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

This book is an unabashed homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s partly an epistolary novel, and it also uses the “I heard this story from this guy who was given the story from this guy who heard it from the guy who actually experienced the events” narrative device. Yes, there’s probably a name for that narrative device. No, I don’t know what it is, and I can’t be arsed to look it up. No, I don’t know what my English degree is good for. I mean, look, I’m ending a sentence in a preposition!

So: About 2/3 of the story is told via incredibly long-winded letters that no person in their right mind would write, with a big chunk of the rest being a story passed on second- and third-hand to the narrator, a device beloved to nineteenth-century authors to impart a cosy sort of feel yet provide a sheen of faux authority to their tall tales. The rest is the narrator telling her merry little tale, plus bits and pieces of ancient manuscripts.

I get what the author is trying to do. I can even pinpoint what this book reminds me of, from Pamela, which is the prototype for the “nothing much happens and the letter-writer is annoying and I wish she’d just get good and raped already but dear God I can’t stop reading gaaaaah” novel, to The Castle of Otranto, to Dracula itself.

The problem is, right around page 350, I suddenly realized: this is it. The most exciting bits of the book have already happened. Regardless, I couldn’t help but slog on anyway because I hoped there would a Stupendous! Resolution! To! This! Big! Old! Mess!

I was, as Garth Algar might say, denied. The ending is… but I get ahead of myself.

The narrator, a historian herself, says in the prologue that she wants to recount some Very Odd Events that happened when she was a teenager for posterity or a reasonable facsimile thereof. The story starts in 1972, when she finds some mysterious letters and an even more mysterious book in her dad’s documents. The book is Ominous: very old, odd-smelling, with completely blank pages except for a woodcut print of a big old bad-ass dragon in the center, accompanied by the word “DRAKULYA.”

She asks her dad—I almost said “badgers,” but the narrator is far too limp to do something that energetic—about the mysterious book. Dad turns pale, stammers, puts her off, but eventually starts unraveling a long, long, long story that took place while he was still in grad school.

Seems that you don’t find the book, the book finds you. After discovering the book in his library carrel while researching his thesis on Renaissance-era Dutch merchants (this sounds incredibly boring, but trust me, compared to this book, I bet that thesis would’ve provided pulse-pounding excitement), daddy-o brings the book to his thesis advisor and renowned historian, a right smart chappie named Bartholomew Rossi.

Rossi, in turn, turns pale, stammers, and then launches into his own story about how he found a very similar book under similar circumstances, and how his investigations have led him to the conclusion that Dracula is alive and well and living in Hell—or somewhere in Eastern Europe, at any rate. Before his investigations can go on much further, though, some Nasty Shit happens that turns Rossi away from the trail. Dracula, it seems, will not brook any trespasses, which makes no sense when you get to the ending--but more on that below.

Right after imparting part of his story to the narrator’s father, however, Rossi disappears from his office, with a puddle of blood on his desk and another sanguineous smear high up on the wall being the only clues. Thus begins the Hunt for Red Rossi. OK, Rossi’s not a commie, but as the narrator’s father finds out, he’s definitely been spirited beyond the Iron Curtain.

So: Story within story within story. All of them mostly boring, peppered with just enough “Oooh, creepy!” to keep me reading.

Later in the book, the narrator’s father vanishes, haring off to seek the narrator’s mother. The problem? She allegedly died when the narrator was but a wee bairn. However, daddy darling leaves reams and reams of letters behind, which the narrator reads over the course of a night—a feat I have much respect for, because that part of the book? Took me two weeks to work through. Seriously, I kept falling asleep every 15 pages or so.

The book is mostly daddy darling’s tale. He traipses all over the European continent, from Istanbul (hearing that name always makes me think of that They Might Be Giants song) to Hungary in his search for Rossi, and in the meanwhile meets and falls in Lurve with a feisty Romanian hottie. Peripherally, we have the narrator pursuing her dad after he vanishes, though conveniently enough, he leaves her all sorts of clues and the aforementioned stuporously detailed series of letters.

Besides the slow, slow, slowwwww pace, two other things bothered me quite a bit about the tale.

One of them is a peeve I’ve had since I was a child. You know how frustrated you were as a kid when you read a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book and you figure out shit wayyyyy faster than the allegedly smart, sassy investigators, leading you to wonder if they’d been hit on the head one too many times by nefarious kidnappers who don’t want them to figure the Secret of the Haunted Barbie Doll? Or when they ignore the easy, obvious solution in favor of doing something completely fucking retarded? The characters in The Historian do the same sort of thing several times. And I’m not just talking about the good guys—the bad guys do it, too.

My favorite instance of this sort of obtuseness revolves around a completely unremarkable copy of Dracula belonging to the narrator’s father’s university library. A creepy undead librarian attempts to remove its entry from the card catalog, Hot Young Romanian thing has checked it out, and everyone acts like it’s the only possible copy to have and OMG IT’S SUCH A DANGEROUS BOOK TO READ.

Dude. It’s Dracula. I doubt that book has been out of print since its first publication. While they’re making a fuss over the one copy, I’m wondering why the narrator’s father couldn’t have walked into the nearest bookstore and just bought himself a cheap paperback edition, and why the creepy undead librarian hadn’t torched all the bookstores in town carrying copies of this book if keeping people from reading this book was so stinkin’ important.

In the meanwhile, this intrepid reader contemplated taking a razor to the wrists—not hers, but the characters’; I thought maybe fresh blood would lure Dracula out and they’d solve the mystery that much faster, but alas, I couldn’t.

The other thing that bothered me is going to entail quite a bit of spoilerage. Please, for the love of tacos, don’t read this any further if you don’t want to know the resolution of the book, because HOLY SHIT it’s stupid.

OK, ready?

Dracula wants a librarian.

Oh yeah, that’s right. Dracula himself hand-makes all these creepy little blank books with nothing but a woodcut of a dragon and his own fucking name right in the center. He hands these out like candy to bright young academicians, though why he picked this batch, I will never figure out because a lot of the time they seemed about as sharp as a sack of wet hair. Oh, sure, he occasionally scares off the dilettantes with random acts of cruelty and mayhem, but ultimately, this is all a big, perverse test because he wants to pick the most persistent chump to help him catalogue his supah-secret subterranean library.

Sorry for the overuse of sarcastic italics, but: Dracula is going through all this trouble for a fucking librarian. What, the classifieds weren’t good enough any more? Let me tell you, if the Internet and Craigslist had been around in the 50s, we would’ve been spared this sorry story. Out of all the many “What the FUCK?” endings the author could’ve chosen, this is probably right up there with Dracula seeking a colon hydrotherapist for fun times and love a la Kenny Loggins.

(Actually, if somebody wrote an erotic parody of The Historian called The Colon Hydrotherapist, that would be so. fucking. awesome.)

And after all the stupendous build-up and the ominous atmosphere, the vanquishing of the bad guy happened so fast, I would’ve missed it if I’d blinked. In one of the few parts of the story that could’ve used more detail and drama instead of less, it was all “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am” and “Oh hey, bad guy’s dead.”

Yet, despite all its flaws and its uncanny ability to mimic Ambien, I still found the book readable. Initially, the slow pace built up the suspense and I raced through the book, eager to find out more; it’s really too bad that the pace actually slowed down and the suspense went nowhere. And no matter how saggy and baggy and slow it got, it says something about the author’s skill that I still slogged on, determined to find out the ending no matter how much I had to pay in library fines. The concept overall was pretty cool, and it provided reams of historical detail whose accuracy I cannot vouch for but which sounded pretty damn cool. And the quietly creepy parts were very, very creepy.

If this book were a piece of meat, it’d be in need of a really, really skilled butcher, one who really knew how to trim the shit out of that shit. As it was, it was a big, bloody hunk of meat with all the gristle and fat and tendons and icky crap attached to it, and I had to chew my way through all that. My teeth are stronger, I guess, and it didn’t taste all that bad, especially because I’m the kind of freak who generally enjoys the extraneous, icky crap, but I’m still kind of pissed off, especially since this is being touted as the most tender of filets.

(Yeah, I know, but hey, I warned you about the meat metaphor.)

Sarah says:

The weekend I moved, you could have visibly seen the yanking grin on one side of my face from where the plot and the character of this book hooked me. This book arrived the day I moved, and I had it sitting in the window seat of my house, literally the only thing unpacked in a house full of boxes. I kept hiding behind the boxes to keep reading it - this book seriously hooks you so bad you’ll have a rictus curl in the side of your face.

Tara is spunky, snarly, sexy and fabulous, and since the book is written in the first-person, you spend a lot of time in her head. I didn’t mind in the slightest being there, as Tara has both a fascinating way of looking at the wack-ass events in her life, and at people’s behavior in general. She’s judgmental and doesn’t pull any punches, and just wants to be left alone. However, the prose, as it is first person, jumps from subject to subject rapidly, much like your brain does when it’s sparking, and sometimes it’s hard to tell ruminations from plot developments. I suppose this is one of the perils of writing in the 1st person.

As for Howard, the reader has to rely on Tara’s impressions of him to get a sense of his character, and this is difficult, since the reader has a much better sense of her friends since she’s known them longer. You know she thinks he’s hot, and you know that he’s persistent, almost to the point of creepyness. But because all the development takes place from her perspective, you aren’t really sure if he’s a character worth trusting or if you can blithely rely on him as the “hero” of the novel.

His character, particularly in the beginning, comes across as a rather weird dude, and my understanding of his personality isn’t quite as developed as I’d like when he starts spilling his guts about his emotional past. What’s supposed to be an personal moment early on between Tara and Howard leaves me feeling like I do when I encounter people who engage too quickly emotionally and tell me things I feel are none of my business. If I had a better idea of him, a more-developed sense of his character and who he is or at least what he looked like, other than that he was hotty mcmuffinstud, the true-confessions moment would have inspired a lot more pity. As it was, he had to fight his way back, in my estimation, from creepy over-divulging guy, to adorably hot man who wants to take care of prickly Tara and her crazy ass universe.

I am, however, glad this is a series because I wasn’t tired of Tara, Howard, or any of the auxilliary characters by the time the book ended. I wanted to know more about them, and about Tara. But more importantly, I wanted to know more about the day to day life Tara leads, especially when someone isn’t trying to throw a curse on her. She runs a revenge website, and sells fascinating products. The reader learns the history of one or two, but not all, or how she came up with the idea in the first place.

The thing about the Keys that makes the story both believable and a total escape is the residents’ acceptance of events, people, and attitudes that are really fucking bizarre. From Miss Good Voodoo to this dark silhouette that watches Tara’s window at night, to the cook at Crusty’s who hates her for reasons relating to ceviche, there are some funky ass people in this story, but Tara isn’t fazed by them at all, or, if she is, she gets over it fast.

To evaluate this book, I have to ask myself, did I like it? I sure did. But is this a romance? Or a ghost story? Or a paranormal mystery series? I don’t honestly know. There’s definitely a breaking-through-the-armor moment with Tara, and there’s definitely some romance going on, but unlike many a romance I’ve read, aside from admitting that she checks out his buns, there’s no internal ruminations as to how Tara feels about Howard. I don’t honestly know that it is part of her character - she’s more of a “he’s got to prove he’s worth my time before I go pondering the fineness of his eyebrows” kinda gal - or if romance is meant to be the main element of the story.

I look at this novel as the pilot episode of a really fucking awesome tv series, where there’s a lot of initial construction to do, and after you’ve watched awhile, you realize the pilot doesn’t necessarily reflect the entirety of the series’ tone and style. However, if the series goes where I hope it will, the pilot will have launched something very interesting.

Sarah’s Grade: B-

Candy Says:

Hey, if Chuck Palahniuk can do it in Haunted, then Cindy Cruciger can do it in Revenge Gifts, too.

What am I talking about?

Tense changes, people.

The books switches dizzyingly from past to present and back to past again. The tense changes oftentimes happen within the same paragraph, and in at least one spectacular instance, within the same sentence. And there’s no discernible reason nor pattern to these tense changes. Tara walks into the sushi restaurant in present tense, sees Howard in the past tense, eats lunch with him in the past, then leaves the restaurant in the present.

I know. I have the same problem too. Takes one to know one, right? But oh my, reading it was exhausting because every time the tense changed, I mentally switched gears. By the end of the book, I felt kind of numb.

Distracting tense changes aside, however, I agree with a lot of what Sarah says: this book is pretty entertaining, and the narrator, Tara, is truly refreshing, especially for a romance heroine. She’s no shrinking violet, that’s fer damn sure, and lord knows I’m tired of shrinking violets in romance novels.

But. Butbutbut. She hasn’t had an orgasm before.

No, she’s no virgin, but apparently she’s had nothing but lousy lovers all her her life.

With Howard, though? Screaming bliss within minutes. I shit you not. Sigh. This romance stereotype seriously needs to die, die, die.

But here’s a puzzling thing: Tara, while basking in the afterglow, muses on how much she misses ruthlessly using a man’s body for her selfish pleasure, which leads one to the bizarre conclusion that orgasmless, unfulfilling sex with clueless lovers is selfishly pleasurable for Tara Cole.

---Please note, there’s been a bit of debate about how accurate the paragraph below is. Check the comments for more details---
That’s not the only inconsistency, either. One of her friends, Sam, is gay (or at least presented as such) in the beginning of the book. Some time later, and without any explanation or signs of bewilderment on the part of the narrator, Sam is straight and seriously hitting on Tara. Perhaps this can be attributed to an unreliable narrator, but even unreliable narrators are surprised, and Sam’s sudden orientation switch doesn’t give Tara pause. Me? I paused, actually said out loud “Hang on minute, I thought the dude was gay!” and spent five minutes riffling through the first 100 pages of the book looking for references to Sam’s homogaiety.

And while the narrative voice is fresh, different, quirky and very, very entertaining, the non-stop vignettes and snarky remarks eventually wear thin. Yes, I get that Tara is cynical. Yes, I get that she has an evil sense of humor. I like her for that. WHY is she constantly pointing this out to me, though? The story and her actions already show this to me in ample detail, and the endless internal quipping slows the pace of the story quite significantly in some spots.

I’m also not sure I buy into the love story. I’m with Sarah on that, too: Howard is very attractive, but other than that, he’s a cipher, and the speed with which the romance happens can give you whiplash if you’re not careful. Part of this is because of the amount of space taken up by the snarking; instead of viewing the relationship develop in more detail, you’re treated to yet another off-center observation from Tara, which, by the end of the book, tends to be a variant on previous observations she’s made earlier in the story.

The pacing overall is uneven. The book starts out at a fairly leisurely pace, with weirdness building on weirdness. The last 70-80 pages of the book, though… Woo damn. The book isn’t so much kicked into high gear as launched into Mach 3 with no warning. Characters who were peripheral to the story are all of a sudden introduced willy-nilly, mayhem and magic galore happen, and the resolution of the story? Fun, but a bit too pat and convenient for my tastes, especially after all the build-up in the first parts of the book.

One last nitpick: There are snippets of Javascript code in the book, all part of the script that generates a quote of the day for revengegifts.com.  That’s all well and good, since Tara’s a computer geek, which is something else I like about her--convincing computer geeks in general are in short supply in Romancelandia, and female computer geeks? Shit, I think Tara’s the first I’ve encountered. The big problem though? The script cannot work as written. (Feel free to skip this whole paragraph if you’re not interested in reading me blather on about Javascript, by the way.) So for one thing, the one curly bracket in the script is left open, which, in my experience, does not make for Happy Code. For another, if Monday == 1, then it follows that Sunday can’t also == 1. Not to mention the wrong comment tags are used in the wrong spots; Javascript comment tags are two slashes (//) and they should be used within the <script> tag, whereas HTML comment tags look like this: <!-- --> and should appear outside of the <script> tag. The exact reverse happens in Tara’s Javascript. The lack of formatting tags in the Javascript are also puzzling; as with HTML, carriage returns do jack shit in the script--you need to code in the paragraph and line breaks. I know, petty nitpicking, but hey, if you want to include computer code in a book to show what a 1337 haxx0r the heroine is, then by crackey do it RIGHT, or at least fake it convincingly enough so that a ‘tard like me (trust me, I ain’t no great shakes with Javascript) can’t look at the script and go “Huh. Wait a minute, there’s a buncha weird things going on here....”

Despite all these issues, though, Revenge Gifts is still worth checking out. Tara is a fun alternative to the usual romance heroine (orgasmless state notwithstanding), and I’d wager I’m one of the few people here who’s really, really bothered by constant tense changes and broken Javascript. The story is definitely not run-of-the-mill, and the humor is pretty damn black in spots--something sorely lacking in most romance novels.

Candy’s Grade: C

But of course, this is no ordinary man-ho; he is Jack Devlin, the hero of our story. And he’s not even a man-ho. He’s a cutthroat publisher man, owner of a large printing and bookselling empire that grows larger by the minute owing to his predilection of selling books in cheap serial publication so the poor plebians around him can read and enjoy book ownership as well as the rich. Jack is there to discuss a professional matter with Amanda, but quickly figures out she has a different sort of professional matter in mind. Despite her protests that she’s changed her mind and wants him to leave, he seduces her into mindless pleasure and leaves without taking his own (what a man!), wishing her a happy 30th birthday as he goes.

When they meet again, and she realizes he’s not at all a man-ho, but instead a wildly hot and wealthy businessman, one who has bought her first manuscript and is intent on publishing it with or without her approval, she is furious, but also intrigued. Did I mention, he’s hot? And a publisher? You see the attraction, then.

I read this book over the week prior to my own 30th birthday, and while I am married and pregnant and definitely not a virgin (the baby just kicked me as I wrote that - HA! says Baby Bitchlette) I can relate to 30 being a milestone that tends to shock one into evaluating the past 30, and the next 30. It is something of a gateway into true adulthood, that big “3” at the start of one’s age. So I can understand Amanda entertaining the idea that, as a spinster, she has nothing to lose by losing her virginity, as she sees no option to marry in her future. She spent her eligible age caring for two invalid parents, and she’s reached such a level of intellectual success with her novels that no man would want her, as she is both too old and smarter than they are.

I have to say, I enjoyed the idea of Amanda taking matters into her own hands and divesting herself of her virginity, giving herself the sexual experience she’d never had, and I love the misunderstanding that conspires to give her a night of memorable climax with a man who already appreciates her intellect and isn’t going to be intimidated by her sizable creative brain.

I liked Amanda, as well: she’s practical, clever, and very intelligent, and while she recognizes that she’s been dealt a short hand by being dismissed as the spinster aunt by her own siblings, and left to care for her parents without a bit of help from them, she also is very proud of herself and her accomplishments. She’s a shade of Jane Austen - a popular writer who examines the society around her and has plenty to say about it in the context of her fiction. I’m also a sucker for romance novels about writer heroines, as I find writers writing about writers to be a most interesting character challenge.

I somewhat liked Jack as well, in so much as he was a tortured hero with a horrible childhood, looking for a way to his own success, and making sure he brought his friends with him as he rose to his goals. He works hard, and he’s shrewd, clever, and knows exactly how to make good money with his publishing ventures. In short, as a hero goes, he’s good looking, smart, savvy, rich, and wants to make the heroine happy at any cost.

I bet you saw that “BUT” coming down the road three paragraphs ago. There is a very large and irratating “BUT” in this novel, and it’s something of a spoiler. However, I’m not sure I can discuss why this book left me with more of a sneer than a smile without discussing this plot and character decision in detail. So if you’re not interested, I’ll end here with the following: This book is a lively story with characters that I liked, though they didn’t have much to struggle against on the whole. Despite the one flaw that I found throughout the story, which some readers might not even notice, I did enjoy reading about Amanda and Jack, almost to the end of the book.

Now, let me deliver the straight dish:

The minor problems with this book are indeed minor, and slight quibbles. In the book, there was no major conflict for Amanda and Jack to struggle against, except that she thought he was too wild and unsavory a match, considering his ruthless reputation. Professionally speaking, they were perfectly successful at the start of the story, and there was no danger to either of their successes, except that they might, God forbid, have more. Their struggles were internal for the most part, and as such didn’t amount to much. Their disagreements were either resolved midway, or addressed and dismissed after a few pages. So I never got a good sense of what the big deal was as to why she and he resisted one another for 375 pages.

The biggest problem I had with this book, however, appeared over and over as I read, and towards the end, as I mentally tabulated what grade I’d give the novel, I kept having to knock the grade down as again and again this problem appeared. I’ve seen it in other novels, too, and it bugs the shit out of me:

Heroine: Oh! A real and honest problem! An emotional difficulty, a deception, a fear, a real problem!
Hero: Here! I shall make sweet love to you so that you will escape this worry through orgasm and not really deal with it!
Heroine: Oh! But we must FACE this problem! I am practical and pragmatic! We must address, discuss, and manage this problem that is giving me fits!
Hero: Come here! I shall play with your woman parts and you shall stop making this noise about problems!
Heroine: Oh! But… Oh Oh OH!

Yeah. Jack’s a big one in the sack and every time there’s a plot twist that gives Amanda a bit of worry, out pops Jack’s jack to pump her problems away. Avoidance much?

From the manful “claiming” of Amanda through sexing her up, with passionate variations of “Say my name,” which are in this novel centered around the “Who do you belong to?” variety (I kept thinking Jack was going to ask her next, “Who’s your daddy? WHO’S YOUR DADDY?!") to the steamrolling over her very real and valid anxieties over their relationship and subsequent marriage, Jack did little to perform as an equal partner in the relationship, except where sex was concerned. And that kind of control over her, where he used her sexual pleasure to secure her acquiesence, got old with me really fast. Jack even uses their sexual intimacy against her, threatening to publish news of their sexual adventures to the entire world should she try to leave him. Ugh, I say.

But the worst part was the very end: Amanda gets pregnant, causing more “big misunderstandings” and the screwing over of a very kind, respectable, and genuinely nice suitor, who of course she has no real passion with, and in the end, suffers a miscarriage. She withdraws from Jack, convinced that he only married her because of the pregnancy, and is devastated by the loss of the baby she did indeed want to have. Jack goes barmy trying to figure out ways to reach her, so of course he goes back to his old bag of tricks, bringing a tray of food and the jack-in-his-pants to woo the sorrow right out of her - three weeks after her miscarriage. He whips out his magic bag of sex and procedes to throw her legs over the arm of her chair and go down on her, despite her protests that she’s not ready. There’s even fruit involved in the kinky sex play, and really, the whole scene made me look at the book with an expression of horrified fury. The hero dismisses the heroine’s agony, and proceeds to override her desire for him to stop, and I’m unable to adequately express my horror and revulsion at the entire scene.

At the end of the book, prior to the Worst Oral Sex Scene Ever (TM Candy), Amanda says, “You’re a bully.” And Jack replies, “And I’m bigger than you.”

Wow. What a man. It was quite irritating really: I wanted to like so much of this book, from the way Amanda comes to the decision to live her own life in consideration of nothing and no one but her own desires and happiness, to the professional element of the story wherein she’s a writer and he’s a publisher, and they’re working on an updated edit of her first novel together. But Jack spent too much time seducing the real issues of their relationship out of the way, and while Amanda got all that hot monkey lovin’, I was left to read about it in cold disgust, and since Jack didn’t save any of that sexx0r for me, this book gets a much lower grade than I thought to give originally. 

Candy’s Take

First of all, what I liked about this book:

I loved the unusual historical setting. Nineteenth-century England is all well and good, but it does get wearisome after a while. Lee does an excellent job of portraying the setting and how Chinese culture—everything from its fashions to its style of architecture—jars Lydia.

Also, Ru Shan is a convincing Chinese person. For one thing, the author refrains from making him über-Chinaman, the way Mary Jo Putney gave Troth of The China Bride so many virtues that she became a caricature of a Chinese woman. Ru Shan knows certain aspects of Chinese culture and philosophy, but is not by any means an expert in all of them. He’s not some kind of kung fu master, nor does he demonstrate intimate knowledge of feng shui; he’s a merchant who happens to belong to a rather interesting sex cult. He’s also not anachronistically tolerant of other races and religions. In fact, he has a true disgust of white people, which is consistent with the era.

The author also did a good job with Lydia’s reaction to being confined and made a slave. It’s very convincing. Finally, a captive heroine who’s not a simpering ninny, sighing and melting into the forceful embrace of the captor after her first flutterings of pleasure. She’s pissed off about her captivity, and she remains quite consistently pissed off, and most of the time I was thinking “Yeah! Good for her!”

Which leads me to what I didn’t like about this book:

The transition from Lydia’s very natural reaction to being a slave (anger, frustration, a desire for revenge, a fervent wish to escape and never look back) to OMG I LURVE YOU RU SHAN was abrupt, to say the least. The sexual portions of their relationship are presented in great detail, but it’s clear that while Lydia enjoys these attentions physically, mentally she’s in another place entirely.

Ru Shan does eventually realize that Lydia is much, much more than just a source of yin the way a cow is a source of milk, so his treatment of her improves accordingly, but we really don’t see them interacting in a way that would lead to two people actually falling in love with each other. Lust, yes. Love, no. Lydia’s switch from bloodthirsty revenge schemes to cooing love dove is so fast, I actually paged back to make sure I hadn’t missed some critical scenes.

Ru Shan’s ultimate declaration of love isn’t convincing, either. He does marry her (MINOR SPOILER: partly to compensate for the dishonor he had brought on her, partly because of her everlovin’ yin, and partly because he’s desperate to use her clothing design skills to help pick up business in his store—yeah, REAL romantic reasons for marrying a girl), but up until the very last minute he quite explicitly admits to himself that he doesn’t—in fact can’t—love her. A few pages later, however, he’s declaring his everlasting devotion to her, and given his reasons for marrying her, and the reasons why he panics when he comes very, very close to losing her for good (hint: losing her love was not uppermost in his mind), this comes way, way too close to the Sudden Realization of Love plot device for my comfort.

It’s not just the switch from hate to love that was abrupt. Overall, the speed at which Lydia and Ru Shan overcome the race and culture barriers when both had narrow, jingoistic upbringings is not believable. Throw in how these two are brought together under unpleasant circumstances that enhance negative perceptions and stereotypes, and I needed a lot more convincing to believe in their love.

Another point that bothered me is how Lydia heads over to China a mere three months after her father’s death, all hot to trot for Max. This seems odd to me. I know at least a year of mourning was customary in the Regency era, though I have no idea what the customary mourning period is in 1898, but three months seems mighty short even for modern times. That, and the fact that Lydia is a young, beautiful, gently-bred woman who travels completely alone all the way to Shanghai provided me with quite the major “WTF?” moment. Even if Lydia is dumb enough to think this is a great idea, where the hell was her mom? I find it difficult to believe that a Victorian mama is willing to allow her young, beautiful, unmarried daughter ship off to a barbaric land without any sort of chaperone.

The writing style overall is quite good, and like I said, Lee does an excellent job with the setting, but there were some passages that, to me, sounded jarringly modern. This is especially true when Lydia finally reunites with Maxwell, her hapless (and hopeless) fiancé. In particular, he constantly calls her “Lyds,” which not only seems modern and too informal even for an affianced couple, but to my ears sounds like a very American diminutive of “Lydia.”

White Tigress is quite the page-turner and I really enjoyed the setting, but ultimately I wasn’t convinced of Lydia and Ru Shan’s love. I’m still going to pick up Lee’s next book, though. It features a Shaolin monk. RRROWR.

Sarah’s Take

I’m entirely in accord with Candy’s impressions of reading about an entirely new location. Breaking out of dewy green England for the far east during a time of great cultural flux was fascinating, and Lee did a masterful job of portraying how each side influenced the other - from their personal perception of each other’s hygiene, grooming, and habits, to the misconceptions that rumors bred on each side.

Further, Lee spent a good amount of time developing how both the hero and the heroine moved past their own shallow perceptions of each other’s culture, and began a deeper understanding of the motives and values that drove them - particularly when those concepts shared common value and interpretation, such as his notion of a person’s “spirit” and her understanding of a human “soul.”

Now, what was it you called yourself, Candy? An uppity Godless chink? Yeah, I think that was it. Either way, Godless hebe over here needed the heathen Chink when it came to some major moments of Chinese culture and Taoist philosophy with a healthy dose of tantra. I honestly felt that the explanation of the motivation came so late that I already distrusted his motives because without any background to his religious goals, I had no basis on which to judge him except by his actions: obeyed woman mentor, purchased slave, chained her to bed, and proceeded to milk her yin, whatever that was.

By the end of the story, I came away with a fascinating grasp of concepts and an appreciation for how Ru Shan’s goals were different from Lydia’s, and, more importantly, how between their character motivations they could find personal and sexual harmony. Getting to that understanding took me some time.

However, my disappointment with the book came when it ended and I didn’t feel there had been enough vindication on three key points.

For one, Lydia herself goes from being a slave to being something of an addiction for Ru Shan to...sailing off into the sunset. I keep asking myself: was the degree to which she became a victim vindicated by the end of the book? Was her experience as a slave properly acknowledged by her lover who was also the person who purchased her and held her in captivity? That’s a serious imbalance of power that a mere, “I’m sorry” is not going to assuage. Even grovelling might not cut it.

Next, Maxwell: without giving too much away, I wanted him to bleed for his treatment of Lydia, and sadly, he remains intact from a phlebotomist’s perspective. She manages to use her newfound language skills and her ability to understand the values of both his culture and the culture of the country in which he resides to bend him to her will, but even then he still manages the upper hand. Through his machinations, she gains what she professes to hate but secretly wants all along, but still, I wanted Mr. Fiance’s head to roll. In a Bobbit sense.

Perhaps the real problem I had was the balance between fantasy and reality. Reaching a glowing happily ever after when there’s been such imbalance of power, hatred, prejudice, rage and sexual pressure, if not abuse, is quite a task that Lee sets up for herself, and one of the easier ways to urge that HEA along would be for those who stand in the way of the couple, or malign their relationship, to suffer in some way for their poor actions. In a romance, at least for me, I want bad things to happen to bad people, especially after bad things have happened to the good people.

Reality, of course, is that the bad things don’t happen in measure to the bad people who you think deserve them, and perhaps Lee was erring on the side of realism, since she did such a careful and crafty job of clearly portraying the prejudices and hatreds on both sides of the English and Chinese cultural divide. Suspending reality for a just-desserts ending might not have been on the menu.

However, I wanted to see some misery on the part of the shitful characters, and I wanted to see something happen to them other than, “And they lived in Shanghai in their continued misery.” Yes, continuing in their existences as described would be hell enough for me, but like Mr. Fiance, I wanted Bobbit Revenge on these people.

I was thinking, as I read the ending, that the best desserts for the icky villainous characters would be Lydia and Ru Shan’s success. If the family of ickiness can overcome their revulsion of the English wife with the knowledge that she’ll bring in money with her clothing designs, they can damn well swallow the crow of seeing Ru Shan and Lydia so happy together and knowing that their marriage is the cause of the horrid family’s largesse.

However, as Candy and I discussed today, it is often very, very hard to buy into mixed race and mixed religion happiness and I wonder what that says about us as a culture. I mean, Candy and I are both in mixed-culture and mixed-religion marriages, though I converted, yet we both remarked on the hurdle that those mixtures presented, and whether it’s possible to suspend belief knowing as we do the historical prejudice that faces them at every turn. Much like the Cassie Edwards Savage Indian who settles down in to prairie bliss with Margie McPioneer, we have a hard time putting aside what we know must have happened in the future.

Yet doubts and cultural clashes aside, White Tigress is a definite page turner, and is certainly a book I’ll reflect on, particularly for what it reveals about my own preferences and impressions of cultures portrayed in romance.