a bit contrived.

But once Zach and Lucy are in her house, and once he persuades her that (a) her life is in danger, and (b) she should use her mammoth amount of sick days to take time off of work and hide out in the house with him, the attraction builds, forcing Lucy to consider who she wants to be and whether she wants that version of herself to be with Zach, and forcing Zach to consider that perhaps his days of ardent bachelorhood are over - just as soon as they figure out which Bradley is the one they want, and why Lucy’s Bradly and Zach’s Bradley seem to be the same dude.

As with most of Crusie’s stories, the book is charming because of the characters, both human and canine. Lucy, seeking to reinvent herself, starts with superficial goofy changes, and ends up with hair dyed a dead, depthless black. But as she learns to stand up for herself, she stops bending at the direction of other people’s preferences for her, and learns to choose her own mistakes, even if they mean that she ends up with green hair. And once she understands that the changes she’s hoping for are internal, she’s able to pick a hair color that matches the person she thinks she can be.

Lucy is a great heroine: she’s not thin or physically perfect, and is prone to doing dumb things to her appearance when what she really wants is to change her life - I’ve done that. Watching her change and watching the hero fall for all sides of her - where she starts and where she ends up - quite delicious.

Zach is nicely yummy as well, though not as attractive a character as Lucy. He’s definitely worthy of her, given that he’s gone to great lengths to protect her, even as he becomes aware of some rather large and scary feelings for her. Instead of running away and distancing himself from those big scary emotions, as some romance heroes might do, Zach moves in and sits on the sofa owned by the subject of those big scary emotions, and faces his fears while protecting her from a Bradley or two.

But Zach also illustrates what aspects of this book didn’t work for me. After only a few days of being locked in together, Zach is done - that’s it, he’s getting married. Literally, days after he’s met Lucy. I know some dudes prefer not to dwell on decisions, but that was a little quick on the surrender of his bachelorhood. Even Lucy, who has decided to be more spontaneous and to go after what she wants, is taken aback, considering she just got divorced a few days prior.

Without giving away too much, the mystery of which Bradley is which, and who is after whom, came together slowly, but was prolonged by Lucy and Zach ignoring details and clues that two detail-attentive people should have caught. It’s like watching someone do something really doltish in a movie - I wanted to scream at the book, “No, NO Don’t IGNORE THAT it’s IMPORTANT.” And I couldn’t believe that Zach would breeze by two very large clues that indicated the safety of Lucy’s house had been compromised. The inattention didn’t seem in-character and made the mystery less sold, more flimsy.

But the aspects of what didn’t work were far outweighed by what did, particularly how Crusie handled the bad guy. Bradley is a clever creation in that he is not an all-out villain, just a bit creepy. He’s like a watered down version of that uber-creep Bill in Crazy for You. By the end of the story, you understand his motivations, though you might question as I did why Lucy put up with some of his behaviors. But he is certainly not evil personified, and even Zach realized that he and bad-guy Bradley have things in common. Much like we discussed on SBTB earlier, understanding the motivations and humanity of the villain, particularly when they are written as a person who has made some evil decisions rather than just being evil through and through, makes for a scary and effective antagonist.

Reading early Crusie so soon after reading the babydaddy book did indeed restore my happy quest for good romance, but it also shuffled my To-be-read pile, as I now want to read Don’t Look Down sooner rather than later to see how current Crusie compares to the early publications. But as usual, if one is looking for quality, particularly after deliberately delving into some sticky romance territory, Crusie is as dependable as ever.

Watchers are created to be guardians of witches by Circle Lightfall, a rather mysterious organization. On one hand: protecting witches from being turned into hamburger is a good thing. On the other hand: they use some rather unsavory methods to battle the Dark, up to and including implanting elements of the Dark in the Watchers to allow them to combat their foes more effectively.

Theo and Dante strike up sparks right away, even if Theo finds him kind of creepy. Dante, on the other hand, figures out in double-quick time that he’s found his soulmate, the only person in the world who can make the pain from the Dark inside him go away. The usual shenanigans ensue--bad guys attack, Dante and his fellow Watcher, Hanson, hand their asses to them, Theo does some rather rash things, Dante blows a gasket, does more ass-handing, rinse and repeat.

While overall an entertaining offering, the book suffers from some debut author clunkiness, especially with the way chunks of exposition are worked in. The dialogue, action blocking and characterization also suffer from bouts of awkward lurchiness. I find it hard to describe in concrete terms, but with some books, I find myself picturing soap opera actors delivering the lines while pacing a cheap, garishly-lit set. Something about the cadence of their speech and the way they react just lends itself to that sort of visualization. Dark Watcher suffers from this sort of writing only occasionally, but it was often enough to be distracting.

Theo herself kind of bored me. She’s kind of a cross between Nancy Drew and Siddharta Gautama Buddha: she can do EVERYTHING, everybody loves her except the bad guys, and she just about oozes compassion from her pores. If she were a hippo and compassion were hippo sweat, she’d be red all over, baby. She’s not really annoying, but she also didn’t have too many interesting nuances.

Dante is a bit more interesting. There are delicious hints of a really unsavory past, not to mention the things Circle Lightfall did to him to make him a Watcher. However, very little of his backstory is revealed, and most of the time in his head can be summarized thusly: “Theo. Theotheotheo. Man she’s hot. Oooh, can I touch her? But I’m tainted. Mmmm, Theo. Theotheotheotheotheo. Ooh, she just touched me! Wait, scary bad guys are after her! RAR, HERE ARE YOUR ASSES, BAD GUYS. Mmmm, Theo. Theotheotheo.” But then a lot of romance novels suffer from this sort of redundant musing.

Those of you expecting a traditional HEA for this book are going to be disappointed, by the way. Lots of threads are left dangling at the end, threads which are presumably picked up in the sequel, Storm Watcher. Dante and Theo’s love story is, in many ways, just beginning right when the book stops.

However, this book does get two things very, very right. The first is the world-building. Most paranormal romances I’ve read have kind of sucked on the world-building, and usually I don’t even give it a second thought, just as I don’t let clunky love stories faze me while I’m reading fantasy and SF. The world in this book is fascinating, especially the intrigue surrounding the Crusade and how it came to be. By the way: if you’re a hardcore Catholic who believes all the Popes and the Church have been, are and always will be infallible authorities guided by the Holy Spirit, amen, then I recommend that you skip this book because it’s probably going to offend the hell out of you. Personally, I thought Dark Watcher took some interesting risks; while horror, fantasy and SF aren’t afraid to poke at the occasional religious authority, I have yet to see paranormal romance novels do too much of this. My only frustration was that the length of the book didn’t allow me to explore the world and the monsters to my full satisfaction.

The other thing this book gets right is its portrayal of witches. Here’s another problem with many romance novels: characters who are remotely crunchy-granola-earth-mother rapidly become caricatures, oftentimes really, really annoying New Age stereotypes whom I’d love to crush under a spiky bootheel. Most Constance O’Day-Flannery novels and Rachel Gibson’s It Must Be Love provide prime examples of these types of airheads. Dark Watcher is the first romance novel I’ve encountered that treats crunchy types with respect and makes them seem (oh, dare I say it?) cool.

Dark Watcher is kind of a mixed big bag, but overall, it’s more good than bad. If you’re looking for a different take on romance novel witches and some fairly complex world-building, you could do a lot worse than checking this one out.