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

Sienna, Virgin Extraordinaire and Ingenue-at-Large, is working for a temp agency in London as a freelance secretary when she’s assigned to an OMGHUNK of a Greek billionaire, Alex Stefanides. The usual chestnuts apply: she sees him and the world stands still; his hand brushes against hers casually, and she feels as if he’s just given her a tonguebath naked, ad nauseam. But she’s but a mere secretary. There’s no way Alex could be interested in her, right?

But to her surprise, Alex does display an untoward interest in her, and in no time flat succeeds in teaching her how to play Hide the Schmeckie.

Then, just when he has the tender young miss in his grasp, OMG HUGE REVELATION TIME: apparently Sienna’s older brother had done Alex’s sister wrong at some point in the past, and the shaggenating and the seducerating was all a big old revenge ploy.

To Jordan’s credit, this bit of silliness is resolved soon enough, as Alex finds out through his sister that he’s full of shit. I perked up a little, but alas, my hopes were dashed most cruelly--almost as cruelly as little Sienna’s head against the fender of a car.

Oh yes. During an overwrought conversation with Alex, Sienna runs outside, right into the rain and the bumper of a London taxicab and loses her memory. At this point, it would’ve been kinder to us readers and a whole lot more interesting overall if she’d just been killed outright and then have Alex embark on a hot homosexual affair with Sienna’s brother (COCK PARTY AHOY!), but no such luck. Instead, Alex marries Sienna in a fit of remorse, even though she can’t remember who she is, though she seems to remember she likes the cock well enough.

Yes, mouseketeers, you read right. This isn’t just a revenge ploy book. It’s a revenge ploy book with an amnesiac bride. What an awesome surprise. It’s like going to the free clinic to get your chlamydia treated, only to find out you have tertiary-stage syphilis. (Retrograde amnesia plots: It’s the tertiary syphilis of romance novels! Authors please take note.)

What will happen to our intrepid young lovers? Will Sienna regain her memory? Will the truth behind the circumstances of her marriage ever be revealed? Will any of this be explained with any semblance of believability? Will Sienna realize that a dickhead who would seduce and dump a girl solely to avenge an imagined wrong and then marry said girl without her consent is probably in-fucking-sane and she should run away as fast as her wee amnesiac feet will allow her to? Will the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series again?

The only thing that saved this book from an F was the novelty of the format. This book is one of the Harlequin Ginger Blossom series of manga comics published in conjunction with Dark Horse. The artwork is pretty, and the purple ink provided the whole enterprise with just enough kitsch value so I ended up laughing incredulously instead of chucking the book against the wall, and really, throwing things is NOT a solution, because what if I’d accidentally hit one of my cats? Then I’d have a pissed-off cat AND a shitty book that’s no less shitty for having hit the wall. It is kind of bizarre to come across manga conventions like the little sweat-drops of consternation and the chibi eyes in the context of a Harlequin romance, but overall, the incongruity distracted from the awfulness of the book.

Oh, I was also disappointed that the sex scenes were very, very discreetly rendered. I’ve read a few Penny Jordan novels in my time, and they’re usually pretty spicy. Does my disappointment make me a perv? (Like I don’t know the answer to that without asking the question, ha!)

I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would read this book, because it’s neither fish nor fowl nor meat--though tofurkey might serve as an apt comparison. Diehard Penny Jordan fans would probably enjoy the full-length novel better, and manga fans who’ve never made forays into Harlequin novels would probably be puzzled or bored by the soap opera lite feeling of this book. If Dark Horse started translating books that were actually GOOD into this format, like some of the old Anne Stuart category romances, or even something by Vicki Lewis Thompson, this line would have the potential to be a lot of fun. As it is, I can only parrot what I said earlier: Bleurgh!

Who’s the Daddy? is the incredulous tale of Caroline Atkins, who awakes in a hospital bed after an barely-described accident that has left her in a state of breathtaking amnesia. She can remember the chauffer and her favorite drink, but she cannot remember anything else, including her family, the two toadies who follow her father everywhere, and, surprise!, what happened two months prior that would leave her pregnant.

Seems that this book was published well before patient confidentiality was something that hospitals cared about, because Dr. Dumbass blurts out her condition in front of her parents, the toadies, her also-pregnant-and-annoying-as-well sister, and her sister’s husband. He might as well have done a song and dance routine down the hallway.

Here is where your phrase collection begins to come in handy. Now’s about the time I said, “Are you SHITTING me?” At two months, one with any medical knowledge might have the brain cell function to think that perhaps, if the patient IS pregnant, she might not have TOLD anyone. And Dr. Dumbass doesn’t have the foresight to think perhaps he’s messed up in spilling the buns, here (Note: not beans. There are no beans in this oven).

No, it’s all part of a concerted effort on the part of all these cardboard characters to Drive the Plot Forward at All Costs. Kind of like pushing a Nash downhill: when it’s that heavy, it’ll start rolling and move on its own momentum, but it takes a big shove to get it going.

Caroline, her overbearing bonehead father, her vapid charity-obsessed mother, and the two toadies, the sister, the sister’s husband, and - hello! - the hot studly construction worker man who just came barrelling into her hospital room, all want to know one thing: WHO is the FATHER of this CHILD?

Not, “When will she get her memory back?” Not, “Shall we put her in a facility to enable the resurrection of her brain’s memory?” Not, “Should she be released from the hospital?” But “Who is the father because dammit no child in THIS family is going to be illegitimate!”

Seriously, her father is more worried about who’s the babydaddy than he is about the fact that his admittedly favorite daughter cannot remember her phone number, because he has got a wedding to plan. Or, at least, make his wife plan while he spends money on it. The issue of her amnesia is treated as an inconvenience by everyone, including Caroline, who is released to her family’s care barely a few hours after she was admitted to the hospital after the “accident” that left her with no lasting injuries other than a headache and the inability to remember anything about her life up until that morning.

Come ON, Now

Caroline’s father demands, as she is being released, to know who the babydaddy is, and the two toadies from his office and the hunky construction worker all step forward to say, “I am.” Caroline has no idea who any of them are, but she thinks the hunky construction worker dude is damn hot.

After she returns home from the hospital, looks through her closet at all the mysterious clothes that she doesn’t recognize as belonging to her- though she DOES of course recognize that the labels are all designer and high-end - and introduces herself to the housekeeper, who is a kind, truthful, and noble sort, just as a housekeeper made of stock-character-cardboard should be, Caroline gets down to work: time to figure out who the babydaddy is.

She invites hunky construction man to dinner, and asks Mrs. Lamb, the housekeeper who she allegedly calls “Lambie,” -

Who are you kidding?!

- to set up a romantic dinner for two. Her father, of course, being the overbearing blowhard that he, as a stock-character-cardboard father, should be, rearranges things and cancels her dinner for two. He tells Mrs. Lamb(ie) to set an extra three settings at dinner - and invites Prescott and Adrian, the two toadies, to dinner as well, so that they can press their suit as Caroline’s future husband and father of her baby.

Caroline is none too pleased, but instead of telling that officious, pompous buttmonkey to go blow it out his ass, she makes Max, hottie construction guy, sit down at dinner with the two toadies and her entire, insane family, and put up with the lot of them through a meal. Suspend reality, folks, because the Plot Must Be Driven Forward and these people Must Interact.

Now here’s where it gets really, really good. Max charms Caroline’s mother, ignores her sister - who is livid that her older sister is stealing her thunder by also being pregnant - and goes chasing after Caroline after she leaves the table in a fit of gestational nausea.

After the romance of helping her hurl, they have a moment wherein, sitting on the bathroom floor, she leans into him and he almost kisses her. There is NO MENTION of teeth brushing, either. Post-vomit kissing! Now THAT is a new one!

Do you think I’m STUPID?

Caroline and Max continue to see each other, and the mystery unfolds: who IS the babydaddy? What do Prescott and Adrian hope to gain by proposing marriage under the watchful urging of her father and accepting the mystery baby as their own? Is it just to get at Caroline’s money and at her father’s company? And what happened that Max and Caroline stopped seeing each other? Oh, the questions, they pile up. Emphasis on “pile.”

Caroline herself is one of those romance heroines we love to loathe: she’s described as “feisty” and in the first few pages almost comes across as somewhat snarky and strong. But then she’s faced with two men she doesn’t particularly like and one she can’t keep her hands off of, all claiming to be her babydaddy, so she does what any “feisty” heroine would do:

She promises her father she’ll marry the first man who provides “proof” that he’s the babydaddy. Because she’s caused her family enough embarrassment by being pregnant in the first place. And even as she comes to seriously distrust and dislike the babydaddy candidate who has “proof,” she still upholds her “promise” to her father that she will marry this unlikeable toad, because she… has to do what her father says.

Mm-hah! That’s some feisty heroine!

It almost seemed that the author went back and forth between “feisty” and “limp fish” because Caroline does have moments where you think, “Ah ha! She’s remembered her spine!” and then, faced with Daddy’s disapproval, she goes back to following orders.

I mean, check out this conversation:

“..You keep hanging on to that other man, the one you’re infatuated with.”
“I’m not infatuated with Max, Daddy. I love him. And he loves me.”
“Then why are you marrying Adrian? That’s not fair to him.”
She clenched her teeth in frustration. “I’m marrying Adrian because I promised you, and because he offered proof that he’s the father of my baby. But I don’t love him.”
“But, Caroline, it’s only fair that you marry him. After all, you’ve admitted that’s his baby.”
“No, I haven’t. I said he offered proof.”

Are you as confused as I am? It’s not fair to marry him if you don’t love him, but it is fair to marry him because he went through the trouble of offering proof that he’s the babydaddy.

There are some plot holes I can’t figure out, and of course I don’t want to give away all the crazy wacky bits of the story because someone will ultimately read this book just to see if it’s as insane as I say (Yes it is, trust me) But some things just don’t add up.

For example, according to the story, Max and Caroline had a whirlwind affair for two weeks, and Max was under the impression that she was new to the area. He took her on tours, drove her around, tried to help her find a job - and after they had hot hot sex, she ran away. He woke up, she was gone, and what the hell happened?

Then he hears her name on the radio following her accident - so she’s big enough of a name in the city that her accident MAKES the NEWS yet when he meets her, he’s never heard of her, or of her family, or of the family company. And when he hires a private investigator, even the PI recognizes the name. So how did he not know who she was?

But what drove me to collapse in fits of laughter and screaming was when it was T-minus one day until the wedding, and she tells Max that she needs him to be there, in the church pews, watching as she marries this other buffoon who has “proof.” She loves him so much she needs him to be there to support her as she marries someone else.

Now that, gentle readers, is love. And a “feisty” heroine.

Ultimately you do find out who the babydaddy is, but it’s more of a quest to disprove two of the contenders so the lustful pair can live happily ever after, and all the way to the end, the amnesia is almost an afterthought. But the ride to that happy ending is so completely bizarre, it’s almost worth buying a copy of the book used, just to tell people how truly bizarre the story is.

As I stated earlier, what made me angry about this book was that it seemed to assume I would accept any number of vacillations of character on the part of the heroine, that I would accept a heroine who would do as her father said even if she couldn’t remember her father in the first place, and that I would accept a hero who would put up with a heroine who put her father’s chauvinistic and inconsistent demands over her own desires and a hero who would never ask that she grow the hell up already.

He needed to grow a pair, she needed another hit on the head, the father needed sensitivity training and a clue, and I need to go find another book fast to get the taste of this one out of my mouth. 

The setting and concept are pretty cool, and not something I’ve encountered in literature before. The story takes place in an alternate reality which lacks all color. That’s right: it’s all shades of grey in this here joint. It wasn’t always like this; apparently all the color deities, the Tilirr, fled the world and took all color with them when the last king, Alliran Monteyn, was placed into Snow White-style stasis. At least, I think this was when the world lost its color—the book is long, y’all, and I fell asleep many, many, many times while reading it.

What’s interesting is that while reading the book, I kept assigning color values to the landscape and the characters without any prompting; it wasn’t until I was well into the book that I started viewing the scenes in black and white on any consistent basis. I really liked this aspect the book, mostly because I like books that mess with my head and make me re-think perceptions and expectations.

The story opens when Our Intrepid Heroine, Ranheas Ylir, stumbles upon an what seems to be an assassination attempt on some aristocrats travelling in a coach. Since she’s a mercenary who holds dual PhDs in Asskickology and Bad-Ass Mofonics, she wades into the fray and saves some nobleman (and noblewomen) ass.

The nobleman is Lord Elasand Vaeste, whose wig in the realm of bigwigs is very large indeed. Well, OK, he doesn’t wear a wig, he just has long black hair with a totally gay-ass white streak running through it, which just makes me think of bad anime hair, which then makes me think of bad anime eyes, so I ended up picturing Elasand as a character from cheesy-ass yaoi art.

Ahem. Back to the story. Anyway, there’s intrigue afoot and he’s off for some Hush-Hush Bigwig Meetings with the Regent, but since he’s all tricksy and shit, he’s using his cousin’s upcoming wedding as an excuse to go to the capital city and visit the Court. He tries to hire Ranheas because even though he’s tricksy, he’s also a dumbass and set off on the journey with no guards, just a driver whom the assassins turned into hamburger right away. Ranheas, however, blows him off. Why? ‘Cause she’s a free spirit, man. *beatnik snaps*

But their paths cross again at an inn down the road. And of course Ranheas finally signs on to be his bodyguard. And for no discernible reason at all, falls in love with Elasand.

At this point I’m smacking my head against the book, because I hatesssss it when a character falls in love for no discernible reason. I mean, literally, at this point, the chick has spoken, like, ten sentences to the guy. There are a couple of stories that manage pull off this sort of Instant Lurve without making me want to hit all the characters involved with a dead fish, but they are few and far between indeed. Most of the time, I don’t buy this sort of scenario.

When they arrive at the capital city, there’s more skullduggery ahoy, including another foiled assassination attempt and the presence of strange emissaries from Qurthe, a heretofore unknown country far to the south. The soldiers seem able to kill without touching anyone, and the leader of the emissaries, Lord Araht Vorn, is particularly menacing. Dude is Big, Bad and Black, mang. The pussy-ass Regent is in a panic, and there’s some ill-defined but vaguely ominous fuckery going on with the various Guilds in the city which is sending the His Wimpy Uselessness into a tailspin, too.

In the meanwhile, interspersed with the actual story are an excruciatingly detailed description of the city’s layout and a painful, Robert Altman-esque (I HATE ROBERT ALTMAN RAR) slice-of-life montage, as we are introduced to a dizzying array of characters who populate the city. The action isn’t slowed down so much as crunched thoroughly into a pulp and left for dead on the side of the highway. I persevered through all this deluge of words, hoping and hoping for a payoff and… nothing. Most of the characters introduced in this section of the book? You’ll get maybe a couple paragraphs about them later on. It all basically reads like a massive infodump, and I am not a big fan of infodumping unless it’s geeky science shit. Neal Stephenson gets a pass, but not many other authors do.

So yeah, the Court has been overrun with freaky-ass people who claim to be emissaries to the Lord of the Dark and the City of Twilight, invasion seems imminent, the Regent is useless, Ranheas meets the head of the Assassins’ Guild, Elassir, under intimate and embarrassing circumstances, Elasand figures out that they need to seek help from the Tilirr, Elassir, Elasand and Ranheas set off on a mini-quest, and Shit Finally Happens. Slowly, because it takes Ranheas almost a friggin’ page to move two steps since the narration is weighed down with so much descriptive prose and internal musing, but it happens. The ending, when it finally, finally arrives, is predictable—c’mon, there’s a handsome young king in stasis, and his death was associated with the loss of color in the world, so just take a guess as to what happens by the end of the book.

OK, bagging so much on the plot is kind of unfair. I’ve read and loved books in which not much at all happens, but the beauty of the prose carries it through. The Riders by Tim Winton, for example, is a quintessential example of this sort of book.

This book’s prose drove me apemonkey bonkers.

First of all, I have never seen such rampant italic abuse in a book. Every color noun is italicized, including the word “color.” This is a problem when color words are used with distressing frequency. The various noble houses have colors associated with them, for example, and the Light Guild is able to re-create monochrome colored lights. The names of the Tilirr (of which there are six, one for each color of the rainbow) are all italicized, too, as are the pronouns associated with them. The Tilirr make many, many appearances in the book, and every time they do, a regular orgy of italicized words ensues as every friggin’ variation and shade of color associated with the Tilirr shows up and jiggles its ass on the page. (No, not literally—I might’ve been able to work through this book faster if there had been more ass jigginess, but alas, that was not meant to be.)

Throw in the occasional italics used for emphasis, and I ended up reading this book with some really fucked-up diction. I elect William Shatner as the narrator for the audio book, because that’s who I heard in my head every time those damn italics showed up.

For what it’s worth, I get why the colors are italicized. I get the point, and I noticed when the italics were no longer being used. I just don’t think it was a particularly useful point to make, and its awkwardness far outweighed anything else.

And the dialogue… Egad, the dialogue. Let me give you an example of how people talk in this book:

“I feel sorry for it, Ma!” the little girl said suddenly. “Neither man nor woman—no matter how beautiful, I wouldn’t wanna be like tha’! And I’m scared, Ma! I’m scared of it!”

So that’s an example of what the unwashed masses sound like. Here’s the nobility, showing us how quick on their feet they are in a crisis:

“Master Marihke!” he spoke in a stumbling manner. “And the rest of you! Pardon me, but you must go look outside.”

“What is it?” responded Marihke.

But Ukrt’s eyes were terrified. “Look outside, Masters!” he was saying. “Come now, quickly, look outside at the sky!”

“Indeed!” said Elasand, coming out of his distracted state. “This is the reason I’ve come here in the first place. There is something unusual happening outside! Come, all of you!”

If it had been me, I would’ve trampled over Elasand and gone outside already, because woo damn, when there’s an emergency, I’m going to get my ass moving pronto instead of waiting for some aristo with bad anime hair to tell me to get my ass moving.

But then, I’m the same heathen who thinks J.R.R. Tolkien needed lessons in dialogue writing too, so take this peeve with a grain of salt.

By far the most distracting aspect of the prose was the rampant adjectivitis. I’d be the first to admit that I, too, suffer from adjectivitis, which is a subset of a larger syndrome known as Modifierosis Nervosa. But this book… Oof. Nary a noun goes unmodified. Adjectives are stacked wantonly atop one another, snuggling up against each other without so much as a comma to separate them. Check these two examples out:

In the center, a little toward the back wall, stood a raised stone altar, in the form a large simply hewn crude stone with a somewhat concave surface, round like a very shallow wide bowl.

(…) Ranhe, following him as asked, saw tears glistening in his pale lapis ancient young eyes.

These are the memorably bad ones, but I’m not kidding when I say that almost all the nouns in this book are modified, often with two or more adjectives. Really, Rebecca Brandewyne should get ahold of this book post-haste.

The book is also littered with verbal tics. The one that bugged me the most was the way so many sentences started with “For.” The “for” was largely unnecessary, and their proliferation became especially bad towards the end of the book, as if it was spawning season for them.

But I will say this much about the book: the heroine is very unusual. For one, she’s a vegetarian. Not something I’ve seen much in fiction, unless they’re bad hippie-dipshit caricatures. And for another thing, she’s allowed to be unattractive in a really unusual way. Minor spoiler: She has hair! Like, all over! Including her face! Dude, this chick needs to shave daily. Oh, and her feet stink. It takes courage and skill to create a heroine like Ranheas, and she really stood out.

Unfortunately, I found all the other characters kind of annoying or completely undeveloped. Elasand? I wanted to smack him. Elassir, the head of the Assassins’ Guild? Not quite as annoying, but I still wanted to smack him. And don’t even get me started on the other characters, like the Regent and this poet laureate who’s a minor character but who really got on my tits every time he appeared. It’s not a good sign when I end up rooting for the bad guy and fervently hoping everyone perishes in a big, bloody battle, then feel peevish when not as many of the so-called good guys died as I had hoped.

So, in summary: cool concept, and I really liked Ranheas’ asskickiness (well, aside from her inexplicable love for Elasand). The rest of the book? GAH.

(Side note: This sounds good in theory, but unless the girl keeps her head completely still AND takes care not to mess up the lip-prints of the girl(s) who blazed the trail before her, I don’t see how this would work.)

Gin invites various classmates, all of whom serve as stupendously wooden archetypes. Here’s a quick run-down of several of them:

Sandy: Good-two-shoes girl who’s best friends with Gin because… actually, I have NO IDEA why she’s friends with Gin. Sandy has no idea either. Neither does Gin. This is one of the book’s many mysteries.

Jade: Skinny, hot, popular, smart, into championing causes such as getting rid of the dress code. In short: a tiresome paragon.

Ash and Rose: GOD. These two are so annoying. Every time they came on the scene, I was overcome by an urge to smack ‘em in the face with a two-by-four. They’re the perfect couple and obviously meant to be the book’s moral center. They’ve been dating for over a year, but they haven’t done more than kiss and they don’t plan to do more for a while yet. They’re supposed to be different and cute and inspire admiration for a) their moral and physical purity, and b) their fearlessness about Being Different and Defying Norms and all that, but really, all they inspire in me is heaving nausea.

Hunter: Handsome, amoral asshole with a peener that burrrrrrns, oh how it burrrrrrrns, but oh boy, he sure loves getting head.

Perry: Closeted gay boy who’s allegedly snarky and smart, but more often than not comes across as petulant, delusional and mumbly. I’m not kidding. Dude mumbles all the time in this book, even when Hunter’s dick isn’t in his mouth.

Skye and Rod: The archetypal Teenage Couple Who Has Sex Before They’re Ready. Teenage Premarital Sex: Don’t Do It! Only marginally less annoying than Ash and Rose.

All these characters have about the liveliness and realism of marionettes being worked by a puppeteer on quaaludes. Their motivations are opaque at best and downright puzzling at worst. Gin, for instance: why is she so sexually precocious? What little we see of her family life seems stable, and we’re never provided with any believable reasoning for why she’s so promiscuous.

Also, all those people screaming about how obscene this book is, how it appeals mostly to the prurient interest? Hate to destroy these people’s lurid suck-n-fuck fantasies involving hot, hard-bodied teenage boys getting blowjobs from barely pubescent girls (oh, you KNOW some of that outrage was fueled by a lethal combination of displaced horniness and the accompanying guilt over that horniness), but Tod Goldberg said it best: “The book is about as titillating as a bowel movement.” Well, assuming you’re not the type to be titillated by bowel movements, that is—there does seem to be a terrifyingly large number of these people in certain newsgroups.

At any rate, rest assured there are no explicit sex scenes. There are exactly two scenes involving oral sex in the whole book. The first one takes place off the page: We basically enter the scene as Hunter is zipping up. The other involves Skye and Rod, and…. OK, there’s no way I can do justice to Ruditis’ deathless prose, so here’s a quote:

Her breathing intensified. She grabbed a clump of the comforter in her hand, squeezing tightly. She was feeling all the things she had read about in the trashy romance novels her mom kept hidden under the bed they were on. Skye’s bosom heaved. Her loins burned with desire. Waves of pleasure washed over her body ready to crash on the shore.

The sad thing is, while that scene deliberately attempts to skewer romance novel sex scenes, the rest of the book is written every bit as clumsily. To give you an idea of how clunky it is: Think of an episode of Saved By The Bell. No, not back when it was even remotely amusing and featured Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani-Amber Thiesen and god knows what other hyphenated teenybopper hottie. I’m talking the recent seasons in which Screech is, like, 42 years old and STILL a creepily underdeveloped buffoon amidst a host of bland Hollywood hardbodies trying their best to look like teenagers.

OK, so can you picture one of those episodes in your head? Good. Because seriously? This book bears an eerie resemblance to one of those episodes. The writing is so goddamn stilted that should all the global warming alarmists prove to be right and Earth is flooded in a sea of melted icecaps in the next few years, the prose in this book will remain high and dry.

And while the book isn’t titillating per se, you can tell that Ruditis tries to be all nudge-nudge wink-wink with the occasional double-entendre, and most of these attempts just don’t work. For instance, check out the opening paragraph:

Gin took the slender shaft of the tube in her palm. She gave a gentle tug along the base and watched as the lipstick extended to its full length.

Admittedly, it’s been YEARS since I’ve worn lipstick, but as far as I know, you twist the base to get the lipstick to extend. I’ve never encountered a lipstick that required you to tug on the base; if nothing else, it makes no sense. Tugging the base would logically mean the tip would retreat, unless the lipstick manufacturer created an unduly complicated and completely counterintuitive mechanism that would extend the lipstick when you pulled. Either Ruditis has no idea how lipstick works, or he knows and decided to describe it inaccurately in an effort to preserve this truly pointless (and execrable) lipstick-as-penis imagery.

The book does get the core messages through, and they’re good messages for teens—or anyone, for that matter: oral sex carries real risks and consequences, and having sex before you’re ready isn’t that great an idea. Too bad the message is delivered by such a boring, clumsy messenger. Several other YA books have dealt with teenage sex and relationships with much more depth, grace and readability; the memorable ones for me were Deenie and Forever by Judy Blume, but I’m sure these are pretty dated by today’s standards.

In short, the book and the subject matter had lots of potential, but ended up with all the depth, believablity and complexity of an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers—that is, if the Pink Ranger got all humpy with the Green Ranger and decided to give him a hummer between costume changes, then infected the rest of the team with gonorrhea.

(Actually, there’s probably pornographic MMPR fanfic involving just such scenarios. And what’s worse, I’d much prefer to read this fanfic than watch an actual episode of MMPR. Oh, the humanity.)

Dear Heroine:

Here are some things you should not do if you wish me to continue rooting for you:

1. Do not do something so unbearably stupid I grit my teeth, and moreover, don’t do it solely for the sake of pushing the story forward. Don’t find thousands of dollars in your safety deposit box, along with two passports for your husband and daughter, and then put it BACK. Take it OUT. Take it WITH YOU. Don’t find panties under your husband’s car seat and then THROW THEM AWAY. Put them in a bag and send them to your LAWYER.

2. Stop allowing life to happen to you and then complain when it does. If you want to take charge of your life, I understand. It’s a big step. But get off your ass and DO it already. The more you let larger and larger things happen to you, all the while complaining about them, without doing something for yourself in return, the more I want to stop rooting for you, and settle your problems by smacking you over the head repeatedly.

3. Stop making decisions that make no sense. Actually, for this one I blame the author. I don’t always get the authors who talk about their characters telling them what to do, but I do think that there comes a point in a written character’s story where you have to ask yourself, “What would this person do?” The more consistently you choose to have the character do something that makes no sense in light of the character herself, the more I get annoyed.

4. Do not repeatedly shove your head up your ass and then complain about the view and the smell.

Love,

Sarah

Seriously, y’all, I know I’m going to get a bundle of “Oh my GOSH I LOVED this book how could you be so HARSH” comments, but I did not like this book.

In fact, it rapidly reached the “flip through just to find out who did it and move on with your life” stage, which is about the next-to-worst stage you can get with me. The very worst is “toss the book across the room unfinished and forget about it as soon as possible.” That’s a rare stage with me.

Oddly enough, when I picked it back up to finish on the train on Monday, I did read through the ending without flipping through - only to find myself chastised by Crusie as every single one of the momentously stupid things the heroine did were rewarded by the bad guys getting caught, the mean people shutting up, and all because she was a Good and Honest Person.

The Good and Honest Person in question is Maggie Faraday, who just discovered her husband cheated on her, and then, one after another, has unbelievably weird things happen to her, like giant, rubber dominos falling in succession on her head to the point where you just want her to move out of the way. Her very best friend is surly and secretive (but of course she can’t call said best friend on her shit and say, ‘What is major malfunction?’) and her mother is gathering gossip about everyone else, while telling her to keep her own nose clean, and her entire life in the small town she lives in is based on her being a perfect angel person who never does anything wrong.

She was in turns boring and taunting me to hop into the story so I could beat her.

Her one-night-stand secret-hot-sex-fantasy man has come back to town, coincidentally (not) investigating her husband, who is indeed a philandering bastard buttsquatch. From the moment he shows up on her porch looking for Hubster, hilarity ensues.

Only, unlike many a Crusie I enjoyed thoroughly wherein hilarity ensued, I didn’t enjoy this one. It wasn’t just that the heroine did stupid things and made dumb decisions that left her vulnerable over and over, even as she told herself (and therefore the reader) that she was going to be strong and fight against the rumor-mongering fools in her town and do what she wanted from now on. It was the feeling that no one but NO ONE could truly and really be this so almighty clueless. I can’t even get into the specifics without spoiling the entire plot, as it is a convoluted thing I didn’t entirely capture. But damn. I didn’t cheer for her. I didn’t want her to win. I wanted her to get her poop in a group so I could read about a grown up instead of a plasticine doll in a romance novel.

The hero was even more of a vanilla character, if that’s possible. Aside from a device for sexual gratification, C.L. (and I am not even going to tell you what that stands for) is some kind of vigilante crossed with an accountant - he’s trying to figure out if Maddie’s husband was a shady businessman - which aside from making him a homosexual puppy beater, having him cheat little old ladies out of their money is a quick path to bastard status. C.L. was a nice enough guy, and I loved reading about his family, but did I get the sense that, were I Maddie, I’d swoon over him? Not at all.

The best friend was such a shitful friend, aside from instant babysitting and pushy attitude when needed, that I didn’t like her in the slightest, and kept wondering if her nasty secretiveness was a way for Crusie to point me in the direction of suspecting her of villainy. Then best friendy witch would do something honorable, like make sure Maddie and C.L. had time alone together, and I figured she couldn’t be all bad. But I still didn’t like her, and I didn’t root for her happily ever after, either. I wanted to smack her around for being such a grumpy witch.

This is probably one of the first times I’ve ever read a book where the heroine annoyed me so much I couldn’t bring myself to give a shit about her. I just didn’t. “I have to protect my daughter!” So you remove any evidence of your husband’s philandering that you might use to divorce his ass and acquire a settlement that would allow you to protect her. “I am not sure what is going on but something bad is happening and someone is after me!” So you hide a gun in the freezer after wiping it for prints, and then hide evidence from various people who might help you.

Shit on a shingle, Maddie, you stunk up the joint.  I think part of the problem is that I’m married to and friends with many attorneys, so to watch you do stupid things and leave yourself wide open - even though I know it’s going to work out in the end - was excruciating.

The only thing I couldn’t decide was whether this was my new all-time low book, or whether the crowne of crappe was still held by Honey Moon, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, which holds the distinction of being the first romance novel to ever make me nauseated. I think SEP still holds the Crappe Crowne, but this book was way down there, too, which makes it doubly disappointing. I hate it when authors I love write something I just can’t stand.