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

But the book still failed to engage me. I put it down again and again, and I never felt any urgency to pick it up again. I didn’t really care what happened to Kim or her OMGHOT boytoy Lex; in fact, I thought it’d be much more interesting to see the bad guys win just to shake it up.

Kim Valenti is a codebreaker for the National Security Agency and a graduate of the l33t-as-fuck Athena Academy, which, from what I gathered in the book, is an Academy for Budding Superwomen, complete with its own shadowy intelligence branch and assorted sources of classified information. Kim is trying to trying to crack encrypted e-mails from some Middle Eastern terrorists, and thanks to some leads from the academy, she’s finally figured out the target: a location in Chicago. Unfortunately, she can’t find anybody who will listen to her, not even the hot shot bomb squad agent who helped her with a previous case, a hot piece of ass named Lex Tanner.

So acting on a hunch, she goes to a television station in Chicago, only to get trapped in a Very Sticky Situation: the station is overrun by terrorists and all the staff within held hostage. To complicate things, Kim finds out that the primary target isn’t the station. The station is a distraction, a red herring. The terrorists are after much bigger game than a mere TV station.

So being the good little l33t-as-fuck agent that she is, Kim kicks, punches, claws and leaps her way out of the station and heads over to FBI headquarters to kidnap herself a fine piece of bomb squad ass to help her defuse the bomb.

More asskicking ensues, and Kim and Lex save the day. But alas and alack, the two terrorists responsible for masterminding the attack manage to escape from the TV station, so that means more shenanigans abound before Kim and Lex have to put away their chaussures pour donner des coups de pied sur les derrieres.

There are a lot of things I like about the two main characters. Kim, like I said before, is supremely competent at her job. When I say she kicks ass, I mean it: SHE KICKS FUCKING ASS. And she gets her shit tore up by the bad guys, too--she’s good, but she’s not invincible. The sight of a heroine who is capable of doing all this without being missish or squeamish or nice about the whole thing is refreshing, especially in Romancelandia, where the female population is often distressingly dim and helpless. Kim is also commitment-shy and unabashed about enjoying sex for its own sake in a fairly realistic way, which, again, is distressingly rare in Romancelandia and its surfeit of frigid, insecure women who dedicate their lives to their work but don’t have two brain cells to rub together (ref. Zachary, Amanda).

But something about her still rings false. Her angst about her dead brother, beheaded by Iraqi insurgents, for example, feels tacked on. The grief doesn’t quite have enough bite to it. It’s hard for me to pinpoint other things about her that struck false notes, but ultimately, I think that much as I liked her, she just wasn’t particularly interesting to me. The entire book immersed me in her point of view, but I closed it feeling no closer to the character than when I’d started.

Lex is also a rather unusual hero. I really like how he isn’t portrayed as conventionally handsome: he’s skinny and he has a big nose. He’s also willing to let Kim do her job, and holy Christ I’m so happy to see a smart, assertive hero not be all shouty-shouty and “HERE LET ME SAVE THE DAY LITTLE GIRL” all over the heroine.

But here’s something interesting I discovered about myself: I couldn’t settle on an ethnicity for Lex, and I found it discomfiting. When Kim compares his lips to Denzel Washington’s and notes his dark skin, I immediately assumed he’s black, and I was all “Woo hoo!” because hot black men are sorely lacking in Romancelandia. Then later on, there are mentions of his piercing blue eyes and Italian roots, which muddled the picture for me, so I started thinking of him as an olive-skinned white dude. And this wrenching change in direction? Bugged me. Here I was with my happy picture of Hot Skinny Black Guy in my head, and now waitminnit, he’s Hot Skinny White Guy? But wait, maybe he’s a black guy with blue eyes, because hey, Vanessa Williams has blue eyes, but gaaah I don’t want to have to switch my mental picture AGAIN.

Yes, I’m shallow. I want to have a clear picture of the hero and his hotness, and I don’t want that picture to change drastically partway. This quirk is mine alone, and no fault of Ruth Wind’s.

The growing emotional ties and sexual tension between Kim and Lex felt almost as tacked on as Kim’s grief for her brother, and as for the sex itself… well, there was a lot of build up to it, but when it finally happened, I didn’t sit back with a happy sigh, I raised my eyebrows and thought “That’s IT? What the hell?” The sexy-sexy in this book: It talked the talk, but it couldn’t walk the walk.

The suspense storyline also didn’t grab me. The suspense wasn’t particularly suspenseful, and thinking back on it, I think part of the problem was the pacing, which, despite the fight scenes, was pretty sedate. There were also very few surprises, no clever twists that had me go “Naw, no fucking WAY!” to keep me turning the pages. And frankly, I wanted more details. I wanted more about the NSA and how it worked, I wanted to know more about code-breaking and how it’s done, I wanted to know how common it was for codebreakers to also be field agents or even if the NSA DID make distinctions between certain types of personnel, I wanted details on different types of bombs and how to defuse them, I wanted the POV of the villains. (To Wind’s credit, though, despite the lack of a villain’s POV, she took care to provide very credible motivation for the terrorists to do what they’re doing.)

In short, I wanted more of everything--including the love story. But a Bombshell can only be so long, and given the type of story it was, I wanted something Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsythe or even Michael Crichton could offer, only with better characters and better sex. Countdown ended up being neither fish nor foul nor meat, which is too bad because it got so many other things right.

The book opens with said heroine, Whitney “Pink” Pearl (for the eraser, get it?), testifying before a Senate Finance Committee regarding her former employers, a prominent accounting firm which was being investigated for aiding in the Enron-esque financing shenanigans of Marvel Energy. The firm’s intentions had been to try to pin the entire mess on Pink should the fraud be discovered, even though the responsibility for the monetary monkey business went back several years and up several corporate levels above her head.

The context of testifying gives Pink the opportunity to explain to the committee and the reader what the heck the problem is: she has proof that the executives of her firm and her boss specifically cooperated in the Marvel financial funny business that has bankrupted the company. Her proof is in the form of a single disk with copies of email and documents she swiped from her boss’s computer. But the disk was stashed in a box that was mixed up with another similar box, and sold at a yard sale, along with a blow-up sex doll named Mr. Bob, to a daffy older woman who has since gone on vacation. So Pink has to wait for the woman to get back from vacation, find the box, and bring the evidence to the finance committee to prove she isn’t making all these allegations out of a desire for revenge for having been fired for bringing her findings to her boss in the first place.

The explanation of her testimony sets up the plot marvelously, and gives a great deal of insight into Pink’s character – she’s wicked pissed off on the behalf of all the people who are getting screwed out of their entire investment portfolios because Marvel couldn’t manage to practice sound business ethics, and she’s doubly pissed that she’s broke, notorious, and unemployable in her field while the executives in question are living the same luxury life they always did. But by virtue of being broadcast on television, her testimony creates a situation wherein everyone with an interest in the case itself knows that all that stands in the way of years in the big house for the guilty parties is a sex doll with a disk nestled next to his plastic ass. Plenty of time to interfere, and threaten Pink – which is exactly what happens.

Pink, as the whistle-blower, was not popular with either her former employers or the employees of Marvel Energy, and even though she’s on the news and something of a household name, she’s forced to move back to her hometown of Midland, Texas, to take a job with her mother’s small town accounting firm. Someone is following her, leaving poop on her doorstep, ransacking her hotel rooms, generally scaring the hell out of her, and making the process of rebuilding her life while dealing with her notoriety AND trying to clear her name a pain in the ass, if not a complete impossibility. Doing the right thing can suck a royal wang, is the subtext of this book. It takes a very strong person with a great deal of smarts to actually navigate the consequences of pissing off high powered executives, entire corporations, and investors, all while having to testify live on television in front of members of the US Senate.

This was my first Silhouette Bombshell, and after a bit of exploring online and bothering Candy, I understood the format, which I didn’t quite get at first. The focus is very much on the heroine, and very much on the process of her kicking ass in an untenable situation, and the romance aspect is almost secondary to the ass-kickingness of the heroine. In this book and its sequel, there’s not just one hero, there are two. Possibly three. Any more, and you need an accountant to keep up with them all.

First, there’s Senator Steve Santorelli, who is on the finance committee and an easy person to gaze at while testifying. He seems to believe Pink is trying to do the right thing, but, as a widower and one of the most eligible bachelors of Washington, his seeming romantic interest in Pink is personally flattering and professionally dangerous.

Then, there’s her new direct boss, Sam, who looks like Sammy Hagar from Van Halen, and who teaches her the intricacies of investigating on behalf of their clients. There’s definitely chemistry between Sam and Pink, but it’s never addressed by Pink directly in her narration of the story. She thinks he’s good looking and finds him fascinating, but there isn’t any forthright mention of zings of electric hot mamajama shooting up her arm when she touches his hand. Sam is mostly for noticing but not acting upon.

But then there’s Ed. Ed, he’s got the mamajama zing shooters and she’s got definite intentions of acting upon that zing. Pink spends a lot more time discussing the hots she has for Ed than she does the attraction she may feel towards Steve or Sam. To make matters excellently complicated, Ed is retained by Pink’s mother as Pink’s new attorney after Pink fires the attorney who negotiated a useless immunity deal with the finance committee. Ed is a free spirit hottie who owes Pink’s mother a favor and is equally easy to look at, but at their first meeting lays the core of the situation on the line for her: he will represent her, but due to the sequence of events leading to the missing disk (no one really cared about the sex doll with the disk, and that’s a shame, if you ask me), she has to both stay away from Marvel Energy employees in Midland, and be careful because obviously someone wants her removed from the situation, preferably permanently.

This is where the book started to lose me a bit. This isn’t one of those mystery situations wherein some people know some things, and other people know other things, and once you figure out who knows more than they should, you know whodunit. In this book, Pink tells everyone everything, and is way trusting of the police, her attorney and the people she works with, almost to the point of seeming contradictory to the ass-kicking smart-alec she is. Pink is no dummy, and I sometimes felt the savvy part of her character was often offset by the number of times she filled in one character or another on the details of what had happened to her that day – and in one day, Pink has a crapload of things that can happen to her.

Also, it’s hard to tell who the primary hero of the situation is, because as far as she gets with Ed, and they’ve definitely rounded third, she still doesn’t brush Steve Santorelli off whenever he asks her out and demonstrates how interested he is in spending time with her once the committee business has concluded. Is she feeling pity for him because he’s never, according to his own admission, asked anyone out since his wife died? Is she charmed by his banter whenever he calls her? Is she flattered by the attention from such a powerful, hot man, despite wanting to dive into Ed’s pants at any given moment? It’s almost disingenuous, and doesn’t always come across as “torn between two men” as much as “I really want dude A but dude B doesn’t suck either, in case dude A is too much for me to handle.” Part of her reticence could be from not knowing who she can really trust, or from Ed’s slightly bad-boy lifestyle that reminds her of her ex-husband, or from just not knowing who to pick. And since this is a series, there will be some degree of triangulation going on for a good while. But I was never 100% sure if she was as interested in Steve as she was in Ed, or if she stopped herself from cutting Steve loose out of some need for a safety net in case things with Ed didn’t work out, and vice versa.

As for Ed, there’s a lot to wonder about in his character, too. Not only does she not always listen to his advice (which would make for a boring Bombshell character, I agree) but he’s just this side of suspicious to me. Not only is he ALWAYS around whenever Pink is in danger, but he is alarmingly close by whenever she needs someone to help her out of a seriously tight situation. At one point, he saves her ass and she asks him, “How did you happen to be there?” He spins a tale about seeing her car and following her out of curiosity, but there’s still that lingering doubt in my mind whether he’s legitimate or if he’s a bad guy. He’s just over the border into possible villainy at some points, but then his admitted feelings of zingful hot attraction towards Pink go a long ways to redeeming him. The oddness of Ed keeps him intriguing, and while I found myself annoyed that it wasn’t all spelled out for me, I also had to take a step back and remind myself that this is a series, and that all the questions won’t be answered in the first book.

Now, if you’re going to write a book with an independent, smart woman who investigates crime and attempts to kick danger’s ass, and who is torn between two, possibly three, men, you are going to get comparisons to Evanovich’s Plum series. I don’t want to skirt around the topic, but I also don’t want to even begin to suggest that this is a copycat series. Hardly! But if you enjoy the Plum series, like I do, it is a valid question to ask how one compares to the other.

There’s a definite difference between the two heroines, though both do a good share of stumbling into situations that quickly go beyond what they expected. Pink is perhaps sharper than Stephanie, who often wanders into situations completely unprepared and makes her best way out of them. Also, I don’t know if Plum can add, because if she could, she’d have figured out that she couldn’t be making a living on the number of documented cases she’s brought in.

The similarities between the series extend beyond the heroines, though: both books share a character created by the setting. Texas and specifically small-city Midland, Texas, is as much a character in the book as Trenton, New Jersey is in the Plum series. Further, both women find themselves in situations that most of us would never encounter, and reading about women kicking danger’s ass in various forms is always satisfying.

However, a key difference is that there’s a large streak of humor through the Plum series, from the supporting characters in Plum’s family to the general bizarre hilarity of the situations Stephanie finds herself in. You don’t blink if the next person brought in has coated himself in olive oil and rolled in oregano for that crispy-fried texture.

The situations Pink encounters in this novel aren’t as superficially funny, because corporate shithole-ness reminiscent of Enron and Tyco did happen and there are people all over Texas who lost their entire retirement plans after the fraud was revealed and the company went under. So there’s an element of emotional and factual realism to the story, even if on the surface you’re rooting for a heroine named Whitney who was given a nickname based on a rubber pencil eraser.  Essentially you are rooting for the unexpectedness of the heroine: a woman who had an incredible job and a lavish salary and position – who chucked it all to do what was right because of an unwavering moral compass.

Watching her put her life back together is more of a focus than the romance, but Feagan has balanced quite a few Big Questions, from the integrity of one of the heroes to the future of the heroine’s relationship with the other, in such a way that these questions can continue through multiple books in the series without losing my interest, because my interest is held. By an accountant. No kidding.

Brian Hartigan is a man with a problem: after a lab experiment went wrong, his sweat exudes pheromones that make him completely irresistible to women. It’s lots of fun at first, since he got to bang a buncha hot chicks, but the charms palled after a woman tried to kidnap him while another tried to tie him down so he couldn’t escape, not to mention all the fights he was getting into because formerly faithful (and not-so-faithful-to-begin-with) girlfriends and wives started dry humping him in public.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though: one of the scientists tells him that if he has sex with the perfect woman, his sweat will no longer have the ability to turn 76-year-old women into raving nymphos. So Brian goes on the run, ducking and dodging The Man and desperately hoping he’ll find the perfect woman soon, ‘cause hot damn, he’s tired of being assaulted.

Allie Hamden is a waitress at a truck stop diner, and like just about every romance heroine, she’s had bad luck with men. She no longer trusts her instincts. So when a tired-looking man stops in the diner for some coffee and eggs and all her nubbins perk up in interest, she’s pissed off and determined to resist his charms.

She fails, of course. Hot nookie follows. Then they run. Then they nook some more. Nook, nook, nook. Run some more. Nook. Revelations happen. Nook. Oh, hey, HEA!

To say that this story happens fast would be an understatement. It’s barely over 100 pages long, and takes place over the space of a couple days. It’s really hard to pull off a convincing love story in such a short span of time, unless the characters had prior history with each other. The cynical little bitch in me was all “Are you shitting me? No way are these two going to last.”

But the starry-eyed dreamer was all, “Awwww, they’re so cute together! And they’re so nice! And look, you can totally tell they like each other, not just hot for each other’s twiddly bits!”

For once, the starry-eyed dreamer won.

Other than that, the only other complaint I had about the book was too much internal musing on the part of the hero. He ponders on and on and onnnnn about whether or not he should shag Allie stupid, about his situation, and yeahyeahyeahyeah just PULL HER DAMN PANTIES DOWN ALREADY. Too much internal musing is a problem most romance novels suffer from, however. It’s one of my pet peeves.

One other thing that niggled at me was the presence of a few really silly copyediting errors, but I wasn’t sure if the copy I got was an ARC or whether it was the finished product. So Kate, if this was an ARC, I take the niggle back. No niggle for you!

So yeah, the book was fun and sexy, and despite the warp-speed romance, I had reasonable faith in the HEA. It wasn’t perfect (har har), but it did a great job of de-stressing and distracting me from some really shitful events.

Hot Sauce is a love story that focuses on insecurities, specifically those based in class difference, constructed around a fantasy fairy-tale-esque plot structure. A working class boy from midwest moves to the big city, learns from a master chef, becomes a celebrity restauranteur in his own right, and ends up dating the man of his dreams, a rich, gorgeous, well-connected clothing designer from one of the best families in Boston.

Can you smell the insecurities?

Brad is one half of a gay power couple in Boston, unaccustomed to the attention and unable to find equilibrium when in public wih Troy, his debonair and socially-gifted boyfriend. Troy is, through both the narrator’s account and through his demonstrated actions, off his head about Brad, and yet Brad is unsure of his standing in Troy’s life, as if any minute Troy’s tenderness and caring will turn cold and he’ll be discarded.

Complicating matters is Aria Shakespeare, an upper-crust Bostonian who Troy once knew by a different name, prior to Aria acquiring an entirely different sort of crust - the scuzzy, deceitful kind.

As a total aside, I love adopted names like this. I know a few people who rename themselves in truly over-the-top dramatic fashion.I want to ask, do you think anyone will take that tweety name seriously? Or is it all drama? I once knew a drag queen who dubbed herself “Cicada.” You’re an annoying insect? Sure, why not? I have no room to talk, though - I am the Duchess of Cuntington.

Aria tries by any means necessary, including following them to foreign countries, to interfere with Brad and Troy’s happiness, and he cashes in on the most obvious solution to his goal of breaking them up: he targets Brad’s insecurity, and inserts himself neatly as a much better alternative for Troy’s attentions, using Troy, Caroline - Troy’s social harriden of a mother, and anyone else he can find to get what he wants: Troy. Or, more specifically, the attention he’d receive from being with Troy. He wants a piece of Troy’s glamour.

My only frustration with the book was with the imbalance between the narrator’s account of Troy, and the narrator’s account of Brad’s insecurity regarding Troy’s feelings for him. The narration makes it clear in repeated demonstrations that Troy is over the moon for Brad. He wouldn’t greet anyone else in a room full of political contacts until he spoke to Brad first, he would always look for Brad in a room full of people, and he constantly surprised Brad with trips and luxurious outings, and seemed to be a conscientious, giving lover. So as the reader I had no doubts that, despite the interference of the jealous Shakespeare Aria, Troy adored Brad.

But the narrator also cataloged the ways in which Brad felt slighted by Troy, aside from the attentive devotion Troy demonstrated wordlessly. Troy does not use words to describe his feelings; he does much better with the gesture or the gift than he does with the verbal account of his ardor. He is smooth and sophisticated at all turns, except when describing his feelings verbally. Brad, however, desperately wants to hear Troy say The Words, and Troy manages to avoid these verbal exchanges.

Insecurity gets the best of all of us, however, so it’s entirely realistic to watch Brad bank his happiness on whether Troy will tell him the words he longs to hear. Brad certainly has the right to ask for a clear demonstration of how Troy feels about him, without having the moment tainted by the possibility that Troy is really using their good looks and excellent professional partnership for profit and corporate gain, or without leaving Brad any room to question if it’s he himself that Troy loves, or the public image and the sex. Troy is used to being half of several different locally powerful “golden couples,” including a lucrative and somewhat caring partership with his mother, but Brad does not have the healthy ego to accept himself as on par with Troy’s relative celebrity.

Sooner or later you have to choose to believe in the person you love or believe in the snot-nosed coke headed freakshow who is telling you with some funky evidence that the person who you think loves you does not. So do you believe the person who is kind to you or the one who consistently treats you like shit? At what point does one’s own insecurities have to stop and take a look at their silly selves and say, “Wait a minute. I’ve been given no reason to doubt this person except by the word of someone who has never been trustworthy.”

I wish that moment had come a lot sooner than it did for Brad, as he could have saved himself some serious drama. Of course, if Troy had been able to open up and be more honest about his goals and intentions with Brad, perhaps they would have been able to commnunicate better, instead of letting some deceitful freakshow and a mother-in-law come between them. The narrator’s account of Troy, and of Brad’s perception of Troy, were off just enough to make me wonder how Brad could be so blind.

However, the story is as much about Brad’s growth in trusting his partner, and Troy’s growth in his ability to take personal risks in areas in which he’s not entirely comfortable, so in the end, Brad’s growth from insecurity to trust equals Troy’s growth from security to taking personal risks to ensure that security. And their happily ever after, and the just-desserts for Aria, are quite satifying.

Now, for the dishy part.

Y’all. SERIOUSLY. Gay sex. I learned so much about gay sex I can’t even tell you. I mean, in mainstream media one sees depictions of hetero sex all over the place, in various positions and locations. Even ABC, the Ass Broadcasting Network, had in-the-toilet-stall-sex on NYPD Blue, which about made me laugh because, well, EW. Hetero sex, it is everywhere.

But gay sex? Sex between two men? That’s a taboo area that isn’t often depicted, so really, did I have much of a clue what goes on between two dudes? Honestly, no. I didn’t. I have watched porn and seen sexually explicit still images, but descriptions of gay sex? Not really something I’ve encountered so much. Is there equal division between who is on top and who’s on bottom? What are the positional variations? And isn’t there, well, santorum?

I had no clue. But now, I am becoming an educated reader of the gay romance and the accompanying sex scenes. And it’s not like the sex was gratuitous or crass, either. It was genuine and passionate, and pass me that newspaper, ma’am, I need to fan myself. I never thought that gay sex would be hot, but man alive, thems is some hot live men.

So between the hot man action and the genuine, emotional interaction, this is a damn fine romance. Stay tuned for an upcoming review after I read their earlier publication, Spare Parts. 

Because her family, it is The Suck. Her elder sister, Justine, is an egomaniac ball buster who was all set to marry the man of her dreams when the youngest sister, Mica, ran off with him the morning of their wedding. Several years later, Justine is an exec in a makeup company who busts balls and is a general beeyotch to everyone who works with her, until one day the disgruntled wife of one of the (many) married men she sleeps with bursts into her staff meeting and threatens to kill off the employees one by one unless Justine proves that she was or wasn’t with the woman’s husband that afternoon. I won’t go into the manner in which Justine has to prove said activity, but it is quite a scene. Justine barely escapes with her life, and after dealing with the immediate repurcussions of her behavior both in and out of the office, decides on the advice of a kind police officer to head home to North Carolina to see her family, hide out from the yet-uncaptured disgruntled wife, and recuperate.

Mica, meanwhile, ran off to LA with the fiance, Dean, and is now a contracted hair model and minor celebrity, living a very wild and exhausting life. She finds herself confronted with the mess her career and health have become due to Dean’s over-involvement, and her agent, a sensitive man named Everett, directs her to leave Dean, go to the doctor, and take better care of herself, as she is in danger of losing her contract with the hair care company. She decides also to head home to hide from Dean and further heal herself.

The family reunion is set against the backdrop of an unsolved murder that the three sisters witnessed when they were much younger, as the accused and convicted murderer manages to secure a hearing to determine if a conspiracy or inept police work caused his conviction. Ultimately, the sisters have to come forward with what they saw, which further implicates them and damages their already fragile relationships with one another.

So, hello, the Malfunction Sisters are converging on Monroeville, North Carolina, and Regina has to referee the ongoing battles between Mica and Justine, mediate the dissolving partnership and business interests of her parents, assist a hunka-hunka-burnin’ love named Mitchell with the itemization and appraisal of the value of her parents’ antiques store for liquidation purposes, figure out who committed the murder she and her sisters witnessed 20 years prior, and manage to find her own way to happiness.

Regina rules. Loved her. Loved how she learned to ignore her sisters when they were being childish brats - which was far too freaking often - and loved how she learned to appreciate herself even though she felt like no one in her family appreciated her. Loved how she began to appreciate her own value, and recognize her own talents. In short, love how she began to love herself.

I loved the romance between Regina and Mitchell, though I wish he were as full fleshed a character as Regina was, but since this book danced the line between women’s fiction, suspense, and romance so many times I began to accept that he was partly a hero and partly a catalyst for her developing character. Mitchell has his own backstory, and since just about every character is a suspect in the suspense plot woven through the book, his history is a slowly revealed puzzle, which allowed him to be slightly suspicious, even though I knew I could count on his innocence since he was the hero to Regina’s heroine.

But more than anything: I loved the dog. Mitchell has a dog, Sam, who is the best part of the book. While he doesn’t have wild antics and a subtle personality like a Crusie or a Donovan animal sidekick, Sam is a constant and adorable character, lending empathy when needed and serving as an emotional barometer to various scenes.

I read this book straight through in about 24 hours, from two bus rides in and out of Manhattan and an evening on the sofa, and I have to say what hooked me most was Bond’s skill with dialogue. Much of the book is dialogue, and very little description outside of setting the mood of the scene by decribing the environment the characters were in - and more often than not one of the characters did the describing. Bond is skilled with the clever conversation and since I tend to skim paragraphs of exposition in favor of the dialogue when I read, I ended up reading just about every word on the page. 

My problems with this book rest mostly on the development of Justine and Mica. Mica, the youngest, ran off with her sister’s fiance and ended up in a horrible, addictive and abusive relationship with him. Her decision ultimately became her own punishment, so in my eyes she started off even - she’s living the atonement for her major infraction.

But Justine is just horrid. She’s a downright nasty person and has a long, long way to go back to redemption in my eyes, and even as she dances around changing the parts of herself that were so inherently unlikeable, she would still backslide into further sticky territory as a character, forcing me to wonder if she would ever truly be redeemed in my eyes. In the end, I’d have to say she wasn’t, because she managed to make every situation about her, and in the end committed a horrible assault on Mica that seemed, to me, to be far too easily forgiven. Her realization of how shitty her behavior had been throughout the story was not nearly as wrenching as I thought she deserved. She was a witch and I wanted her to pay.

Lastly, still on the “just desserts” topic, while she is a fascinating character and well worth reading about as the middle sister who realizes her own worth is something that she herself has to define, Regina never fully received any real acknowledgement or apology from anyone in her family, from the parents who take her for granted to the sisters who band together despite their own issues to heap abuse on her as if she weren’t really a person worth their consideration. However, Regina’s increased strength and resolve to take care of herself and to not allow her family to hurt her anymore is a much more realistic resolution than to have her family come on bended knee pleading for forgiveness. Family doesn’t change easily, and you can’t really expect a family member to wake up one Afterschool-Special later and realize, “Oh, I’ve been horrible! I must change my wicked ways!” While the part of me that empathized with and rooted for Regina wanted some serious groveling, I have to admit that the novel’s ending did ring true to how real families move past their discord.

This is the first Stephanie Bond book I’ve read, and if they are all like this I’ve got me some glomming to do. I don’t often encounter authors who can effortlessly blend suspense, mystery, romance, women’s fiction, and family drama in a novel that still manages to be somewhat light and certainly funny. I Think I Love You deals with some real issues, and while the romance sometimes takes a backseat to the murder and the family mishegas, the happily ever after is more than satisfying.