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

The premise of the book sounded like so much fun that I’m sad it didn’t turn out better. Caitlyn James is a hairdresser who owns her own salon. While out on a wild night of partying with some of her sorority sisters, a car accident renders her less-than-alive. A secret gub’mint agency decides that her body is salvageable, however, and re-engineers her into a bionic woman. The trouble is, since this was all done without her consent, Caitlyn doesn’t figure she owes anyone anything, and is especially unwilling once she meets The Boss, a creepy eyebrowless wonder who will stoop to nothing when it comes to national security.

Then somebody starts whacking the members of the team of scientists who created the cyborg technology, and Caitlyn reluctantly agrees to work on the case. The prime suspect is Dmitri Novakov, a Lithuanian cyborg gone rogue. Problem number 1: He’s hot. Problem number 2: He thinks she’s the one killing all the scientists.

Think this might provide pages upon pages of interesting conflict and action-packed adventure? Yeah, dream on, kid. This mystery is solved so fast that it’s rivalled only by how fast Caitlyn and Dmitri hop into bed and fall in love, but then everything that happens in this book does so at super speed, since it’s only 195 pages. 195 pages of large print, at that. And of those 195 pages, there are as many scenes of Betsy—oops, Caitlyn—burning out exercise equipment with her bionic strength and speed as there are of her kicking bad guy ass.

Aside from an obsession with hair instead of shoes (and since Caitlyn’s big thing is hair, I don’t know WHY the cover’s tag-line says “Saving the world—one Manolo Blahnik at a time…” unless it’s to associate this character even more closely with Betsy), Caitlyn is basically Betsy from the Undead series. OK, Davidson keeps noting that unlike Betsy, Caitlyn was a straight-A student, but given the way Caitlyn acts and the way she talks, I think the people in her fictional world should find which university gave her all those As and start lobbying to have its accreditation yanked. And when I say Caitlyn talks like a stupid person, I certainly don’t mean Caitlyn’s predilection for bad words; I mean she just plain sounds dumb. She stumbles over perfectly ordinary words that a bright 6th grader has no trouble with. Seriously, at one point in the book she has problems pronouncing “enmity.” What in the everlasting fuck? Three syllables, all easily pronounced and more-or-less phonetic (what a rarity in English!) with the root word quite clearly being “enemy.” It’s not as if the word were a mouthful like, say, “prestidigitation.” So the author takes care to say over and over that Caitlyn’s smart, as do all the secondary characters, but what Davidson shows over and over is a bimbo who has trouble with problem-solving, task accomplishment and multisyllabic words.

The hero is pretty much a cipher. His history is fascinating, because he’s turned into a cyborg against his will much in the way Caitlyn was, and at one point he turned rogue. Do we get any of that juicy backstory? Like hell we do. Instead we get another scene featuring Caitlyn dishing on and on and ON about whatever with Stacy, her best friend. In fact, most of the book is from Caitlyn’s viewpoint, and when we switch to Dmitri’s, all we get is that he thinks she’s hot and smart and funny, a conclusion he comes to after exchanging all of 10 sentences with her. I’m not kidding when I say there are more scenes from The Boss’s point of view than Dmitri’s. What does that say about a romance novel?

When it comes down to it, the book isn’t too bad a read; it’s certainly fast and funny, though completely unmemorable. I had to dock it a few points though, because Davidson is now parodying herself, and worse, doing it poorly. If you’re a MaryJanice junkie, I highly recommend that you check this out from the library before shelling out $14.00 for this extremely slim volume that’s basically a re-tread of her vampire books in cyborg guise. 

Candy’s Take

Y’know, I really enjoyed reading this book. Make no mistake, it’s kind of silly. A ship full of gay pirates? Holy mother of god. But I suspended my disbelief, went with the flow and pretty much had a good time.

The biggest problem with the book is one I rarely encounter. Many single-title romance novels (and fantasy books, come to think of it) tend to prolong the conflict artificially; I mean, usually, just when you think the hero and heroine are going to finally talk and sort out their differences, she catches him kissing some lady on the cheek at a masquerade ball and flies into a passion, runs away to Scotland and rends her hair with grief while he’s convinced she finally ran away to be with that no-good limpdick sunken-chested poet whose titties aren’t nearly as beautiful and firm as his, dammit and then she finds out from her sassy lady’s maid that the mysterious lady is actually his long-lost sister but oh no, he’s all pissy now and she needs to beg his forgiveness for her asinine assumption despite the fact that before marrying her he did have a tendency to hump anything that moved.

So no, this book does NOT have that problem. Quite the opposite. I have to say that this is one of the few books I’ve read that would have substantially improved if it had at least 50 pages or so added to it, because damn, for a big-ass chunk of the book Christine and Justin aren’t even together, and before that they spent all of one day together, none of it particularly pleasant. But within days of them being thrown together on Christine’s pirate ship and Justin reading a few stanzas of Andrew Marvell to her, she’s all “C’mere, stud, I love you, rrowr!” and bam, nookie and HEA. The conflict isn’t just resolved, it’s resolved at warp speed.

Another, more minor problem, concerns Christine’s transformation from shy, chubby duckling to svelte, swashbuckling swan. It takes her about a year, and she sheds most of her weight, loses the zits and becomes a skilled fighter and a convincing male impersonator. OK, one can lose a substantial amount of weight in a year, but the whole master fighter thing was a bit hard to swallow because it takes years and years of training for somebody to become truly skilled at fighting. Hey, just watch any kung fu movie—you can be some punk kid with skillz but the crusty old alcoholic monk can still totally kick your ass.

But on the other hand, DUDE. Shipload of buttpirates. I guess if I can suspend my disbelief for that, Christine becoming a master swordsperson in a year isn’t that much of a stretch.

On the whole, though, Marshall’s writing style is enjoyable. It’s breezy, it’s readable, and the characters are enjoyable even though because of the length of the book and the speed at which the story moves along, they come across more as thumbnail sketches rather than fully-fledged entities. If the love story had been more substantial, it could’ve been a B or B+, easy.

Sarah’s Take

I’m in 100% agreement with Candy in her wishes for more. I wish the story had had more “meat” to it - har har - in terms of the real and valid conflicts between Justin and Christine, and more depth to explain the sudden and intensely passionate attraction between the two of them. I mean, were I a dude, and were I a mega-wealthy stud like Justin, and were I drugged on my wedding night only to wake up with a runaway wife, and then find said runaway wife on a ship of asspirates, would I perhaps, perchance think there was something naughty in her Nottingham? Particularly as she is dressed as a man? On a ship? Of swashbuckling butt burglars?

And my other problem, and truly this is nitpicky in the extreme, is the choice of names for the two major male characters in the book. Justin? Julius? If I was reading quickly - and I usually was because this book just flies - I would often get mixed up between them, as even with a quick scan, the names appear similar. Unless this was a deliberate shading on the part of the author, and I don’t think it was since there was hardly any guardian/ward shennanigans between Julius and Christine, it was a slight distraction that forced me to slow down, even though the prose invited me to speed right along. High speed reading, high speed adventure.

However, the part I loved best about this book, and it was literally a laugh out loud experience, was the camp of it. This was truly the first romance novel I’ve read that was this out-and-out campy. Once I got over the jaw dropping realization that I was reading about a ship of asspirates, I had a great time with this book. Unlike many pirate romances, which try to take the slightly goofy stereotypes of pirates and infuse them with political drama, angst, and sturm-und-drang, this book took the idea of pirates, made them GAY pirates, added a cross-dressing heroine, and hell, while we at it, why not a goose? Named Sally? And an actual person who says, “ARRRRGH?”

This book did not take itself too seriously, which is not to say that it wastes the reader’s time in terms of research or story. It didn’t take itself too seriously in the same manner as your favorite friend who is cuttingly funny because she can laugh at her own foibles. This book was a great deal of fun to read, and it must have been fun to write.

I was torn between a book about a cat burglar who has to cooperate with a hunky policeman, and a book about a small town in Georgia. While I usually go to books set in England in the historical/Regency set, I am a sucker for contemporaries set in the South. Something about the South lends itself to fiction, because place is of such importance in Southern culture that the town itself becomes a character in the book.

I started She Drives Me Crazy last week while Hubby was watching sixty-five consecutive hours of NCAA basketball, and finished it today while in my pjs on a Sunday afternoon. That alone gives me good feelings about the book.

She Drives Me Crazy is the story of Emma Jean Frasier, who returns to her hometown of Joyful, Georgia, after years of living in New York City. She has a bit of a scandalous past, and is trying to put her life back together in her hometown, despite having to face rumors of a wild prom night in which she ended up being found by the entire Senior class buck naked in a gazebo with Johnny Walker.

Yes, that is the hero’s name.

Johnny Walker also left and came back to Joyful, having obtained a law degree in his absence. A boy from the wrong side of the tracks now sits as the county prosecutor, and tries to manage due process in a town of good ol’ boys who get the blind eye of the police, and kids from the wrong side of the tracks, like him, who get the full paddle, even if they’re innocent.

Emma Jean expects to walk into town and deal with an upsurge of rumors about her wild prom night with Johnny, but ends up facing a galloping gossip story that links her to the nudie-strip-club that’s being built outside of town – on land that she thought belonged to her grandmother, and that was passed down to Emma Jean. Not understanding the innuendos and comments being passed her way, she moves into her late grandmother’s home, starts seeing an awful lot of Johnny, who is convinced she’s using him for help and companionship as she did on prom night, and tries to figure out who stole her land.

As is expected in a story set in the South, the town of Joyful plays a major role in the story – the characters are plentiful, from the town gossip who is also the roving housecleaner (and therefore privy to whatever you’re hiding in your underwear drawer) to the gaggle of women at the hair salon. The town is full of people who are passing on stories or listening to them, just as one would imagine any small town. The secondary characters move the story along, and form a tide of influence on the heroine: either they are collectively shunning and condemning her for being an alleged porn star, or they are supporting her in her efforts to right a wrong, once the rumors of her blue background are corrected. The collective of secondary characters is still entertaining, however.

The novel falls short, though, when it comes to the depth of the major characters. One gets a good sense of the background of the hero, the heroine, and some of the major parallel-story players, such as Claire, Emma Jean’s best friend from high school, Claire’s husband Tim, their daughter Eve, and Daneen, a common enemy to both Emma Jean and Claire, who now lives in town as a single mom. But the background one does learn is all told by the characters themselves, and while the reader learns the facts about the events that shaped these characters, one doesn’t get the sense that they really happened, except as convenient methods through which to set up the Insurmountable Tasks ahead of the heroine as she fights her way back from professional and personal failure.

For example: (Spoiler ahead; you know what to do) it’s revealed in the mid-section of the story that Emma Jean had suffered a major head injury, and had been so seriously injured in the cranial sense that her head was shaved and her skull opened to relieve pressure on her brain. That story raises the protective instincts of the hero, and her injury comes up more than once, but the heroine doesn’t dwell on it as much as one might think, except to mention how much she misses her long hair, sacrificed when the doctors shaved it off. The hero is more worked up about it than she is, and while it does make her a more sympathetic character in light of what happens to her later in the backstory, her reaction to this major event, or lack of reaction, is curious and, for me, distracting.

The hero and the heroine are both likeable, and the romance rekindled between them is hot like Georgia summer and quite titillating. Moreover, author Leslie Kelly does an admirable job of building romance and sexual tension, even after the characters have sex for the first time in the book, which is a tough challenge that many authors let slide. In other stories, once the main characters defuse the sexual tension, the story can take a nosedive tension-wise and sometimes focuses only on the external forces working against the couple. Kelly keeps the tension and the emotional stakes on a slowly-increasing incline so the climax of the parallel stories meets up with the emotional climax of the couple’s romance, and the ending is delightfully satisfying.

On the whole, I’m not always pleased by contemporary chick-lit-style novels, especially since they are often heavy on plot twists, populated by a buffet of secondary and background characters, but light on depth of character on the part of the protagonists. But there’s a reason “Chick Lit” sounds like “chocolate.” Both are guilty pleasures that, on a molecular level, are actually good for you. While I wish She Drives Me Crazy had delved deeper in to the emotional ramifications of the protagonists’ pasts to make them each more three-dimensional characters, the romance, the story line, the background characters, and even the town of Joyful itself, all made me happy. If I had to pay retail for a book, I’d want it to be at least as good as this one. 

But then, that speaks volumes as to my expectations of contemporary romances, Harlequin Enterprises, and drug store romance novel purchases in general.

On A Wicked Dawn, and by the way, the title has nothing to do with the plot, not that romance titles do, is the story of Amelia Cynster, one of a set of female twins who I first encountered when I read Devil and Honoria’s story, Devil’s Bride. Amelia and her sister Amanda were very young, about to make their debuts within a few years, and were more annoying than adorable if I recall. Now Amelia is left in London after her sister makes a lovely match with some lord of somethingorother, and she’s set her sights on Lucien Ashford, Viscount Calverton.

Lucien, quite the honorable gentleman, has spent many years within Amelia’s circle of acquaintance, and many more trying to dig his family out of a mountain of debt left by his wastrel of a father. Without telling anyone about his circumstances beyond his mother and their solicitor/banker/investement wizard, Lucien manages to invest and profit enough to bring his family from the deep scaret to the solid black - or in this case, the purple. Now that Lucien has the money, it is time for him to have the luuuuuv (tm).

Amelia has figured out that he was in dire straits for years, and sneaks into his house at three in the morning, the night after he has imbibed his weight in liquor celebrating the windfall that put his family firmly on the side of fortune. She proposes marriage: we’d suit well, and you need my dowry.

Rather than correct her, he agrees. And then passes out.

Now pay attention, because that last part is important. See, in most romance novels, there is a hero, a heroine, some attraction, and some force or problem that must be overcome to reach their happily ever after. Both parties have to earn their happy ending. Sometimes that problem is internal (he stutters or has a predilection for sheep, she spends too much or has a weakness for rutabaga flambe, leading to bad breath and pimples) and sometimes it is external (cue evil villain and don’t forget to make him a gay abuser of animals, too) and sometimes it is not even a person. Sometimes it is cultural differences, class differences, or a big misunderstanding that keeps on going.

This book has two problems to overcome by the authors creation, though there are far more than two problems as far as I am concerned. First, Laurens creates this peculiar theme of control that is found in many of the Cynster novels. He who admits love first, loses control. The men fear losing control of their lives because of their growing emotions for the heroines. The heroines want control over their manly men. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The same is true of On A Wicked Dawn: Lucien fears losing control of his engagement and then his marriage by admitting he loves Amelia, and seeks to secure her declaration of love to assure him that he is not alone in the emotional experience. He also does not want to tell her of his duplicity, because he is afraid...of what exactly I am not sure. Of her being angry at him? It’s a peculiar plot device and not one I understand entirely.

As for Amelia, she’s loved Lucien for years and now that they are married, she sets off building the marriage of her dreams: a love match between two committed people. Where she got the template for that in the London society in which she moved I have no idea. But that’s what she wants. So she’s plotting and scheming to gain his love, while he does the same to gain hers.

And how do they go about securing this love? By exhausting themselves with sex. Seriously, if there was ever a book made for frequent and interminable masturbation or a surfeit of hormones, this is it. They are either kissing, going to second base, rounding third, or just humping like bunnies every fifth page. You’d think they’d have been caught in the act, but no, rooms down the hall from ball rooms, masquerades, garden parties, house parties: all fair game for some humpity hump. And after the marriage? There is still some humpin’ going on. It is non stop. And I have to wonder if the main reason Laurens wrote this book was to answer the question, “Can I write a romance novel that is, content-wise, 78% sex scenes?”

There is another force at work in the novel causing conflict, but it seems like such an afterthought that I still can’t figure out the point of it. Someone is stealing items of value from members of the ton, and various scenes indicate a lady, though one is never sure which lady it is. And the plot is so disconnected from the rest of the story it’s more of an annoyance than a source of intrigue.

However, I can’t grade this lower than a C because I did enjoy reading it. So long as no one read over my shoulder while the hero and heroine did it on a riverbank, in bed, on a desk, in a chair, on the floor, in a closet, in the garden, in a shed, on the grass, in the parlor, on the table, in the foyer....

In To Love a Scottish Lord, Hamish and Brendan MacRae finally meet their matches. (Oooh look, a pun.) Mostly, the story is about Hamish, who was captured while trading off the coast of India and systematically tortured for a year before successfully escaping. On his return to Scotland on Brendan’s ship, he takes up residence in an abandoned castle he christens Castle Gloom. He’s determined to be a hermit—a hermit with a paralyzed arm, at that—but Brendan has other ideas. In short order Brendan is back at the castle with an assload of supplies, a cook, a carpenter and a hot brunette who’s been dubbed the Angel of Inverness for her healing prowess.

Mary Gilly is that rarest of romance novel creatures: a widow who genuinely loved her much older husband, and her sex life was decidedly better-than-ho-hum. No clichés in this book involving virgin widows or orgasm-less wives who wouldn’t know what to do with a friendly penis if it poked her in the face. Mary’s husband was a goldsmith, and his death left her very well off. (He also left her a sociopathic apprentice with an unhealthy obsession with Mary, but more on him later.) Mary had been feeling just a bit restless when lo and behold, along comes a most interesting case for her to handle.

Sparks fly when Hamish and Mary first meet, of course. And initially Hamish mightily resists her efforts to treat him, of course. But within a few days of meeting each other they’re humping like crazed monkeys, of course. And Mary gets to see in gruesome detail what the Indians did to Hamish, but she doesn’t so much as flinch nor does it diminish his attractiveness to her—of course.

Then Hamish comes up with a radical idea: dismiss everyone from the castle, including Brendan, have Mary write to her friends and the apprentice, Charles, to let them know that this particular patient is going to need more time than expected, and this way they can boink all over the castle, all they want. And Mary is like, yeah, crazy monkey sex, woo! And has Brendan deliver letters to her best friend, Elspeth, and Charles, Creepy Apprentice Par Excellence.

Two things result from this errand:

1. Brendan falls head over heels for the very comely Elspeth.



2. Charles tips over the edge from “kinda creepy” to “full-on batshit insane.”

He stirs up rumors that Mary killed her husband, and successfully has her arrested for murder. His plan? He has some evidence that he’s willing to withhold, as long as Mary marries him. And she won’t, of course. Then Hamish comes galloping down to Inverness to find her and eventually is forced to recount a pretty grisly incident from his travails in India in an effort to save Mary, only I don’t get how the anecdote is supposed to help Mary at all; it just seems like a really weird plot device to get Hamish to open up on a Deep Dark Secret that’s been gnawing away at him and Hinted At Darkly through most of the book.

But in the end, this Mary-being-unfairly-incarcerated plot is resolved in a rather surprising way, so props to Ranney for not doing the expected thing

So, OK, the title of the book puzzles me a little because neither Hamish nor Brendan is a lord, though their oldest brother, Alisdair, is an earl. I’m thinking To Love a Scottish Guy Who’s Closely Related to a Lord and Might Actually Succeed to the Title if the Two Eldest Brothers Kick The Bucket, Which is Pretty Unlikely However Since The Two of Them Gave Up the Relatively Dangerous Business of Seafaring for Tamer Pursuits, and Technically the Title is English and Not Scottish Anyway would’ve been too unwieldy. But this isn’t a complaint, just a riff I decided to stick in here because I thought it was pretty funny and didn’t want to waste it.

One of the things that did actually bother me about the book, though, was Mary’s relentless perfection. Is she a wonderfully progressive healer for the time? Check. Is she patient and warm? Check. Is she hot? Check. Is she boobtacular? Check. Does she have some adorable yet meaningless flaw, like, ohhhh, a fear of stairs and heights that she overcomes to treat Hamish? Check. I liked Mary, but I also found her kind of boring.

I liked Hamish a bit better, but even he came across as just a bit too much of a paragon. He’s horribly tortured and indelibly marked by a dark-skinned race while coming from a culture and time that does not look kindly on dark-skinned furriners—in fact, a culture and time which subscribes to the idea that dark-skinned furriners are sub-human, barbaric and inferior in every way even before said furriners brandish their implements of torture. Yet he harbors no bitterness or hatred towards his captors. While entirely commendable of him, I also found it very hard to swallow. He is also realistically skittish about engaging in any sort of relationship beyond the sexual, at least at first, but within weeks of meeting Mary, he’s in love and willing to marry her. This is not believable behavior for a man who’s undergone the trauma he has.

So on one hand, I’m kind of glad Ranney was all classy and avoided hysterics and melodrama, but on the other hand: DUDE. Torture. An abandoned castle. Madness. A little bit of melodrama and a longer recovery period for Hamish would not have been amiss.

I also took an inordinately long time to finish this book because I kept falling asleep about 10, 20 pages after I started reading. I finally figured out that it was all the internal musing that was doing me in. Not a whole lot happens in this book, at least until Mary gets arrested in the last third or so of the novel. Mostly, Mary and Hamish talk, have some sex, then they ponder. A lot. Zzzzzz.

When I wasn’t falling asleep, I was looking crap up in reference books and on the Internet. Now this is not at all Ranney’s fault—the things I’m going to nitpick on are hardly worth mentioning at all, and are a result of me being rabidly anal-retentive about really stupid things, and I never know what is going to set me off, or why. Regardless, here’s some of the stuff that bothered me:

• Brendan and Mary are on a first-name basis right off the bat. WHOA. That’s some intimacy going on here—I mean, this is in an era when married couples addressed each other as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” To illustrate: quite far into Mr. Impossible, the hero is babbling at the heroine and all of a sudden he breaks off and blurts out “And I don’t even know your first name!” or words to such effect—and then I realized that all this time the hero HAD been properly referring to the heroine as Mrs. Pembroke, and I thought YES, finally, a historical romance that gets that right. So yeah. Guy calling a woman who’s not even remotely related to him by her first name? Major protocol violation. And if the guy who does it isn’t even going to be the one who ends up with her? Pointless major protocol violation.
• Apparently Mary has some morphine laying around. OK, cool—except morphine wasn’t identified and isolated from opium until 1803, just over 20 years after this book begins, and even then its use wasn’t widespread until the 20th century, when hypodermic needles came into common use. Laudanum or straight-up opium were how people got their RDA of morphine back in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Some other word usage bothered me, like tumor and influenza. There’s nothing wrong with using these words; according to the etymological dictionary I consulted, they were certainly coined well before the story took place. I guess I would’ve preferred words that sounded more convincing for the time period like “grippe” (which ironically enough was coined after influenza) or “ague.” I know, I KNOW—how stupid is this nitpick? Incredibly fucking stupid. But I can’t help myself. It’s a disease with me, a disease, I tell you.
• OK, so Hamish has only one usable arm; his left arm is completely paralyzed due to some nasty shit the Indians inflicted on him. But in the beginning of the book, Mary notices that Hamish is dressed immaculately, down to a neatly-tied stock at his throat. Eh?!? Just about anyone would be hard-pressed to put on and button their pants with only one usable arm, much less tie off a jaunty neckcloth.

OK, I’m done beating up on the book now. Seriously, though, it wasn’t a bad book. I didn’t dislike the characters, even if I found them somewhat hard to believe in. And once Mary got arrested, I stopped falling asleep every 20 pages and was all “HOLY CRAP WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?” Ranney also gets one thing very, very right: the sex. It’s sexy, and beautiful, and emotional, and just about everything sex should be in a romance novel. If the rest of the book had been as good as the sex, it would’ve been an A-, easy.

But like I said before, loads of people like this book quite a bit better than I do. Probably because they don’t have an obnoxious Nitpicking Monster residing within them who shows up at inconvenient moments to ruin their shit.




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