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

I love the word “untoward”—it even *sounds* uncomfortably inappropriate.

WTF? I read this book *years* ago. I can’t be more than fourteen at the time, which it was written ... *thinking* ... twenty years ago? Why on earth did they choose THIS title? Did they offer an [preferably, rational] explanation?

I could be wrong here, but hasn’t Penny Jordan been writing for Harlequin for 30 years? I usually avoid romance books from authors that have been writing this long, they tend to be...tired and cookie cutter.  Only for SB would I date myself like this.

Oh man, that makes me feel so nostalgic! It’s just like the creepy Harlequins I read when I was 12. Ah, the crap old days…

Better you than me, is about all I can say about that book. Wow, Penny Jordan, brings back memories.

I’m still stunned by the mere idea of manga romance . . . who thought this up? Does someone out there honestly believe that there was a crying need for Greek tycoon/amnesiac bride manga? Who the fuck do they think the target audience for this is? I can vaguely see a manga version of some of the paranormal romances out there, but as the only people on earth who would read “manga romance” also happen to be teenaged juku girls, the odds of them reading Response is pretty much ZERO.

Now I must explore this . . .

I thought the manga-romance marketing was a good idea for Harlequin, with all of the reports of the aging of their market and inroads on their market by other publishers.  All of the pre-teen and teens I know (not a huge list) consume manga voraciously.  Put a romance novel in a format they’ll read, and hook a romance reader for life?  Maybe it’ll work. 

I was entertained by the idea of pink and purple covers, and by the “suitable for ages 12+” on the cover.  Age “ratings” for books now?  But oh. my. god.  I read one (Holding Alex by Margaret Way).  After gagging on the cliches and the treacly-sweet ending, I marched back to the bookstore and demanded my money back.  But the store doesn’t accept returns for manga - because it is so easily and quickly read and the return policy had been abused by unnamed buyers, resulting in a store policy.  I was not a happy camper.  I didn’t want to return it because I wanted to cheat them, I wanted to return it because it was crap.  I’d’ve been happy with store credit to spend on a non-crappy book, or even just a less heinous one.  Whatever.  But I digress.  Back to the romance-manga:  the story was at least 20 years old, creepy and crappy and sexist (the hero is pissed because the heroine leaves the ranch to go be a ballerina; in the end, she gives up a promising career for lurve).  If I was a teen reading that crap, I’d write off romance forever.

>>even though she can’t remember who she is, though she seems to remember she likes the cock well enough.<<

PAH-hahahahah! I am TOTALLY going to use that in a book proposal someday. Hot DAMN, that was funny.

Okay, I admit I don’t know much about magna or japanese graphic art in general, but wouldn’t this idea be much better if it was that totally pervy x-rated anime stuff? I’d so read an early Thea Devine magna book. :cheese: Oh, yeah.

Is it demented of me that I prefer when you guys hate a book? Do I like snark too much?

I enjoy a review that contains the phrase “cock party ahoy!”

What’s hard for me to believe is that someone at Dark Horse didn’t take one look at that 1984 copyright date and say, “WTF? Don’t you have something newer?”

What is manga? 

Sam...forever not hip/out of it…

I’d have a pissed-off cat AND a shitty book that’s no less shitty for having hit the wall.

Likely your cat would have gotten amnesia from the book hitting its head.

Good gods, I have nostalgia now for the older Harl. Presents that I cut me teeth on in bagfuls!

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.
I would have appreciated a beverage alert here (she says wiping keyboard).
How appropriate! The word key is medical 84

What?  No secret baby?

Darlene said: What?  No secret baby?

LOL! I think that trend really started to heat up in the 1990’s, but I could be wrong.

The hero who hatches an “I’ll fuck her as revenge” plot is damn near impossible to redeem, IMO. I seem to recall more than one PJ book that features a hero like that, and I just don’t get the appeal. It’s psycho, to me.

Not sure why, but I went to the amazon page to look at the cover in a larger graphic. Read the page, saw the links to some other books in the manga/Harlequin line.

Betty Neels. In manga. I really, really cannot get my head around that.

My brain keeps sending back an error message.

Not to mention my amazement at Harlequin’s choices for this line. The Neels I looked at was copyright 1993, but I was reading Neels when I was a kid, back in the 70s. Are they aiming for a market of sweet Japanese girls? Because my (not necessarily right-in-touch) impression of the manga market here in Oz, and presumably similar in the US, was that it gravitates across from the not-so-sweet market for comics, anime and computer games.

Somehow I picture the major market for Neels as having more gray hair than that.

Honestly, this kind of thing is par for the course in some very bad shoujo manga (ie. manga aimed at girls). Believe me, shoujo manga readers have read worse.

I’m not much of a romance reader outside of reading shoujo (although SB has gotten me into some more traditional romance writing), but I kind of like the idea of Western romances put in the manga style. I might want to check this line out sometime, even if this story doesn’t sound all that great to me.

>>I’d so read an early Thea Devine magna book. <<

Or “manga”. Goddamn it.

And my word is “perform59” which should clearly be “perform69”. Duh.

She remembers she likes the cock, but nothing else.

What if she forgot that too, and started batting for the other team? Then she could “get her memory back” after she has a major orgasm with her new girlfriend and have a major “Wah, I’m so confused and TSTL” moment.

[...] the Betty Neels manga [...]

*...*

This is the end of the world as we know it and I certainly don’t feel fine. Please tell me you two are jesting? Please?

Maili, dahlink, you know I’d never lie to you.

Behold, the next book I’m reviewing!

WTF? what the hell were they thinking. I mean I like manga well enough and love romance, but at no point did I think they should get into bed together and produce deformed rabbits. Just good friends would have been safer for the whole world I think.

And Penny Jordan?? what where they thinking? I found her disturbing and sexist at 16 when I had no idea. Now it doesn’t even bare thinking about. i mean her hero’s make neanerthals look evolved!!

really, It’s things like this that ruin my faith in human intelligence.

It was probably cheaper to use older books.  Besides, all romances are the same--didn’t you know? 

[tongue firmly in cheek, in case it wasn’t obvious]

Very cool idea, poorly executed.  *sigh*

I think that if you’re going to break into a medium (like Manga) you need to respect it.

We have a line of Yaoi/Shounen-ai novels. When one of my people came to me with the suggestion, the first thing I did was research the medium, and learn the difference between regular m/m and Yaoi. We signed an anime artist to draw the cover art, even.

This trend of “Let’s come up with our own line of anime-style stuff and attempt to cash in on a market without showing the slightest bit of respect for it” is a tad disturbing.

I took a beating on the forums until I made it clear I was doing things the right way. This is not a market that forgives.

Just my opinion.

Not the smartest idea.  At least Candy Candy was cute and entirely Japanese.

School Library Journal reviewer said:

Romance novels and manga may at first seem incongruous, but there are actually many similarities. Scarcely believable plots, star-crossed lovers, sweet-natured heroines, and distant heroes are found frequently in both.

I think it’s disturbing that Harlequin is releasing its old stories.  They’re so dated.

Harlequin should hire CLAMP to write an original manga romance!  (Or get their writers to create something like X - 1999 which is fantastically dark, urban fantasy-like, bloody, and just kicks ass.)

What if she forgot that too, and started batting for the other team? Then she could “get her memory back” after she has a major orgasm with her new girlfriend and have a major “Wah, I’m so confused and TSTL” moment.
Yes, yes, yes! Please write it!

There are so many hungry, good writers out there who would be all over writing manga romances… why redo the old ones? 

But, I have to say, the melodrama of these old stories does fit in with some of the manga lines I’ve read. :)

I’ve seen Betty Neals manga at Borders, and I thought...why?  Why not Bombshell manga or Nocturne manga or even SIM manga.

But no…

Hey, don’t knock tofurkey ‘til you’ve tried it!

OK, I admit it--I’m a vegetarian and I’ve never had the guts to try tofurkey.  And I certainly don’t have the guts to try romance manga, especially not after this review.

Disturbing. Although I’m glad someone thought up this bizarre idea, because now we get the snarky reviews!

Actually I’m posting purely to pick up the dropped italic tag:

Aaaah.

dammit! it didn’t work! We’re doomed to italics forever!

Maili, dahlink, you know I’d never lie to you. Behold, the next book I’m reviewing!

Oh, God ...

*quietly stabs self with a broken pencil*

LOL, I had a friend who wrote a “secret angel baby with amnesia on a ranch story...” An early effort and not published, not snarky, but full of humor…

Robin

I had a friend who wrote a “secret angel baby with amnesia on a ranch story...”

A baby with amnesia?  How could they tell?  *g* All you need is to throw in a marriage of convenience, and you’ve got all the bases covered.

Ahem, the baby was the angel in disguise and he knew he was an angel, just didn’t know what his powers were, why he was a baby or what he was doing on a ranch in Alaska…

Robin

The reason the Ginger Blossom manga line is based on old Harlequins is that these are English translations of manga produced in Japan since 1998.  There have been over 250 Harlequin-based mangas in Japan.

Just to address the dated thing:

Y’all know it was probably cheaper to re-release very old stuff than to sign new people to write, right?  Just in terms of rights that Harlequin probably already owns/owned and the pull on the author of ‘well, there’s no OTHER way I’d make any money off that book so I’ll take a crap royalty arrangment.’ Also, the editing of the text is large done (I’m guessing that they just cut a lot description and left the dialogue which was already edited from publication).

Now, I’m not saying that this is the *Best* plan for HQ, but it does seem to be the least costly for a dipping toes in water investment.

Or Jennifer knows more than me.  =)

Dear CLOD… as an avid manga fan who was initiated via the shoujo genre… I am apalled. Real romance novels came later, and now I read both. Manga has its own… quirks… and so do American Romances…

The twain were NEVER, EVER meant to meet this way!!!

When manga was picking up steam in this country (When -I- was a preteen) we begged for more stuff of any kind. By the time I was 16 they were making a meal of the boy-oriented things like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z (GAWD only knows why that’s popular). So we yearned for more shoujo lovey stuff.

But not like this-!!!

Fact: You can get away with some WEIRDASS SHIT in Japan. They were idiots to think the same things from A: older authors, B: older stories, C: written in English, configured for Japan then brought BACK to English… would work.

Why can’t they get some chicklit chicks to write some fun, peppy stuff for the girls like me who are no longer preteens and now demand some meat in their manga?

I’ve never read a manga and don’t intend to but what I don’t understand is all the criticism of Penny Jordan. All I can say is that if a woman has more than 170 books published, she must have something that readers want! What’s more, she has consistently high sales so I really don’t think your general criticism of her as an author is warranted. And although I agree that her heroes aren’t the kind of guys I’d feel in the least attracted to, they’re the kind of guys her fans want to read about so who can blame her for giving them to them?

How do you define ‘taste’? Isn’t that subjective?