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

The premise of the book sounded like so much fun that I’m sad it didn’t turn out better. Caitlyn James is a hairdresser who owns her own salon. While out on a wild night of partying with some of her sorority sisters, a car accident renders her less-than-alive. A secret gub’mint agency decides that her body is salvageable, however, and re-engineers her into a bionic woman. The trouble is, since this was all done without her consent, Caitlyn doesn’t figure she owes anyone anything, and is especially unwilling once she meets The Boss, a creepy eyebrowless wonder who will stoop to nothing when it comes to national security.

Then somebody starts whacking the members of the team of scientists who created the cyborg technology, and Caitlyn reluctantly agrees to work on the case. The prime suspect is Dmitri Novakov, a Lithuanian cyborg gone rogue. Problem number 1: He’s hot. Problem number 2: He thinks she’s the one killing all the scientists.

Think this might provide pages upon pages of interesting conflict and action-packed adventure? Yeah, dream on, kid. This mystery is solved so fast that it’s rivalled only by how fast Caitlyn and Dmitri hop into bed and fall in love, but then everything that happens in this book does so at super speed, since it’s only 195 pages. 195 pages of large print, at that. And of those 195 pages, there are as many scenes of Betsy—oops, Caitlyn—burning out exercise equipment with her bionic strength and speed as there are of her kicking bad guy ass.

Aside from an obsession with hair instead of shoes (and since Caitlyn’s big thing is hair, I don’t know WHY the cover’s tag-line says “Saving the world—one Manolo Blahnik at a time…” unless it’s to associate this character even more closely with Betsy), Caitlyn is basically Betsy from the Undead series. OK, Davidson keeps noting that unlike Betsy, Caitlyn was a straight-A student, but given the way Caitlyn acts and the way she talks, I think the people in her fictional world should find which university gave her all those As and start lobbying to have its accreditation yanked. And when I say Caitlyn talks like a stupid person, I certainly don’t mean Caitlyn’s predilection for bad words; I mean she just plain sounds dumb. She stumbles over perfectly ordinary words that a bright 6th grader has no trouble with. Seriously, at one point in the book she has problems pronouncing “enmity.” What in the everlasting fuck? Three syllables, all easily pronounced and more-or-less phonetic (what a rarity in English!) with the root word quite clearly being “enemy.” It’s not as if the word were a mouthful like, say, “prestidigitation.” So the author takes care to say over and over that Caitlyn’s smart, as do all the secondary characters, but what Davidson shows over and over is a bimbo who has trouble with problem-solving, task accomplishment and multisyllabic words.

The hero is pretty much a cipher. His history is fascinating, because he’s turned into a cyborg against his will much in the way Caitlyn was, and at one point he turned rogue. Do we get any of that juicy backstory? Like hell we do. Instead we get another scene featuring Caitlyn dishing on and on and ON about whatever with Stacy, her best friend. In fact, most of the book is from Caitlyn’s viewpoint, and when we switch to Dmitri’s, all we get is that he thinks she’s hot and smart and funny, a conclusion he comes to after exchanging all of 10 sentences with her. I’m not kidding when I say there are more scenes from The Boss’s point of view than Dmitri’s. What does that say about a romance novel?

When it comes down to it, the book isn’t too bad a read; it’s certainly fast and funny, though completely unmemorable. I had to dock it a few points though, because Davidson is now parodying herself, and worse, doing it poorly. If you’re a MaryJanice junkie, I highly recommend that you check this out from the library before shelling out $14.00 for this extremely slim volume that’s basically a re-tread of her vampire books in cyborg guise.