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

“HANG ON,” I can almost hear you saying. “You’re just making shit up, now. Candy, your slice-n-dice reviews have gone too far.”

Psh. You think I’d kid about something that important? You think I would make a crass joke about teh buttsecks to illustrate how incredibly silly this book is? Trust me. I’m not even remotely kidding about that last bit. In fact, there’s no way I can convey how silly this book is. It is so silly that at various points, I expected Graham Chapman dressed as a Colonel to appear, declaring that this book was too silly to continue.

Alas, the latter would indicate that this book was funny. And it’s not. I initially read this book as a bit of high camp and was able to maintain this mindset (and therefore enjoy it to some degree) for about one third of the way, because the plot was too deliciously cock-eyed for me to take seriously: Kimber Edgington, the heroine, is in love with Jesse McCall, her childhood sweetheart (whom she hasn’t seen in almost a decade--whom she knew only for a summer when she was a kid, really). Jesse happens to be an international rock star with a taste for threesomes. Not the usual boy-girl-girl threesomes that are the stuff of fantasy for millions of males, of course. This dude’s into two guys and a girl. (Structuring this story any other way would’ve involved TEH GAY for the heroine.) So Kimber, in her quest to prove her everlasting love and commitment, decides she needs tutoring in the Ways of the Double Penetration, and seeks out Deke Trenton, a mercenary who used to work for her father and who apparently has a thing for threesomes.

(How does she know this? One of the more hilarious aspects of Deke’s fetish for this bit of vanilla kink is that it’s something everybody seems to know about, from sheltered girls in their twenties to random people in bars to the Kimber’s brothers to Kimber’s dad. Seriously: every time somebody finds out that Kimber is having a relationship with Deke Trenton, there’s usually some sort of horrified gasp (or inarticulate rage on the part of the brothers), followed by “Do you know what he’s into?” It makes me wonder how in the hell they’d find out something like that. Does the dude have a Wikipedia page? If he did, I’d love to see his history/discussion pages, because god knows he’s one hot mess.)

And when I say “he has a fetish for threesomes,” I mean it in the clinical sense. (The pedants in the audience will note that the fetish isn’t, strictly speaking, a fetish, because it refers to a sex act instead of an object or a body part. Look, just go along with me, all right? Pretend I said “paraphilia” and call it a day.) Seriously, Deke can’t work his dirk of manly passion unless he has additional male company. No, I’m serious. This dude hath not a workable stiffy unless another dude is there. Specifically, his cousin, celebrity chef Luc Traverson. This initially perked my interest--was Luc the Piers Gaveston to Deke’s Edward II, except kind of incestuous, which would make it somewhat more kinky? Alas, no. The true reasons why these two paragons of masculinity engage almost exclusively in threesomes are both much more hilarious and much more repulsive than using a woman as a conduit to express homosexual urges. But more on that later.

After a certain point, however, the sheer weight of the terrible prose crushed my sense of humor, and the only thing left to make it bearable was to read the more ludicrous parts out loud to friends.

The part that broke me? The part that made me throw my hands up and say “I give up”? Was when Kimber decides that her virginity is so special, she needs to save it for Jesse. And by “save her virginity,” I totally mean “have copious amounts of loud, sweaty, multi-orgasmic anal sex with two men she’s known less than a week.”

If this had been written with any sort of tongue in cheek tone, or with any sort of nod or wink to the sorts of people for whom anal sex is somehow a culturally acceptable way of preserving a façade of sexual purity (read: stupid, horny teenagers for whom obeying the letter of the law is much more important than adhering to the spirit), I would’ve cheered it for the bit of high camp it was. Unfortunately, the story tried to sell the heroine as being a smart, spirited young woman a little too hard while showing just the opposite in every turn.

Come on, now. Preserving your virginity with buttsecks. Look, I’m all for people enjoying the hell out of anal sex, and I’m all for people having it with as many partners as they can stand at one time. Just don’t pretend that you’re somehow protecting your sexual purity by having it--whatever sort of definition of “sex” you may subscribe to, I’m pretty goddamn sure just about everyone would agree that that having a man stick his cock up your ass qualifies as “having sex” with him.

But wait, there’s more! Deke, besides being incapable of fucking a woman unless Luc is there (NOT GAY NO NOT AT ALL), has a really, really strange complex about virgins. Namely, he’s convinced that fucking a virgin in the va-jay-jay means she’ll die. This is made into a Really Big Deal, and is also part and parcel of his sexual dysfunction in general and with Kimber in particular (NO REALLY NOT AT ALL GAY). This results in the best conversational exchange in any erotic romance novel, ever, when Kimber finally offers to allow Deke entrance into her cinnabar cavern of feminine wonder (because what she feels for Deke is even more speshul than what she feels for Jesse), and Deke, after pondering and sweating and struggling over this decision heroically, takes decisive action:

“Fuck!" he snarled.

He tilted her up again, her legs now resting on his shoulders, and positioned himself and began to push.

Into her back entrance.

Kimber drew in a great, shocked gasp, her hazel eyes wide. “Deke?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Luc barked.

Tensing a little more with every inch he pushed inside Kimber’s tight passage, the tendons on his neck standing out, the muscles in his arms shaking, assailed by the amazing sensations of being slowly enveloped by her tight, ready flesh, Deke could barely form a word. “Fucking her ass. Saving her life.”

Wow. Talk about a lifesaving procedure you’ll never see on-camera on, say, Grey’s Anatomy.

But wait, there’s more! When I read this part aloud to my friend Ben (who was the first victim of many), his immediate response, after he’d picked himself up from the floor, was “I’m in ur ass, saving ur life.”

And being the enterprising nerd that he is, he actually hunted down a picture and captioned it, LOLCat-style.

(Warning: the picture is pornographic. It seriously is. Don’t click on it, for the love of God, if you’re anywhere in the office, or if there are little kids or animals or sweet, sheltered little old grandparents within a direct line of sight of your monitor.)

So behold! The first instance of LOLPorn found on Smart Bitches.

Recovered from that yet?

No?

Too bad.

After that marvellous bit of characterization, the story chugs along completely predictable lines: Kimber is dumped brutally by Deke (who’s utterly freaked out at how attached he has become), reunites with Jesse, finds him to be not at all what her memories have made him to be, and is repulsed by Jesse’s regular threesome partner, a pretty boy with tattoos who drinks before lunch--evidence of moral turpitude if we’ve ever seen it.

And then a wacky suspense plot springs up out of nowhere and ambushes the rest of the storyline, putting Kimber in danger (remember, kids: it’s never acceptable to have the heroine save the hero’s ass, because that might mean he’s a pansy who can’t get it up unless another man’s also...oh, wait). All of this is a convenient way of getting Deke back together with Kimber so he can open up about his Deep, Dark, Loathsome, Virgin-Killing past--the explanation for why he never fucks virgins, and why he always has to have a wingman in bed. Are you ready for the secret?

Back when Deke was a teenager, he de-virginized his beautiful but highly unstable girlfriend, who became pregnant, got crazy, and killed herself.

That’s it. That’s the big, dark, tormented secret of Deke’s past. Which is actually a pretty good tormented secret, except that his reactions are both nonsensical and morally repulsive. When you attempt to unpack the implications, you come up with the following:

1. His avoidance of sleeping with virgins only makes sense if you accept that virgins are much more likely to become pregnant than other women. Because it’s not as if there’s such a thing as fertile non-virgins, or, you know, BIRTH CONTROL THAT WORKS RELIABLY.

2. Deke needs another man in bed so that if the woman becomes pregnant, he’d have another man to blame. Because in Deke’s universe, paternity tests, like birth control, do not exist.

In case you’re thinking that I’m inferring point number 2, let me assure you that I’m not. I am, in fact, quoting “another man to blame” verbatim from the book.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: this book is a trainwreck of unintentional hilarity. If ever there was a book ripe for MST3K treatment or a drinking game (take a shot every time a character starts a musing with “Damn"), this would be it. The sex scenes are pretty hot, I’ll give it that, but even those are subject to gems like “Fucking her ass. Saving her life.”

If you’re really into copious quantities of sweaty, distressingly hetero buttsex and a menage that wimps out in the end, you might enjoy this book. Me? I’m still recovering from the LOLPorn. 

And really, if I had to summarize the book, I think the look on the porn actress’s face in the LOLPorn photo says it all.

2. The heroine: weird. WEIRD. She resists the Insane Hero but when he kisses her, it’s not as if she actually LIKES it. It’s more like he has incredibly fast acting rohypnol on his lips and whenever he kisses her, she lapses into a coma. A complete cessation of brain function occurs. At one point, I’m not even kidding, she’s in her passion-fog coma, and then realizes that at some point, she got naked and so did he and neither of them had a stitch of clothing on! Oh, noes! 

Now, the awkward process that is removing a bra from another person, let alone panties or socks or God forbid pantyhose, would wake someone who was merely sleeping, so what kind of haze is this woman in!? And, perhaps I’m over-thinking this, but I can’t help but ask: where is the line that defines “I’m so hot for you I can barely see straight” as opposed to “taking complete advantage of some ninny who descends into non compos mentis with one kiss?” I’m telling you: roofie kisses: Mmmmwaaaahhzhzzzzzzzzzzzz. Hey! Where are my clothes?

3. There’s profoundly little variety in the plot. Avast! We have a storm front of punishing kisses with a 90% chance of throwing the heroine down on the nearest horizontal surface!

Then, the wind changes. Roofie Kisses Mwwaaahahhzzzzz runs away to another location, fleeing her own home like it’s been condemned by the power of his tornado of burning, somewhat stalkery and utterly insane love.

Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You follows Roofie Kisses Mwwaaahahhzzzzz (see “stalkery and utterly insane” above) and hello...more punishing kisses. Nearest Horizontal Surface + Roofie Kisses MWAAHHHZZZZ + Absurd Removal of Clothes = UH Oh Spaghettios!

4. They get caught! By her fiance, one week before the wedding! Oh, noes! Milquetoast Fiance finds them IN her bedroom, buck naked, in flagrante licking-toe.

Cue the woeful haiku chorus:

She’s not pure as snow?
Virginal expectations
Dashed to muddy slush!

4. Jilted Milquetoast Fiance, he’s up to something. No man is that controlling while being that kind, particularly if that man is a spurned, humiliated former fiance in a Harlequin Presents romance novel. He will be villainized by the end of the book, mark my words!

Cue the mournful trombone.

I found you in bed!
With HIM?! The wedding is off!
...I can has yr house?

I smell financial shenanigans on the part of Jilted Milquetoast Fiance to be unearthed by the tender business acumen that runs alongside the passion for punishing kisses in the Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You.

5. Roofie Kisses Mwwaaahahhzzzzz runs away again. Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You follows her again. Roofie Kisses Mwwwaaaahahazzzz promises she won’t run. Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You begs her for her love, her mad sexxoring, her hand in marriage, whatever. Roofie Kisses Mwwaaaahahzzz takes off the minute Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You closes the door to take a leak.

6. Lather rinse repeat.

7. Even the setup of the plot is absurd: after one week of knowing one another in a boss/secretary environment, and after four years of subsequent separation, there’s more punishing kisses and entirely bizarre declarations of love from Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You than you can shake a stick at. A long, suddenly naked, where did THAT come from stick.

8. Enter the insanely beautiful and potentially insane ex-wife of Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You, the oddly precocious son of Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You, and some additional conflict, and stir.

I promise, you’ll get fizz. Lots and lots of fizz. 

And you know what? Candy is right. That fizz is drinkable. Drink the fizz, it says. You’ll want more. Turn the page, more fizz! 

This book is like that crackly fizzy candy - the sugar variety, not the Malaysian variety. It’s not satisfying yet you can’t stop the compulsion to taste it some more.

It’s cracktastic, sudzy, over the top, silly and utterly insane fizzy candy, and I cannot put it the hell down. It’s a horrible turn-the-page omg-what-next experience, reading this book. What is IN this book? The utterly frothy insanity is just too absurdedly entertaining to put down, and even though my ability to suspend belief deflated by page 3, I am still reading at a crackalicious pace simply because I cannot stop myself from wanting to know what crazy ass car will be loaded next onto the holy crap locomotion. Seriously.

It’s absurd. The Roofie Kisses Mwwaaahahhzzzzz heroine vacillates between spineless - or possibly unconscious - and strong enough to run away from a hero who scares her. Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You is autocractic, demanding, and, dare I say, punishing in his affections, which he declares immediately and presumes she returns based on… well, based on what evidence I have no idea. Perhaps falling in love for him is based on the idea that if you insist upon it enough, it will come true?

The plot goes in loopy circles that don’t spell out so much forward progression as they do plain old loopyness, and yet. I. Cannot. Put. It. Down. Even the ending is one last resist, one last insist, one last punishing kiss. Nothing’s so much resolved as just...exhausted, and thus the story winds to a unsatisfying finish. I believe I said out loud, “Are you kidding? That’s it?”

Bottom line: this is bad entertainment at its finest. The book on its own is a solid D. But that D comes with a hefty caveat: it’s practically impossible to retreat from this book. You’d love to fling it at the wall, but you can’t, because there’s one more page and surely she isn’t going to -

Oooooh, yes, she did. *turn page*

It starts out with this guy, Edward, coming home from the Army because he has to assume the title.  He’s a Viscount.  There’s a girl, Cassandra, aka Cassie, and she’s loved him and planned to marry him since she was about 8 years old.  They’ve been exchanging letters, secretly, since she was 15 and he first went away.  (Well, it wasn’t a secret from her brother, just from her governess/companion.) Cassie likes to sail her own little sailboat, fish in the ocean, and swim in the ocean (with no chaperone and in a shift, of course, because so many well-bred women of her time did).  When Edward comes home finally, his first sight of her is her coming out of the ocean, with her shift all wet and transparent.  Before he finds out that it’s Cassie, he’s thinking that he wants a piece of that.  *cue ominous music* Well, after he finds out, he still wants a piece of that but since she’s a lady and he’s planning to marry her, he can’t have any of that until they’re legally wedded.  So, she flat out tells him that since he’s home now and she’s 18, they’re getting married.  He’s onboard with that and asks her brother, who’s thrilled.  The only person not happy about is the woman who’s been like a mother to her, Cassie’s governess/companion, who dislikes the Viscount intensely for no obvious reason.  *cue more ominous music, only with more strings--probably cellos* She’s been like a mother to Cassie because Cassie’s mother died in childbirth.  (The dad kicked off, too, but it’s not very clear about when that happened.)

So, things are going well.  Cassie’s happy to be marrying the man she loves and she’s pretty interested in the whole sexual vibe between them.  Edward’s happy to marrying the woman he loves and he’s pretty interested in the whole sexual vibe between them.  The brother is happy that his sister is happy.  Only governess/companion is unhappy and trying to talk Cassie into delaying the whole thing.

This is the first 35-40 pages of the book.

Then, the day before Cassie’s wedding, the governess/companion suggests Cassie get some fresh air.  She takes her little boat out to do just that when she sees a much larger yacht named The Cassandra (Hello?  Clue??  Anyone??).  When said yacht nearly swamps her little boat and then captures it, she’s sure she’s about to be taken by white slavers.  But who should jump aboard her ship from The Cassandra?  Why, it’s the kindly gentleman who was a friend of the family for as long as she can remember, Anthony Welles, Earl of Claire.  Hurray!  He isn’t a white slaver!  He’s the man who aided her brother when their father died.  He’s the man she’s always considered an “indulgent uncle”.  Apparently, he’s also the man who was desperately in lust with her mother even though she was about 6 years older than him and when he went to find her again, found her very married and very pregnant (and then she had the discourtesy as to die, apparently).  He’s the man who, when he saw Cassie at 14 and saw that she was the “image of her mother”, he was “drawn” to her.  When she was 17, he decided he had to have her for himself.  He’s the man who has apparently been paying the governess/companion to rear Cassie to his specifications (he’s half Italian and she’s been taught Italian, etc.) and to help him kidnap her.  He’s the man that forces her onto his yacht and then destroys her boat on the rocks so everyone will think she is dead.  To sum up, he’s a crazy, obsessed, stalker who couldn’t get the mother so he’s transferred his crazy, obsessed stalker-y to the daughter.  He’s the pseudo-uncle, so he’s crazy, obsessed, stalker-y pseudo-incest guy!  He’s 34; she’s 18!  When he first decided that Cassie was his, he was 30 years old and she was 14!!  He’s crazy, obsessed, stalker-y, pseudo-incest-y, pedophile guy!!  He tells her that he’s taking her to Italy and they are getting married, despite any objections she might have to the whole scenario and that’s that.  After all, she’ll “come to understand”.

She says repeatedly that she hates him and that she wants him dead when she’s not trying to fight him off physically and he basically thinks it’s cute.  She says that she loves Edward, has always loved Edward, and won’t ever feel anything but hate for this guy and he tells her that “her turbulent girl’s infatuation for” the Viscount would not have lasted.  If he were the villain, I could live with this, but this guy is the hero??  Then he rapes her because “to allow [her] to continue in [her] virgin state would be the height of foolishness, for it would encourage [her] to nourish unfounded hopes” and we’re supposed to think he’s a good guy because he used some sort of lubricant!  And then....then he lets her steer his yacht.  You know, because she loves to sail and because, of course, Edward would never let her sail once they’re married (not that he ever said that, mind you, we’re just supposed to take Lord Creepy Uncle’s word for it).  And of course, she starts to relax her guard some--the day after he raped her--because he let her steer the boat!  And then he rapes her again that night and she can’t help but come all over him—because passion is a mighty force that cannot be denied between some people (per Lord Creepy Uncle). 

The last straw for me was when she woke up the third morning, feeling guilty for betraying Edward by responding to Lord Creepy Uncle and ponders whether she was ever really sexually attracted to Edward or if she’d just been “curious”.  Okay, in all honesty, that was only the first of the “last straws” for me because I keep getting sucked back in to see if it is going to get worse.  Then I hit another “last straw”, put it down for a couple of days, and come back.  Which is why I’m stalled at page 216.

One of the major problems is the characterization.  Cassie is plot-dumb and it drives me crazy when a character is blindly stupid and incurious whenever the plot necessitates her to be blindly stupid and incurious.  For example, Lord Creepy Uncle is the one to tell her, all smugly and prideful, when she’s pregnant!  (Because how else could we yet again affirm that Cassie is all that is innocence and light if she actually figured out for herself, “Hmmmmmm, I’m throwing up constantly for no obvious reason but I feel fine in the afternoon.  He only lets me wear my nightgown when I’m on my period and I haven’t worn one in forever!  We’ve had sex every day, sometimes several times a day, and the governess/companion did have that embarrassing sex talk with me before I was kidnapped, and I was raised in the country…” If the girl got hit any harder with the Clue Bat, she’d be concussed!) Even more maddening, Cassie doesn’t once go--"How did he know I was going to be out today?  How does he know about the letters I was secretly exchanging with Edward while he was away in the Army?  How did he know what size I wear to fill the closets with all of these sumptuous clothes?  The governess/companion insisted I learn Italian--what a coincidence I was captured by a man who is half Italian and plans to take me to Italy!  The governess/companion sent me out for “fresh air” the day before the wedding to a man that she hates for no reason and look who shows up!” Mind you, she remarks on all of this whenever yet another glaringly obvious clue smacks her in the face but she is seemingly incapable of following up on these questions, even in her own head, before she is--OH LOOK!  SHINY!

Also, it just irritates the hell out of me that I’m supposed to believe the rapacious Earl as a hero and all of this as so very romantic.  Are you kidding me??  He is one of the most unlikable “heroes” I’ve ever encountered!  It’s not just his actions, it’s his attitude and what he says and whenever he’s on the page, I just wish that someone with more brains (and maybe more balls) would smash his face in!  And it often appears that Coulter realized that he wasn’t likable and that it was very easy to draw unwanted comparisons to the Arabic pirate/slaver villain in the book because even dumb-as-a-post Cassie notices this.  That would at least explain the random scene at the dinner party where Cassie sits in on a business meeting between Anthony and one of his shipping partners.  The partner feels that they can recoup some losses by shipping and selling slaves in the Colonies.  Cassie makes some mighty smart-mouthed remarks (because it’s necessary to prove that she’s as spirited/feisty/yadda yadda yadda as the hero often states that she is) and then offers a brilliant solution for recouping some of those losses without shipping/selling slaves (because it’s time to show she’s actually as intelligent as the hero often states she is—and what better way than having an 18-year old who thinks being in trade is beneath someone of their class and who has never been exposed to anything to do with trade, in general, and shipping, specifically, be some sort of idiot-savant with the perfect idea of what to do?).  When the business partner concedes that this is, indeed, a brilliant solution that he himself never even considered (because he has to be plot-stupid, too, if this scene is going to work) but that it won’t make as much money as slaving would, Good Ole Lord Creepy Uncle says that they will leave the slaving to “other, less scrupulous” men.  See!  He’s really a Good Guy!  He’s not like that pirate/slaver with the Arabic name and the harem slave girls!  He won’t trade slaves—just stalk and kidnap girls!  And only this one girl!  And he’s only letting the people who love her think she’s dead for a while—just until she agrees to marry him and settles into her new life!  If he were the villain and I knew that he was going to die some horrible death like, maybe, she shoots him in the head, feeds him to sharks and steers his yacht off into the sunset, it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much.  In fact, she does shoot him once.  She wounds him while trying to escape, even though she desperately doesn’t want to, because he’s not such a bad man!  (For an asshole?) But when he jumps into the ocean after her, he begins to flounder because she wounded him and she is so overwhelmed by guilt and concern that the stupid twit rescues him!  And then she nurses him back to health!

Perhaps you’ve thought, “Okay, maybe his crew is blindly loyal to him and they wouldn’t help her, despite how they all instantly lurvvvve her and admire her and call her “Madonna” (because she’s so completely and instantly captivating by all who see her, except for anyone that might actually want to help her).  But the girl speaks Italian!  Why wouldn’t she tell someone, like her maid (who lurvvvveeesss her) or the housekeeper (who is nasty to her because she thinks Cassie is a dirty whore for cohabitating without marriage with the Lord)?” Because the plot says she doesn’t! 

And perhaps you noticed when I was talking about the business meeting that Cassie was at a dinner party, presumably with other highborn people who might be appalled that Lord Creepy Uncle kidnapped and repeatedly raped her, a Lady?  How did that work, you might say?  Well, he gave her a new boat to make up for the one he smashed.  It’s on a small lake, so she can’t actually go anywhere, but he gave her a boat.  And she gushed and mewled because, you know, it’s a boat!  And she loves to sail and fish!  Because that’s just the kind of plucky girl she is!  All she has to do to keep the boat is to not say anything about this situation (and, because she’s still refusing to marry him, allow everyone to think that she’s his mistress that he’s moved in)!  And she does!  Because the plot requires it!

Oh, and we’re supposed to believe that Edward, her Viscount fiancé, is a bad man (at least not hero material) because he might object to her sailing by herself?  Also, he ogled her when he saw her from a distance in a wet, nearly-transparent shift and thought she was just some girl from town and he slept with another woman a week before he went home to see Cassie again.  Of course, we’re never actually shown any reason why this man isn’t the man for her or why she should forget him or even why the Earl is a better match for her.  Edward slept with someone else!  Apparently, the fact that he can even consider sex with someone else besides Cassie is the Big Sign that he’s not the True and Everlasting Love.  Nevermind that Lord Anthony has his own mistress—excuse me, former mistress—just waiting back home to be mean to his “bride”.  Oh, and of course, the former mistress is having villain-sex with the Earl’s half-brother because we must establish firmly that she wasn’t just promiscuous enough to voluntarily sleep with the Earl, she’s such a slut, she will sex up the brother too.  Because she’s BAD!  Bad and evil!  Because all beautiful, sexy, sexual, confident, independently wealthy, widowed women are bad.  Those traits, after all, are sure signs of her vast insecurities, insecurities that will no doubt lead to bitter jealousy, various vile acts, and probably death.

When I told my husband about this book and about how much I hated the hero, he said that maybe Edward does come to the rescue in the end.  I told him that the back cover indicates that this is the Couple--and besides, Lord Creepy Uncle got her virginity and, by canon, he who get-eth the virginity get-eth the hero status.  Candy reminded me that the true clincher was that Cassie came all over the Earl the second time he raped her because he who makes her come, gets the prize.  She’s right—Anthony deflowered Cassie and made her come, so she’s pretty much done for.  Because the heroine must never have good sex with anyone other than her One True and Everlasting Love.  It’s the “tell”.  She can have truly horrifying sexual experiences that leave her emotionally and psychologically scarred and she can have sex that is so lackluster as to be nearly inconsequential (with previous husbands in historicals or previous boyfriends in contemporaries) but orgasms only happen with True and Everlasting guy. 

Despite my ranting above, for a first book, the story pacing isn’t too bad and the prose only hits the occasional shades of lavender.  The dialogue clunks a bit here and there, but again, first book.  Stylistically, it wouldn’t bother me too much and if I were to give it a grade just based on that, I’d probably give it a C.  However, in terms of content, this is one of the worst romances I’ve ever read--or maybe it’s worse for me because I generally really like her stuff and this is such a disappointment.  I don’t know.  I do know that the heroine is stupid and the hero should be fed to sharks.

So, D-

~Tina

The hero, for one. He is a species of romance novel hero who is as far away from compelling for me as it gets without actively inciting revulsion. He’s the bestest warrior in all the land. He’s supernaturally patient with the heroine and her spunky shenanigans. He won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women. He’s loyal to his king. He’s a good Christian and won’t tolerate the destruction of churches. Children love him. Animals adore him. He’s so perfect, I wouldn’t be surprised if cartoon bluebirds fly about and twitter musically every time he takes a crap. He is, in short, a Gary Sue. I hesitate to use the term “politically correct” as any sort of pejorative in a serious sense, because all too often I’ve seen it being used by assholes who want to spout something sexist or racist while attempting to couch their opinion as unpopular but universal truth, but here I am saying this anyway: Wulfric is a politically correct hero, and hot damn, does that ever make him tiresome.

On one hand, I really appreciate the move away from asshole rapist heroes in the genre. I really, really do. If I had to choose between a violent assmunch like the hero in The Flame and the Flower or a paragon of all things virtuous like Wulfric, I’d still pick Wulfric, tiresome though he is. On the other hand, he’s not a human so much as he is a Ken Doll, except instead of plastic, he’s molded from untempered wish fulfillment. This Plastic Perfect Guy quality to Wulfric makes Bindel’s mention of Virgin Slave, Barbarian King in the article in The Guardian rather ironic; her accusation that this book is one of the examples of “misogynistic hate speech” is completely defused by the fact that the book opens with the hero saving the heroine from being raped. (Sarah Frantz noticed this, too.)

The Gary Suism is merely a symptom of the fact that the book attempts to play with the idea that the so-called barbarians aren’t the truly barbarous ones, and that the civilized world is often uncivil. This is worthy territory to explore; alas, that’s been covered many times before by many different authors, most of them writing execrable Indian romances, and Allen doesn’t provide anything new or meaty to ponder. In fact, her portrayals of the Visigoths vs. the Romans create caricatures worthy of old-school Westerns in terms of which group we’re clearly supposed to root for and which ones we’re supposed to boo. What I did find interesting, however, is how the Race to be Resuscitated in this particular instance is tall, blond and Germanic. The rather condescending “but they’re real people, REALLY” tone is usually applied to Native Americans and sundry non-whites, especially in Romancelandia. That inversion in race and racial expectations was somewhat interesting, and God knows there was a lot of potential for stuff that, if not comprehensive in scope, at least feels emotionally real, but the cultural differences and attitudes aren’t so much skimmed over in this novel as flown over at the height of several thousand feet; you can see a sea of interesting issues waiting to be plumbed, but all you can do is wave to its pretty contours from the double-paned window as the story whooshes by at high speed.

And as an auxiliary consequence of the facile treatment of the culture, you get what I have dubbed the People in Renn Faire Drag effect: the characters are essentially modern people in costume. I realize that there are real difficulties in creating convincing characters from a distant era; so much of our conception of acceptable behavior has changed over the past 1600 years that it can be hard to create characters who are both sympathetic to our modern sensibilities while remaining authentic to their era in history. I don’t expect--or want--complete authenticity. I do expect, however, that the characters will not engage in musings that smack of modern psychoanalysis, philosophical conceptions of self and freedom that were first popularized during the Enlightenment, or 20th-century embracements of pluralism and multi-culturalism. (As a side note: This book, besides being irritatingly modern in tone, also had a hilarious habit of self-consciously pointing out that the characters had been lost in thought for a long time; the hero or heroine are forever starting themselves out of reveries. Authors, please don’t do this. It interrupts the flow of the story, and it makes your characters look retarded.)

Some authors have successfully written book set in Ancient Rome that featured characters that, if not necessarily 100% authentic to the times (and I’d argue that there’s really no way for us to ascertain that, given our distressing lack of time machines), are still convincing for works of popular fiction. Rosemary Sutcliff is, in my opinion, the queen of the Historical Novel Set in Ancient Times. I’m somewhat hard-pressed to put my finger on what she does that convinces me that her characters are true to their times, but part of it is how none of them display the hallmarks of what I think of as modern thinking (such as attempts to engage in what amounts to talk therapy), even though we are privy to their rich, complex internal lives.

Strangely enough, Allen gets a lot of the historical trappings right; she seems to have done a decent amount of research into the setting of the times, and she’s convincing enough that I don’t feel the need to fact-check her. But this, coupled with the anachronistic attitudes of the characters, intensifies the feeling that they’re actors in costume on a well-designed soundstage.

This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for me. Mary Jo Putney is absolutely terrible when it comes to writing modern characters into historical romances. However, she’s also very good at making them flawed, detailed and interesting, and when she’s at her best, I don’t care that her characters are in Renn Faire drag. This book doesn’t even come close.

All that being said, however, the book really isn’t all that bad. It’s boring, it’s trite, it’s facile--but the prose is competent, and the characters likeable enough. It didn’t piss me off with its awfulness, which is when books start falling into the D- and F category, and while I don’t find it quite as repulsive as, say, Dark Lover by J.R. Ward, it’s also not as compelling. Ultimately, I have to agree with Sarah’s grade: it’s a D. It’s a passing grade, but barely.