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

In a nutshell: here’s the pattern of the heroine’s thought process.

Jail and my life experiences have taught me to be strong! And clever! And made me a whole new person!
But I’m a bad person who doesn’t deserve all the things that have happened to me. I’ve made some bad choices.
But my release from prison gives me a chance to build myself into a new confident woman!
But I’m not confident; I’ve caused a lot of harm and my children hate me. I’ve made some bad choices.
But everyone in this halfway house should go to college! We all have potential! I’m great! You’re great! We’re all great!
I’m not. I’ve made some bad choices.
I’m great!
I’m not. I’ve made some bad choices.

Seriously, if you scanned this book and did a CTRL-F for “bad choices,” I’m betting you’d find at least four uses of the pair in each chapter. The reader does see some of Monette’s bad choices, or hear about them as she tells someone else at length what they were, but the reader also sees that some of those bad choices result from not ridding herself of a slew of negative influences, even as she counsels others to do the same. Just saying she’s made bad choices doesn’t give me any sympathy for her when she continues to follow the same path.

There’s no initial explanation of what happened in jail to give her this insight into her own flaws, or what happened to put her at war with her own confidence, so all I had in the hundred or so pages was an annoying character who didn’t seem real or consistent. Add to that a love interest who is stuck in some wooden and terribly trite dialogue exchanges, and some cliche jealous women who embrace stereotypes with loving precision, and I had to put the book down.

The dialogue between characters, particularly the protagonists, was equally frustrating. Sometimes it was cardboard platitudes, sometimes it was phrases that wouldn’t roll naturally out of anyone’s mouth, and sometimes it was info-dumping. I couldn’t believe any of the characters because the dialogue wasn’t moving the story forward so much as filling in the past, or circling in the present.

Furthermore, the events in the heroine’s life were improbable as well. She walks out of jail, checks into the halfway house, appears on the morning news, then lands a job hosting her own mid-day talk show on a talk radio station. Because people who write books automatically do well on the radio?

What disappointed me most was that cover to plot summary, this book could have been great. The cover is exceptionally sexy - a woman’s legs walking up stairs in gold d’Orsay heels? Wow. And the plot summary holds an incredible amount of potential. An innocent woman who hadn’t lead a most honorable life sent to jail for years for a crime she didn’t commit (though she was guilty of a slew of much lesser crimes) is released because of her own bravery in telling the truth of her own story, even the unflattering part, and thus has a chance to rebuild her life? And to do so she has to balance her sense of innocence and her sense of guilt while ridding herself of people who only want her money or fame but give her nothing in return? Could be amazing. But it wasn’t. It was trite, stereotypical, wooden, boring, irritating and disappointing.

I can tell you this much, and urge you to avoid this book:

Dani, the heroine, is an asshole. She gets dumped, starts off the story by moaning about her bad luck with men, and does nothing to make herself likeable, or even tolerable.

Somehow she ends up smoking a cigarette in front of the UN at night, and sees a little girl alone on a bench with a suitcase and no adult near her. Dani has the bright idea of charming the little girl into coming home with her, so she coaxes said youngster into a cab, and takes the kid back to her apartment. Yeah, that’s not creepy, or a massive display of questionable judgment.

Once in the apartment, she makes the kid some soup and eggs, and convinces the little girl to divulge her name. The girl, Maria, speaks in a clearly “English is my second language” manner, using phrases like, “how you say,” and never once using a contraction, so her sentences are stilted and formal. Maria is not from the US. And I have a lump the size of Texas from the subtle frying pan used to communicate that character’s foreign-ness.

If Candy lived in this book’s world, she’d mispronounce her “r’s” and refer to herself as “me” instead of “I” and she’d probably put pee-pee in your Coke at every opportunity so as not to miss a single cliche of being from another country.

But what got me really steamed was the little girl’s earnest request to repay Dani for her kindness after the girl revealed she was from Argentina, and no one arrived to meet her at the airport. Dani makes some comment about how she requires no payment and probably has a few “pesos” in the apartment to use in caring for this girl she ostensibly kidnapped. So not only is she a complete moron, but she’s a xenophobic buttmonkey as well? Oh, I cannot wait to immerse myself in her adventure and identify with her spunky attitude at every turn!

Not.

Right after the pesos comment, I shut the book and shoved it behind all the other books on the borrowing shelf in the bathroom of our rented house, so no one would be afflicted with the horror that was this novel.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the Amazon reviews as well. In a word, OUCH. The other readers, they also want to slap their grandma’s grandma.

From the Publisher’s Weekly review:

The bad guys could be Cagney co-stars; Maria is a modern-day Shirley Temple, dispensing advice on politics, smoking and love; and Alex is melodramatic in a Fernando Lamas sort of way. As for Dani, she’s the kind of bravely foolish heroine of yesteryear who insists on going off half-cocked and alone, yet she stops for a cigarette when she stumbles over a corpse in the enemy’s lair. Everything about the novel, including the paint-by-numbers cover, is so anachronistically cliched, it’s practically high camp.

And some reader comments:

“My nine year old could write a more coherent story!”

“I would have to agree with the earlier reviewer that said that her book is now in the trash, because that is where mine is headed. I usually resale my mediocre books to Half Price Books, but I wouldn’t want to torture another unsuspecting reader with this book.”

“Improbable plot, stilted dialogue, characters who act out erratically and stupidly.... Wish I could give it negative stars.”

There you have it: This book needs Negative Stars. Sounds like a black hole for books, where things you wish you’d never even read could be sucked into some endless void so powerful the memory of the pages you looked at would be stripped from your brain.

Ah, the astrophysics of romance. And in this case, emphasis on the “ass.”

The Demon’s Daughter is set in a parallel universe to Victorian England. By “Victorian” I mean that Victoria is the queen, but there are demons living alongside the humans, everyone is aware of this fact, and life proceeds as one might expect, with, as expected in Victorian society, a very strict and curious balance of power. Seems there are outcast demons who are crapful and take advantage of the human’s energy so as to fuel and better themselves, and certainly there are humans who are willing to pay for the privilege of a demon’s protection. Very similar to a vampire/voluntary donor relationship.

Then there are the daimyo demons, who are upper crust, and look down on the low class demon outcasts. Add to that the strata of rank at work in the Victorian human society, and you have one very confused Sarah. The only thing I could get straight about this universe is that there were more than the normal social levels of peers and undesirables to be dealt with.

I have not had much experience with Holly’s efforts at world building, but I have read several fantasy books and series wherein an entire universe was created that I could access and explore easily. But I could not for the life of me figure out some of the key elements of tension in this book.

First, there’s Adrian Phillips, a policeman who has been physically “enhanced” by the demons, who put implants in his wrists to give him a short period of superhuman strength with which to fight the demons. His decision to accept these implants put him on some kind of universal shit-list, since the demons look down on him as a mere human, and the humans think he sold his own humanity for his ambition. I think he wanted a fair fight, but what do I know? He’s uninteresting to me because he bemoans his exiled status, but then never really wants human contact anyway, diagreeing with the social restrictions standing between him and the heroine, yet never really indicating that at any time prior he gave much of a shit about what people thought of him anyway. He got those implants, he’s dismissed as less-than-human (or more-than-human) and he doesn’t much care, so why should social acceptabilty give him pause? No clue.

His partner in this confusing erotic romance is Roxanne McAllister, daughter of a departed and rather promiscuous opera singer. Roxanne has peculair strength and a gifted talent with painting. They meet because Adrian gets in a fight, gets the crap kicked out of him, and collapses in her backyard unconscious. She brings him into her home - literally lifts him basket-catch-style from the ground and walks into her house with him - to have him stitched up and nursed back to health.

Roxanne, she’s a seriously annoying paragon of virtue. She takes in stray children, finds jobs for them (and of course they are also miraculously talented individuals as well!) and accepts easily that her lover, the man to whom she is effortlessly attracted, has demon technology strapped to his wrist tendons. Further, she finds out that her father is a very prominent upper-class Demon, and an ambassador to the city they live in. She’s conflicted about this information about herself, but she confesses her half-demon status to her new bouncing partner, and he’s like, “Well, ok, shall we go back to bed?”

Now, half-demon status is something that no one thinks is biologically possible, and given the fact that demons feast on the energy of humans, particularly humans in orgasm, one might think he would have more concern over her ability to drain him to the point of needing a few day’s sleep. Certainly she is a little cautious and afraid of how she might inadvertently use him for his energy. Adrian? He’s all, “Please, ma’am, may I have some more of that splendid boinking?”

There are several sources of tension that I’m not going to read any further to see how they are resolved. She’s unacceptable as a mate for him, as her class level is a detriment to his social standing and even his supervisor tells him not to be seen with her. He’s a half-human demon-altered mega cop who is shunned my most human society, though evidence of this shunning is hard to find in the beginning. Seems he just doesn’t like people and wants to hunt down additional criminals in his time off. So what’s the problem? Shouldn’t being an outcast serve him in that endeavor?

Meanwhile, she’s half demon, but rather uncurious about whether that means she can bench press her house, or whether she’s just the same as she ever was, except that she knows who her father is.

But what gets me is how poorly the sexual elements and the tension fit together. It’s so jarring, like the paranormal plot starts up and then Holly grabbed the crowbar to wedge some hot-n-heavy erotic moments in there. To me, they didn’t seem to fit and were too abrupt to be truly erotic. They seemed more like paint-by-numbers elements: “It has been 20 pages and now we must fuck like bunnies on cialis. Let us begin!”

Moreover, Roxanne is a virgin, yet she displays an astonishing amount of sexual knowledge and technique. How did she acquire such a sexual repitoire? She paints erotic portraits, and her mother was a ho, but what does she know about blow jobs? How does she know the perfect manner for giving a hand job? Is this a latent strand of ho-knowledge suddenly becoming wantonly active?

Further, the pacing is so confusing to me: drama drama, world building details guaranteed to confuse the hell out of me, drama drama, hello, let us make the beast with two backs! Let us do it like the madness!

Then, what’s worse, they separate for a time, and then, for some undeveloped reason he takes her to dinner, whereupon he tells her he can’t be seen with her. Her reaction: she’s going to order something deliciously expensive on his tab (I’m down with that) and… change the subject entirely to get him all turned on so he can’t resist her. She punctuates her effort by sticking her foot in his crotch and threatening to go under the table and hoover down his traitorous wang.

Sadly, a good number of the Amazon reviewers are unable to see past the erotica elements to evaluate the plot, so I couldn’t point to anyone else who agreed with me here. Anyone who posted a bad review said it was porn and porn is bad, so of course I give their opinion about as much weight as a cold fart. But the good reviews went on about the fantasy of this world of demons existing alongside humans and I could not get into it.

To be brutally honest, it reminded me of the movie “Underworld,” which Hubby and I call “Underwear.” Vampires hunting demons? Whoo! Hot interspecies love between undead death hunter and hot sexy man-wolf? Whoo! Actual movie? BLEU DONKEY KOCK. Oh, it was awful. It had such potential and was beyond boring. And the sexual tension between the protagonists was so underdeveloped and flat that when the time came for them to get their kissy kiss face on, the entire audience groaned. A hundred people collectively groaned, having realized that this movie sucked.

The Demon’s Daughter had the same amount of erotic tension between the protagonists - that is, none that I could discern. Further, the areas of exploration that I thought were obvious - what does it mean that she’s a demon’s daughter? What can she do with that? And what does it mean for him whether people think poorly of him for his implants and think worse of him for being seen with her? - were left in favor of plot developments I couldn’t bring myself to care about. There are all these alleged forces working against two people who already live on the fringe of acceptable society, and yet he cares desperately about his own reputation enough to insult her to her face about whether he can be seen with her, even while he himself is desperate to be with her. This man is not worthy of her, super human strength or not.

She’s a remarkable balance of fragility and strength, and I was intrigued by her character, but I was so bothered by the scene where he announces his inability to be associated with the likes of her that I closed the book.

And this, dear reader, is where I stopped reading. So this will be where my review ends as well.