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

Authors who deserve an unending supply of expensive chocolate and awesome oral sex from the beautiful hardbody of their choice:

• Laura Kinsale: I love her.  Every single book of Kinsale’s except The Dream Hunter have received As from me. And it’s not as if The Dream Hunter is a bad book; I’d give it a B. If I had to marry a book instead of a person, I think The Shadow and The Star might be it, though it’d have to fight a duel with Laura London’s The Windflower to win my hand. And even then I’d occasionally run off and have a hot love affair with Midsummer Moon. OK, I’ll stop before I sound like a really creepy lesbian book stalker. (Hey, wasn’t that a villain in one of Linda Howard’s books?)
• Loretta Chase: Another author with a near-perfect streak (the one book I didn’t like, The Last Hellion, I actually dislike quite a bit). I reviewed Viscount Vagabond for AAR a few years back and gave it a B+, but I re-read it recently and it’s been elevated to A-. Her witty dialogue and the way her heroes are completely flummoxed by their love for their heroines are nothing short of adorable. And I mean that as in “worthy of adoration,” not “reminds me of those completely terrifying Hummel figurines of little kids playing the pan flute to some random barnyard animals.” And come to think of it, Lord of Scoundrels and The Lion’s Daughter will have to fight for my hand in marriage, too.
• Jennifer Crusie: I will buy her books as soon as they come out. In hardcover. Because she’s worth the $24.95, almost every time. The only books I was disappointed with were Welcome to Temptation and Faking It. I don’t know what it is about those Dempseys, but they just don’t quite do it for me.
• Sharon and Tom Curtis, a.k.a. Laura London, a.k.a. Robin James: The Windflower. The Golden Touch. Lightning That Lingers. Sunshine and Shadow. GODDAMN I love these books even though I can practically smell the polyester pantsuits and feel the feathered bangs against my brow in the contemporaries. But The Windflower? I had the most heinous case of stomach flu when I was 18 and ended up staying at the hospital for three days, and re-reading that book, especially the parts involving Cat and Raven--if I ever delve into fanfic writing, I’d write love stories for those two boys--pulled me through some of the most godawful experiences. (I kept throwing up the fever reducers, and for whatever retarded reason they couldn’t administer the stuff parenterally, so they had to use Another Orifice Entirely to get the meds in me, if you know what I mean.)
• Patricia Gaffney: Why hast thou forsaken romance novel-dom, Pat? Your women’s fiction books are good, but I re-read To Love and To Cherish, Sweet Everlasting and Wild At Heart constantly and mourn our loss. Wild at Heart in particular fulfilled all my girlish fantasies about a grown-up Mowgli. And dude, you totally created the sexiest, sweetest pastor ever in Christy Morrell. But please don’t write any more funnies. Crooked Hearts and Outlaw in Paradise were mediocre at best. And really, all your books, even the really dark ones like To Have and To Hold were funny--laugh-out-loud funny, in fact--in certain spots; you seem to do witty dialogues and humorous vignettes much better than a whole bookful of funny.
• Shana Abe: I think she’s one of the most underrated authors out there. Her writing is lyrical without being soggy, and she consistently creates love stories between adversaries that work for me--I normally hate those books because they’re all “I love you! I hate you! Let’s have crazy monkey sex! OK, back to loving you! No, hating you!” Abe doesn’t fall into this trap, and makes the conflict believable.
• Barbara Samuel a.k.a. Ruth Wind: For Lucien’s Fall and Bed of Spices alone she deserves the chocolate and the oral sex. Her writing style is something other romance novel authors should study: so beautiful and poetic, yet clean and unflinching. For a while there I thought she’d gone the way of the Gaffney, but it seems like she’s writing romance novels again, so yay!

Authors Who Are Really Good, But Also Really Uneven:

• Lisa Kleypas: OK, her books starting from Give Me Tonight and running through Prince of Dreams were pretty much pure gold. Only With Your Love in particular boggled my mind. An evil twin boinks (and eventually wins over) his dead good twin’s widow? Holy shit! That’s hot! And Dreaming of You completely broke the mainstream mold of historicals by having a hero who’s obviously lower-class and has absolutely no taste or refinement. At the risk of sounding like Nicole Richie again: That’s hot! And then Somewhere I’ll Find You was published. Snooooooooze. Because You’re Mine? Double snoooooooooooze. After that her books have run through a crap-great-crap-great cycle. Worth Any Price? Crap. Where Dreams Begin? Solid gold, even if in some ways it’s kind of a rehash of Dreaming of You. The last several books she’s written (Lady Sophia’s Lover, Suddenly You, Again the Magic) have been nothing to shout about; in fact, I think they’re poorly-written in a number of ways, yet I enjoyed them anyway and they’re on my keeper shelves. No other author has this effect on me.
• Judith McNaught: Judith turned me to The Dark Side. If not for her, I would’ve happily avoided the romance novel section of the bookstore like the plague lest its bodice-ripping cooties rub off on me. Then I picked up Something Wonderful when I was 16, and ended up staying up all night to read it instead of studying for midterms. I began to glom everything she’d ever written, but discovered that in all, she wrote only four books I loved. Everything since then has been, well, drekkish. Whitney My Love was so bad, it made me angry. And you won’t like me when I’m angry. *turns green, grows biceps and starts tossing bookshelves around* GRAAAAAAAR.
• Teresa Medeiros: Once an Angel and Thief of Hearts were so very, very good--they were funny, sexy and touching without being cloying. Everything else I’ve read by her has been a bit on the cloying side (could she have used the words “beguiled” and “beguiling” more often?), but for years I bought her books automatically in the hopes she’d repeat what she achieved with those two books. No dice, though Nobody’s Darling came pretty close.
• Anne Stuart: Anyone else read Shadow Dance? Anyone else find Valerian’s cross-dressing and his surreptitious courtship of the young, beautiful, impressionable Sophie, ummmmmm, very stimulating? Because I did. Damn. And the category romances she’s written for Harlequin very rarely disappoint. Her single titles aren’t quite as reliably good (the historicals she wrote for Zebra have been nothing to shout about), but I keep buying them when I see ‘em anyway.
• Jo Beverley: The first book I read by her was My Lady Notorious, and I loved it loved it loved it. I loved that Cyn was slim and pretty (at that point in time I’d overdosed on tall, hulking muscular heroes, and to tell you the truth, give me slim and pretty any day over bulky and rugged). I loved that he looked through Chastity’s disguise right away. I loved the Georgian setting, which was a nice break from all the Regencies. But nothing Beverley has written since then can even come close to this book, not even the other Malloren novels.
• Karen Ranney: Ranney has a very distinct writing style that, when it works, it WORKS. It drags you in and doesn’t let you go until 4 a.m. and you realize you have to be up in about 3 hours to get ready for work. When it doesn’t work, it slows everything down and sends you right to sleepyland when it’s not making you tense with frustration because you want the story to MOVE ON, ALREADY. Upon a Wicked Time and My Beloved are two love stories that had the former effect on me; everything else has ranged from unreadable (Above All Others) to passably good (the Highland Lords series).

Authors Whom I Like, but Don’t Love:

• Mary Jo Putney
• Judith Ivory
• Shelly Thacker
• Mary Balogh

An Author I Like, but Really Know I Shouldn’t:

• Dara Joy. Good god, what a guilty pleasure. Her plots often make no sense or have holes so large, so gaping that they make Paris Hilton’s… never mind. Her sex scenes border on purple. And really, could she create any more really, really annoying heroines? Yet I can’t help myself. I love her books. They’re fun, and sexy, and a great way to help me forget whatever bullshit is going on in my life.

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