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

Our intrepid narrator, shoe aficionado and newly-crowned Queen of Vampires, Betsy, is determined to lead as normal a life as she possibly can. To this end, she goes job-hunting, and manages to land a job right out of her wettest of wet dreams: shoe salesperson in Heaven (i.e. Macy’s at The Mall of America). Betsy’s all “Hell yeah, employee discount!” but as always, there’s bitter with the sweet. For one thing, termites decided her house was the perfect location for a spring break party and then figure ah, what the hell, might as well stay on through summer vacation. For another, there’s a new vigilante group in town whose mission is whacking as many vampires as they can get their stakes on.

The house problem is easily solved, thanks to her best friend Jessica’s unending supply of moolah: they just rent a huge mansion—one right across the street from the governor’s, in fact, and I find the thought of Betsy and Co. living across the street from a house once occupied by Jesse Ventura oddly amusing.

The second problem is a bit thornier. On one hand, Betsy is the Empress of the Undead and apparently one of her duties is making sure her subjects aren’t turned into vampire tartare. On the other hand, a lot of vampires are assholes and she’s had to yank off more than one belligerent undead headcase from their hapless victims, so what’s a staked vamp here and there? But once the thugs attack her friend Tina and make an attempt on Betsy’s own ass—well, in the immortal words of a thousand Steven Seagal flicks: This time, it’s personal. So with the help of the ever hot, ever well-endowed vampire Sinclair and the motley crew of sidekicks we met in the first book (Tina, Jessica, and Marc the Cute Gay Doctor) plus a fresh batch of new sidekicks, Betsy attempts to hold down her job and solve the mystery at the same time. Some righteous asskicking is handed down, but the villains would’ve gotten away with it all if it weren’t for those meddling kids and… Oh, wait. Sorry, wrong campy, insubstantial pseudo-horror comedy series.

The problems I had with the first book are all magnified in this one. The lack of substance, the lack of character development, the chip on Betsy’s shoulder that resembles a flourishing young redwood when it comes Sinclair—I mean what is WRONG with her? This guys saves her ass AGAIN and provides her with the most wonderful orgasms AGAIN and still she snarls and distrusts him, which makes me wonder if she has some kind of a permanent dent in her cerebral cortex from getting her head smashed by that Aztek (godDAMN that’s one ugly car—I mean, speaking of subcortical damage, what in the fuck were those designers smoking when they came up with that hideous hosebeast?).

Aside from a pretty neat plot development at the end that stems from the termite problem, this book is pretty much completely dispensable. You KNOW the plot is very, very light when even a long-winded bitch like me can summarize it in three paragraphs. Nobody grows, changes or learns much of note, and at the end of the book almost everything is returned to the status quo. Betsy is still shallow, sarcastic and not very pleased with being undead royalty, and she’s still totally pissed at her consort, Sinclair, for little to no good reason. Sinclair is still a mystery in many, many ways, but still TOTALLY FUCKING HOT. Etc.

What’s so frustrating is, there’s so much material that Davidson could’ve explored instead of just shooting out more one-liners. Why is Betsy so different from the other vampires? How exactly is a vampire created? There are various mentions of vampire laws and such—how are they enforced? Also, what happened to the vampires who were extremely loyal to Nostro in the first book? And more details about Sinclair, Tina and Marc would not have been amiss. Seeing Betsy interact more with her parents would’ve been interesting too; her dad wishes she was still dead, for Christ’s sake, a hint of conflict that was raised in Undead and Unwed but quickly glossed over.

But despite all my complaints, this book really is a lot of fun to read. Like the first novel, the zippy, snarky dialogue is probably its best feature. Shit, scratch that, it’s just about the only feature in this book. It made me chuckle out loud, though, and I can’t dislike something that’s this much fun, hence the B- grade instead of a C-.

If Betsy keeps going in this vein without growing or changing as a person, I’m afraid I’m going to get tired of her, and I don’t want to get tired of her; I really enjoy her voice. It’s just starting to resemble a one-note melody, and god knows I don’t want Phillip Glass in novel form.

Not that everybody and their dead dog don’t know the storyline already, but here comes my usual overlong plot summary anyway: Betsy (originally Elizabeth) Taylor is having a pretty tough time. A couple months back, a bunch freaks with bad breath, no sartorial sense and unusually sharp teeth attacked her just as she’s leaving Khan’s Mongolian Grill. But the dentally enhanced thugs are the least of her problems, especially when her thirtieth birthday rolls around. On that happy day, she’s late for work, gets laid off, and then receives a not-too-gentle cranial adjustment from the fender of a car (an Aztek, no less, which is quite possibly the assiest looking car in existence) while attempting to rescue her cat. And to add insult to injury, she rises from the dead a few days later with a mean case of drymouth, which is bad, but for that special hellish touch, she’s wearing her stepmother’s castoffs—including what seem like a pair of cheap shoes. CHEAP SHOES.

Betsy decides this is some sort of weird fluke (and let’s face it, life with only Payless shoes to wear is not a life worth living anyway) and unsuccessfully attempts to off herself in various ways, none of which work because:

a) She doesn’t need to breathe any more; and

b) She heals at speeds that would make Wolverine swoon with envy.

She also finds to her complete horror that she now has a thirst for blood. Besides the major ick factor, her new fangs make her lisp whenever they make an appearance. There’s apparently no dignity to being one of the walking dead.

But there are a few benefits to being a vampire. People, especially heterosexual men, find her irresistible. OK, it’s kind of tiresome having to peel them off her leg every time they look into her eyes and decide WHOA SHE’S REALLY PRETTY, but it’s nice to finally have mojo. Her strength, reflexes and senses are supernaturally enhanced, and she doesn’t have to testify tearfully before Congress about how she got that way. She even makes a new friend when she talks a depressed doctor out of splattering the sidewalk when her supersensitive hearing picks up on his suicidal musings as she walks past a children’s hospital.

But those perks are pretty much outweighed by the assiness of the other vampires, who find her soon enough. There are two major vamp camps in town, and she has to decide whose to go with: the one headed by a preening Bela Lugosi-wannabe with a bad combover named Nostro, or the much-smaller contingent headed by a hot, hunky, terrifically built vampire named Eric Sinclair. (One of them ends up being the bad guy, and the other ends up being the love interest. Try not to let this puzzle confound you for too long.)

The problem is, Betsy doesn’t want anything to do with vampire politics, and her conviction that they’re all freaks with no lives (har) is only strengthened when they tell her she’s the Vampire Queen prophesied by the Book of the Dead. All she wants is to be left alone so she can lead a normal life. Well, normal except for that occasional uncontrollable-need-to-chomp-into-a-human-neck thing. But goddammit, Sinclair is offering her an unlimited supply of designer shoes for her allegiance, and she’s undead, not made of stone…

This book is narrated from a first-person perspective, and I dig Betsy’s voice. She sounds exactly like what she is: a shoe-obsessed, irreverent, street smart (if not necessarily book-smart), wisecracking Super Secretary. It’s to Davidson’s credit that Betsy embodies many things I find irritating in people, both in real-life and fiction, yet I like her anyway. Part of it’s how Betsy doesn’t take anything, including herself, too seriously. Everything’s fair game for her snarking, from vampires skulking around in graveyards ("Ooooh, the CARLSON mausoleum. How sinister! What’s next, a plate of lutefisk and square dancing?"), to her stepmother ("I could not forgive her for chasing my father while he was married, bringing him down like a wounded gazelle, and then marrying the carcass"), to her smarts ("I could have gone to medical school, except for all the math and stuff").

Then there’s Sinclair. Dude, he’s HOT. But there’s not enough of him in the book. At the end, I know certain basic facts about him (how he turned into a vampire, some bare basics about his background) but not much else. And he’s crazy about Betsy, of course, which is obvious to everyone except Betsy herself. Ultimately, though, he remains something of a cipher, which is a pity, because he provides such a nice foil for Betsy’s good-natured bitchiness.

The secondary characters are mucho fun. There’s Marc, the suicidal physician whom Betsy saves. Marc is gay, and it’s okay ‘cause gay means happy and happy means gay. No, scratch that, he has an anxiety disorder, but eh, he does much better once he moves in with Betsy and gets to be her Gay Sidekick. And hooray for Marc being a doctor—most fictional portrayals of gay men I’ve seen in the mass media involve them being in the arts, and usually the more flaming varieties at that.

Jessica, Betsy’s best friend, is also worth mentioning. She’s black, and damn, I cannot remember the last time I encountered a black person in a romance novel. (Actually, I can’t remember the last time I encountered a black person in ANY kind of fiction since reading Snow Crash three years ago. Hmmmm.) I got a chuckle out of seeing the two of them disagreeing over Gone With the Wind and cracking jokes about the race issue—God knows my friends and I have made some pretty tasteless jokes about the “yellow peril” I represent and my alleged affinity for calculus. I especially like Jessica’s obsession over her “best friend” status because it rings so true. I had a friend in junior high who was very much like that, and lemme tell you, it’s much more amusing to read about it in a book than to experience it in real life.

One aspect of the story has me scratching my head, and it’s Betsy’s antagonism towards Sinclair. OK, he’s pretty high-handed, and Betsy is not always the sharpest knife in the drawer so I didn’t expect her to realize that what she’s interpreting as asshattedness is an overdeveloped protective instinct, but I find her continued antipathy towards Sinclair kind of puzzling since he saves her ass more than once, and he’s hot, and he smells nice, and he provides the most excellent orgasms, etc., etc., etc. Frankly, the antagonism feels kind of forced; I get the sense Davidson is trying to drag on the antics and put off the HEA until later in the series. Nothing wrong with prolonging the sexual tension, but I wish she’d picked a less lame species of conflict on which to base it.

Much as I enjoyed reading this book and had a hard time peeling myself away once I started it, I feel absolutely no urge to re-read it. I think part of it is how it didn’t really engage many of my emotions apart from my sense of humor. It’s fun and fluffy, but just a little bit too fluffy. If the conflict between her and Sinclair had just had a little bit more bite to it (I SWEAR TO GOD I didn’t even notice that pun until I typed it), if I’d gotten a better sense of the other characters besides Betsy, if the resolution to their troubles hadn’t been quite as abrupt—in short, if the book had been a bit more substantial, I think I would’ve liked it even more than I did. As it is, if you’re looking for some funny-ass bitchiness and Snarkywood is down for some reason, this book is a pretty decent substitute.

* Screaming lady image shamelessly stolen and modified from the DVD cover for The Day of the Triffids, which was a pretty scary book that got made into a very campy movie.

It does beg the question: what is it about young girls in romance novels that makes them slightly squicky heroines in their own right? I suspect for my brain, it’s the idea that once the novel ends, the story ends. Hero marries heroine, they all live happily ever after. The. End. The characters stay young, beautiful, and perfectly happy in my mind, and this may be one of the reasons I find recurring collections of past novel characters slightly irritating. No, Bob and Jane are living in Bulltestershire Manor and are YOUNG and HAPPY and they do not age gracefully and have sixteen children all under the age of ten!. I think it is that *I* don’t want to characters to age, and I resent an author forcing me to age them in my mental picture.

I think Putney was aware that a grown up child from a previous novel suffering as a heroine the way Alexandra does in this novel would give a good number of readers a major case of the squees. In Rainbows, Alex was called “Amy,” until she decided to change her own name, according to her own telling, and demanded everyone call her Alex. The name change might have been Putney’s attempt to encourage readers to separate the young girl from Rainbows from the heroine in The Bartered Bride. Because Alex sure does suffer a good bit in this book, and no one would want to see a young girl they liked from a previous novel fall into such circumstances.

I will warn you, there is rape, abuse, and a good deal of sexual trauma in this book, and if this is something you are sensitive to, I suggest you avoid this novel entirely.

But aside from the often difficult subject matter, The Bartered Bride is a roller coaster ride of a book, specifically because so freaking much happens it’s amazing that it takes place of a matter of months. I mean, woo damn. Name a convention commonly found in a European historical novel, and I will bet you a Butterfinger that it’s in this book. Kidnapping? Slavery? Young children? Older children? Grown up children? Past characters aiding the present hero and heroine? Villains up to no damn good in horrible ways? Disinheritances? Lack of sexual confidence? If you like adventure romances that take place over several countries instead of romances that insist on keeping the characters in Hymenshire all the time, this is the book for you.

The hero, Gavin, is a Britain-born, Scottish-raised American sea captain; Alexandra is the daughter of Catherine Kenyon, as I mentioned, and is now a widow herself with a 12 (I think) year old daughter, Katie. Katie is alternately precocious, all-too-wise, and the only sign of her acting appropriate for her age is her loathing of her “lessons.”

Gavin first encounters Alex in a slave market on an island in the Pacific while touring the central village with the Sultan, a shrewd and somewhat sociopathic man. Gavin makes the mistake of asking to buy the slave so he can set her free, and the sultan realizes he can use Alex as a bargaining chip in his desire to have Gavin serve as his liaison to the European market, an idea Gavin is opposed to, having guessed that working for the Sultan would be an unfair, tenous arrangement at best, and downright dangerous at worst.

The sultan and Gavin return to the palace, and Gavin finds Alex in a cage in his room: she is to be the prize in a challenge between the Sultan, who has never lost, and Gavin. If Gavin wins, he is free to take Alex with him. If the Sultan wins, Gavin is his slave, along with Alex.

The terms of the challenge are not insurmountable but certainly extremely difficult, and the last challenge places Gavin and Alex in - well, not to give away too much, but places them in a rather forced horizontal position, not the best thing for an honorable English gentleman, and a woman who has already been sexually assaulted several times while in captivity.

I will tell you that Gavin does win, and he and Alex locate her daughter and return to England to face their feelings for one another, and society at large, which would not be all too welcoming to a woman with such a tattered sexual past.

The sexual past is the challenge for me here: on one hand, this book dealt with real issues and managed to sustain an engaging storyline that travels from multiple countries to multiple societies and illustrates some of the differences in those societies. However, I do recall on several occasions thinking, “When is this angst going to come to an end?”

I’m not talking about the personal angst experienced by Alex. She had sexual issues to deal with throughout the book and I found them realistic and somewhat admirably dealt with by the author. But one catastrophe after another smacked these two over the head, to the point where you wanted the villains, all the many varieties of them, to experience hell-on-earth style punishment just to vindicate all the suffering the protagonists had to endure.

On the other hand, Putney is a master at describing emotional encounters, and the scenes between Alex and Gavin are wonderful, as are the scenes that develop their relationship. I’d have to say that The Bartered Bride is often more of an adventure book than a romance, but the romance is a solid element that provides a great deal of healing and does soothe the angst when it gets to be too much. And the adventure itself is intelligent reading, with a romance between two intelligent protagonists, so I found it perfectly enjoyable.

Riona isn’t quite that lucky. During a ball, she’s lured into the garden by the smarmy and extremely broke Harold MacDougal, who then attempts to compromise her to force her into marrying him. He doesn’t succeed in so much as stealing a kiss—Riona, to her credit, kicks him in the nuts while he’s trying it and this is one of the few satisfying blows she gets in, from here on out it’s sheer frustration watching her helplessness, baby—but he does succeed in mussing her up. And of course that’s enough evidence of her ruined virtue for the rest of society, and perhaps even more importantly, in the all-powerful Mrs. Parker’s eyes.

Riona initially resists the attempted manipulation, but Harold insists on spreading ugly false rumors about what they did in the garden. She realizes that the scandal of being both ruined and unmarried would in turn ruin Maureen’s chances at marrying her British captain, but balancing her personal happiness with that of her sister’s proves to be a much harder task than she had bargained for. She eventually acquiesces—reluctantly—to Harold’s suit.

Riona’s mother decides to enlist help with Riona’s mulishness from an old friend and former tenant of hers, Fergus MacRae, who was something of a father-figure to her girls while he lived with them. Fergus, however, is otherwise occupied by his impending wedding, so he sends his nephew James in his stead.

Of the MacRae brothers, James is the sensitive, pretty girly-man. He became a ship captain because his brothers did, but he doesn’t feel the same affinity for the seagoing life as his siblings. He maintains a journal, in which he confides his most intimate thoughts in the best angsty, sensitive girly-man prose. Really, if James were a modern man, he’d probably keep a livejournal, listen to bands like The Flaming Lips or Radiohead and have oodles of fangirls who secretly assume he’s gay.

So at any rate, here’s the rest of the plot: James meets Riona. They fall madly in love at first sight. Riona’s mother sees this, tells a big whopping lie about missing livestock and enlists James’ help in catching the imaginary thief in an effort to keep him at the farm longer. A crazy-ass villain with a grudge against the MacRaes makes a quick appearance, but that side-plot is neatly resolved about halfway through the book. James realizes that a farmer’s life is much more fulfilling for him than being a ship captain. Riona and James have OMG HOT SEXX0R. And everyone in the book who realizes how perfect James and Riona are for each other just kind of walk around with their dicks in their hands going “Uh duhhrrrrrr, what do we do, boss, what do we do?” But praise Jah, James finally gets a clue and resolves everything in the last 40 pages of the book.

Despite the rather dismal excuse for conflict in this novel, The Irresistible MacRae is still eminently readable. Like I said before, this story was a nice break from the high drama of the first two books. It also helps that Riona and James are both extremely likeable characters. I like how realistic Riona’s struggles were when it came to weighing her concerns about getting married to Harold the Slimeball vs. her sister’s happiness. Her deep-seated desire to be selfish and tell everyone to fuck off was a nice change from the usual romance novel heroine, who can be quite the martyr, and her eventual capitulation makes her that much more honorable because you realize the cost it exacts on her. And James is adorable. He’s hot, he tries hard to resist Riona before he caves in to his desires, and he also has a nice protective streak to him that’s never obnoxious. I happen to like sensitive girly men, what can I say? Makes a nice change from the usual romance novel heroes, who tend to be hyperkinetic alpha types.

I did bump the grade a half-point lower because of one more issue besides the plot: Ranney’s tendency to dwell on her protagonists’ internal musings was a bit much. YES, I know Riona is unhappy with her choices. YES, I know James is having a hard time resisting Riona even though he knows he should stay away from her. I GET IT. MOVE ON WITH THE STORY, PLZ. It’s all very prettily written, but pretty is as pretty does.

But really, despite all my snarking, you could do a lot worse with a romance novel choice than picking up The Irresistible MacRae. You could, for example, be reading Kill and Tell. If you don’t mind books with lots of introspection and sluggish excuses for plots don’t bother you too much, feel free to give this a shot. I do recommend reading the first two books first, but Ranney handles the backstories skillfully enough that doing so is not strictly necessary.

Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love

It’s 29 years after the events that ended One Man’s Love. Alisdair MacRae, eldest son of Ian and Leitis MacRae and a very successful ship captain, is visiting the ancestral MacRae lands that were abandoned when the clan decided to escape to Nova Scotia instead of suffering the full brunt of British rule in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden. He wants to look at Gilmuir Castle, which he’s heard so much about but never seen in person. But really, the visit is supposed to be a quick detour; he’s on his way south to London to talk to his father’s stepmother. When Ian MacRae (born Alec Landers, heir to the Earl of Sherbourne) decided to commit treason and aid the Scots in defying and eventually escaping the British, his stepmother, Patricia (who aided the escape) had him legally declared dead and her son installed as earl. However, her son is now dead, and Alisdair is presumed to be next in line to inherit. Alisdair has every intention of refusing the earldom. His life, he thinks, is with the sea and with a steady, sturdy woman in Nova Scotia.

Until he rescues a beautiful young woman named Iseabal. Iseabal is the only child of Magnus, laird of the MacRae’s age-old rivals, the Drummonds. The ruins of Gilmuir and the strange, sudden disappearance of the MacRae clan has always stirred her interest, and Iseabal uses every opportunity she has to escape there from the intensely abusive Magnus. Then one day, while exploring the castle, she quite literally falls down a hole. 30-year-old ruins that have been bombed to fuck and back by British cannon are full of holes—who knew? Not Iseabal, apparently. But conveniently enough, Alisdair is right there to yank her out.

Alisdair doesn’t really think too much of the encounter. Gilmuir and the MacRae land are actually foremost in his mind, especially when he sees the land being grazed over by sheep. He finds out that Magnus Drummond has been ceded the ownership and use of the property, and on impulse he heads over to the Drummond stronghold to buy the land back. Magnus is willing to sell it, on one condition: that Alisdair marry his daughter too. It’s not every day a man gets to marry a woman he pulls out of a hole, but fate has selected Alisdair for just such a destiny.

After the wedding, Alisdair and Iseabal and immediately sail for London, where Alisdair plans to annul the marriage and tell his step-grandmother gently but firmly: Thanks, but no thanks. But on the voyage down the two of them discover Things of Great Hotness about each other. For instance, Alisdair discovers that Iseabal is a sculptor, which he finds to be a turn-on. And Iseabal discovers that Alisdair has a genuine core of kindness and gentleness to him, and that’s a turn-on for her too, especially given her experiences with her father.

And Alisdair’s plans all go awry once he sets foot in London, of course. He doesn’t expect to like Patricia quite so much, for one. He also doesn’t expect the Sherbourne estate to be quite so prosperous. He suddenly realizes that if he accepts the earldom, he’ll have enough money to rebuild Gilmuir and start a shipyard there, and since the MacRae land has become a new obsession of his, he makes an old woman very happy and accepts the title. Similarly, his plans to annul his marriage to Iseabal are abandoned when Patricia, playing matchmaker, makes him aware of what exactly he’s giving up.

The happy couple sail back to Scotland to rebuild their future, except Magnus, as befits a romance novel villain (romances are not known for their multi-dimensional, believable bad guys—I know, SHOCK, HORROR, GASP!), has reneged on the deal and has reclaimed the land. And so begins a battle in earnest,and Iseabal feels herself horrified at the depths her father will sink to—so much so that she begins to doubt that Alisdair can truly love the daughter of the man who is able to commit such atrocities.

But they work it out in the end (I know, SHOCK, HORROR, GASP!), and everybody gets their just desserts. No, trust me. They do. There’s even a really sweet secondary love story involving Fergus, Leitis’s older brother and presumed dead at Culloden in the previous book.

Ranney does a good job of creating characters that aren’t quite your usual, run-of-the-mill romance novel archetypes. Alisdair strikes a nice balance between being confident and assertive on one hand, and being a genuinely nice guy on the other. Iseabal is one of the more interesting characters I’ve encountered lately. Her abuse at the hands of her father has led her to exercise extreme restraint over any outward manifestations of emotion, and her struggle with the repression is presented very believably. Alisdair’s desire and corresponding efforts to break through that restraint are similarly well-portrayed.

The writing style in this book is quite beautiful; it’s lyrical without being overwhelming. Ranney has a very distinct voice, and although I’ll read just about anything she releases, a few of her books have collapsed under the weight of her prose style (My Wicked Fantasy is one book that comes to mind, and Above All Others is actually almost completely unreadable because of it). Thankfully, she manages to avoid that particular pitfall in this book.

When the Laird Returns is a pretty entertaining book. It’s well-written, and it doesn’t insult your intelligence, though it comes close to calling it mean names a couple of times. Check it out. If you’ve read and enjoyed other Karen Ranney novels, look this up. If you’ve never read any Ranney, I suggest trying Upon a Wicked Time or My Beloved to get you hooked, those two books kick ass.

Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love