by Candy • Saturday, February 05, 2005 at 02:27 PM
Sarah: Jay-SUS H. CHRIIIST. I am DYING here. Oh my GOD that cover is AWFUL! The kneeling, the phallic thingys in the background, the expression on his face ("Oh, darling, I’m sorry I’m gay.” “No! No! Let me prove that you are not!"). Oh my GOSH I am convulsing.
How on earth did this get published? I know there’s some question as to whether readers of romance identify with the heroine, the hero, or both, but who is going to identify with either one of the people in this picture? Is anyone going to identify with the disinterested hero who looks utterly unimpressed with a heroine who is, by my estimate, three inches from giving the almighty hummuna humma? And further, why is she so desperate to get into this guy’s pants?
I personally rarely look at the images because they are so often incorrect when you read the actual descriptions of the characters, but geez. I can’t even look at the background and ignore the people, because the artist put these big huge phallic planters in the background, just in case I forget that the underlying message of this and all romantic fiction is erections. It’s all about male erections!
Sheesh.
Candy: Guy: “I don’t know, doctor, it started out as a sore on my leg, and before I knew it, it was sprouting a nice set of knockers.” Girl: “Please, you HAVE to share your Aquanet with me. You don’t understand! If my hair collapses the incredible mass will create a black hole, the likes of which will ultimately destroy the earth!”
This is definitely a case of “When Bad Covers Happen to Good People.” The book received Desert Isle Keeper status at All About Romance, though personally I’d give it a C+/B-. But the cover is an F. Hell, an F-. When I picked it up to read late last year, The Very Tall Husband, who has looked at my collection of be-Fabio’d Laura Kinsale novels with nary a flinch (OK, he flinched a little), took one look at that book and said “Oh geeeez.”
And of course, the models look nothing like the characters in the novel. Charles de Montforte is supposed to be blond and beautiful. The dude on the cover looks blond and kind of like Brad Pitt’s ugly second cousin. Amy Leighton is supposed to a gorgeous, half-Indian ingenue. The woman on the cover is about as Indian as I am, and given the hair, the boobage and the pose, she looks like the type who specializes in twirling around the center-stage pole at Starz Club for Men. Go ahead and read this book, it’s pretty fun, but if you’re taking it out in public please employ a fabric book cover to save the sanity and eyeballs of those around you.
by Candy • Friday, February 04, 2005 at 07:49 AM
Holy shit! I’m so excited: Ruth Wind (real name: Barbara Samuel) has a new book coming out in April. It’s called Countdown, and it is part of the Athena Force Bombshell series by Silhouette. Sounds cheesy as hell, but who cares, Barbara Samuel is back to writing romance, wheeee! I have two of her “women’s fiction” books on my TBR shelves, but I’m not a big women’s fiction fan, so they’ve been glaring at me accusingly for over a year now.
Between this and knowing that Mr. Impossible is coming out in less than a month, I’m a happy little camper.
Also: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME.
by Candy • Thursday, February 03, 2005 at 01:25 PM
More conversations on what drives us batty about romance novels:
Sarah: I am in the middle of glomming all the Balogh and Putney backlist I can get from Booksfree.
Candy: Good luck with the glom. I personally can’t read too many Putneys in a row, though when spaced apart she’s usually quite reliably good. Her Fallen Angels series is especially entertaining, but when they stage group get-togethers in the later novels and you see the massive conglomeration of gorgeous, wonderful people who have found other gorgeous, wonderful people to spend forever with, it gets a bit much.
Sarah: Oh my GOD yes, when the gorgeous and well-matched love couples collect in one place, it is a bit over the top. I mean, for an era of arranged matches, where are all these love matches coming from? I’d love to see a series written about a deb who enters after a Putney/Balogh/Quinn/Kleypas season where every freaking girl made a love match, and how on earth do you compete with that?!
The worst is the Quinn Bridgerton family. I love the family dynamic and I love that she has characters who behave like real siblings and aren’t just caricatures meant to drive the plot as the “jealous brother” or the “harpy sister” but gosh, get the whole clan in a novel together and you want to hurl from the full-sugar-Kool-Aid sweetness.
Candy: Yes, it’s one thing to suspend disbelief for novels that you read separately, but then to pack the results of several novels in a small space is totally gag-a-riffic. Also, when I look at all the couples and realize the extremely wacky circumstances they were involved in when they met (this ESPECIALLY applies to the Fallen Angels series, and any other series involving a group of friends who are also spies or crimefighters or whatever) I’m, like, “Doesn’t anyone fall in love with somebody introduced by a mutual friend any more?” Jesus.
The Karen Ranney series I’m reading right now, The Highland Lords (gag me with a spoon, that’s such a horrible series title) is actually somewhat refreshing because the first two books had high drama, but the third just has one of the MacRae brothers falling in love with a woman who happens to be engaged. The book was kind of padded out unnecessarily (I mean, I figured out the solution about 200 pages before it finally occurred to the main characters), but after reading two convoluted stories that involved high drama and protagonists who initially hated each other, I thought a quiet story about two genuinely nice, honorable people falling in love was a nice break.
Sarah: I totally agree with the group recollecting of past heroes and heroines - what really bugs me is that they are so wishy washy! Even if they were hell on wheels in their own stories, once they are settled into domesticated, loving wedded bliss, they are BORING. I mean, I understand not wanting a past character to overshadow your new heroine, especially if the past character was just better all around, but still, there’s no way that some of these hell raising women are now genteel images of perfection for crying out loud.
by Candy • Wednesday, February 02, 2005 at 10:34 PM
I was listening to Oh, Inverted World today after taking a break for a couple of months, and I was reminded of how much I like “Girl Inform Me” and how I’ve always thought it would make a really neat love story. James Mercer, the lead singer of The Shins and dude responsible for much of the songwriting, writes some very pretty poetry. Witness:
Girl, inform me
All my senses warn me your
Clever eyes could easily disguise
Some backwards purpose
It’s enough to make me nervous
D’you harbor sighs, or spit in my eye?
But your lips when we speak
Are the valleys and peaks
Of a mountain range on fire
So let me walk these coals till you believe
I can cut the mustard well enough
Cause you know as soon as breathe we scrutinize
I would sooo hump Mercer in a heartbeat. But then I have a soft spot for those skinny, geeky artfag boys.
by SB Sarah • Tuesday, February 01, 2005 at 06:39 PM
Our Grade:
Title: Dearly Beloved
Author: Mary Jo Putney
Publication Info: Signet (copyright Mary Jo Putney, 1990) 2004, ISBN: 045120851X
Genre: Historical: European
Usually by the time I get two-thirds of the way through a book, I’m churning through it, desperate to see how it ends. With this one, I am having a hard time finding the energy with which to give a crap. I mean, how many repetitive misunderstandings and angsty moments can you have in one novel?
If you’re Mary Jo Putney and you’re writing “Dearly Beloved,” there’s no such thing as too many.
I have lost my patience with this book. It’s like the same conversations between the characters, with Ominous Foreshadowing.
He: You are a ho! I cannot trust you!
She: I am a noble ho! You can trust me because I looooove you! But I have secrets I cannot share with you!
He: You are a ho! You love me! Yet you have secrets! And so do I but that’s different! And I should be emotionally healed but I am not! I still don’t trust you!
She: Let’s have lots of sex!
He: Yes! Let’s!
She: There is a man! He is scary!
He: I am a spy! After the same man!
Narrator: And she wished she had told him of her past, but she would live to regret bitterly that she had not shared her secrets with him, because they rose up and bit her square on her ass!
Candy tells me this is one of her most famous and widely considered to be her best, but I am not in accord with that assessment. The hero is tortured and scarred, and throught the storyline he’s emotionally healed by her luuuuuuve. Usually I’m a sucker for that, but woo damn, her eternal perfection and serene courtesan routine is starting to bother me.
The story opens with a violent, drunken rape scene between the hero and a young woman, and seriously, I almost tossed the book back in the BooksFree bag and sent it back unread. Yet I knew this book was supposed to be so highly rated that I had to at least try to finish it. I do have to say, if rape scenes are not your thing, you won’t get past page 25 of this book.
The heroine, Diana Lindsay, is a calm and collected country mother, raising her son with another woman, Edith, when they come upon a woman, Madeline, sick and dying in the snow. The miracle of country living cures her, and slowly she reveals that she is a courtesan who fled London after falling in love with her protector. Diana, whose past, including how she came to be living as a single mother in the countryside, remains a complete mystery, asks Madeline to teach her to be a courtesan, knowing on some personally metaphysical level that This Is Her Destiny.
When she arrives at her first Cyprian’s ball, Diana sees the hero, Gervase, Lord St. Aubyn, across the room, and they immediately begin a long, hot and sweaty affair born out of mutual white hot attraction. I don’t think I can reveal much more than that without spoiling the book, but the questions of St. Aubyn’s rape of a young woman, the father of Diana’s son, how Diana came to live on her own in the country, and why on earth she thought being a ho was her destiny are revealed as the book progresses.
It seems to me that Putney takes too many conventions of romance, such as the virginal heroine or the tortured hero, turns them over, then shuffles them together to make you think it’s original. To me, Dearly Beloved reads like a runaway train. I want to stage an intervention with the characters:
Lookee here, Hero: Shut up, listen, and get the hell over yourself.
And you, too, Heroine: You are not perfect. Do something stupid, fart, burp, get mad, raise your voice, get mad in the face of the hero being an assmonkey. But for GOD’S sake quit realizing you’ll regret not speaking up. Fool.
The problem is, subverted conventions are great- but only if they actually develop as characters, and don’t spin their wheels in the mud of their own habits. The hero says he’s realized his emotional paralysis, then goes right back to the same behavior of distrust and accusations. He constantly doubts the heroine without her giving reason to do so, and then excuses his own conduct when those same accusations lead to her to do something he doesn’t like. It’s all her fault - everything, her fault. His emotional wounds: the fault of women, and she’s a woman so lay that at her doorstep. His inability to love and be loved? Caused by his upbringing, and one of his parents was a woman, so see above. This would be bearable if she stood up every once in awhile and told him he was being an asshat, but she just takes it, and remains serene in the face of his derision and nastiness. Only at the very end does she lose her shit with him, and as the reader, I was all, “Thank GOD.” Remaining calm to try to throw off balance someone who is angry can be effective, but after awhile her behavior started to come across to me as manipulative.
Neither of them is a prize, if you ask me. Usually I can read to the end of a novel based on my interest in one of the two protagonists, if the other is something of a butt. But in this case I was disinterested in both of them equally, and repulsed by the end, even. The hero’s temper and the heroine’s serenity just get old after awhile. And no one is that perfect all the freaking time.
Case in point, the following conversation between the hero’s brother, who is confiding in the heroine while the hero is off risking life and limb on some mission.
Heroine: “Why did you choose to talk to me? You hardly know me.”
Hero’s brother: “Because it is a convenient plot device!”
Just kidding.
Hero’s brother: “...you remind me of a Madonna, all warmth and understanding.”
And that is pretty much all you need to know about the heroine. As I said, I’m a sucker for stories in which the hero is rescued from emotional torment by the love and guidance of a caring partner. But I also demand that the heroine realize something about herself, as well. She also must learn, or grow, or change, or develop in a traceable fashion that makes her character worth knowing for 350+ pages.
In “Dearly Beloved,” the hero progresses from someone I would dearly love to bean with a tire iron to someone who I’d dearly love to smack around with a frozen salmon. The heroine starts irritating and ends irritating. And the course of the story is angsty and repetitive, and irritating as all get out. There’s no end to the unpleasant subject matter, and any taboos or things that might potentially make you go squick are probably in the plotline somewhere.
I realize that there is a loving following behind this book of readers who adored it, so I am hesitant to throw my own review in their faces, but I have to say, I did not enjoy this book. Too much angst, too much drama, to much anger, and no resolution that effectively and sufficiently diffused all that negativity. It’s one thing for the hero to be a butthead and then say, “I’m sorry.” It’s another entirely for the hero to spend an entire novel being a butthead and then have him deliver words of purple-flowered love and adoration at the end. The latter scenario does not entirely relieve the bitter taste in my mouth.
However, this won’t turn me off of Putney forever. I’m moving on to Angel Rogue, which my partner in crime Candy assures me is a wonderful novel.
