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

The setting and concept are pretty cool, and not something I’ve encountered in literature before. The story takes place in an alternate reality which lacks all color. That’s right: it’s all shades of grey in this here joint. It wasn’t always like this; apparently all the color deities, the Tilirr, fled the world and took all color with them when the last king, Alliran Monteyn, was placed into Snow White-style stasis. At least, I think this was when the world lost its color—the book is long, y’all, and I fell asleep many, many, many times while reading it.

What’s interesting is that while reading the book, I kept assigning color values to the landscape and the characters without any prompting; it wasn’t until I was well into the book that I started viewing the scenes in black and white on any consistent basis. I really liked this aspect the book, mostly because I like books that mess with my head and make me re-think perceptions and expectations.

The story opens when Our Intrepid Heroine, Ranheas Ylir, stumbles upon an what seems to be an assassination attempt on some aristocrats travelling in a coach. Since she’s a mercenary who holds dual PhDs in Asskickology and Bad-Ass Mofonics, she wades into the fray and saves some nobleman (and noblewomen) ass.

The nobleman is Lord Elasand Vaeste, whose wig in the realm of bigwigs is very large indeed. Well, OK, he doesn’t wear a wig, he just has long black hair with a totally gay-ass white streak running through it, which just makes me think of bad anime hair, which then makes me think of bad anime eyes, so I ended up picturing Elasand as a character from cheesy-ass yaoi art.

Ahem. Back to the story. Anyway, there’s intrigue afoot and he’s off for some Hush-Hush Bigwig Meetings with the Regent, but since he’s all tricksy and shit, he’s using his cousin’s upcoming wedding as an excuse to go to the capital city and visit the Court. He tries to hire Ranheas because even though he’s tricksy, he’s also a dumbass and set off on the journey with no guards, just a driver whom the assassins turned into hamburger right away. Ranheas, however, blows him off. Why? ‘Cause she’s a free spirit, man. *beatnik snaps*

But their paths cross again at an inn down the road. And of course Ranheas finally signs on to be his bodyguard. And for no discernible reason at all, falls in love with Elasand.

At this point I’m smacking my head against the book, because I hatesssss it when a character falls in love for no discernible reason. I mean, literally, at this point, the chick has spoken, like, ten sentences to the guy. There are a couple of stories that manage pull off this sort of Instant Lurve without making me want to hit all the characters involved with a dead fish, but they are few and far between indeed. Most of the time, I don’t buy this sort of scenario.

When they arrive at the capital city, there’s more skullduggery ahoy, including another foiled assassination attempt and the presence of strange emissaries from Qurthe, a heretofore unknown country far to the south. The soldiers seem able to kill without touching anyone, and the leader of the emissaries, Lord Araht Vorn, is particularly menacing. Dude is Big, Bad and Black, mang. The pussy-ass Regent is in a panic, and there’s some ill-defined but vaguely ominous fuckery going on with the various Guilds in the city which is sending the His Wimpy Uselessness into a tailspin, too.

In the meanwhile, interspersed with the actual story are an excruciatingly detailed description of the city’s layout and a painful, Robert Altman-esque (I HATE ROBERT ALTMAN RAR) slice-of-life montage, as we are introduced to a dizzying array of characters who populate the city. The action isn’t slowed down so much as crunched thoroughly into a pulp and left for dead on the side of the highway. I persevered through all this deluge of words, hoping and hoping for a payoff and… nothing. Most of the characters introduced in this section of the book? You’ll get maybe a couple paragraphs about them later on. It all basically reads like a massive infodump, and I am not a big fan of infodumping unless it’s geeky science shit. Neal Stephenson gets a pass, but not many other authors do.

So yeah, the Court has been overrun with freaky-ass people who claim to be emissaries to the Lord of the Dark and the City of Twilight, invasion seems imminent, the Regent is useless, Ranheas meets the head of the Assassins’ Guild, Elassir, under intimate and embarrassing circumstances, Elasand figures out that they need to seek help from the Tilirr, Elassir, Elasand and Ranheas set off on a mini-quest, and Shit Finally Happens. Slowly, because it takes Ranheas almost a friggin’ page to move two steps since the narration is weighed down with so much descriptive prose and internal musing, but it happens. The ending, when it finally, finally arrives, is predictable—c’mon, there’s a handsome young king in stasis, and his death was associated with the loss of color in the world, so just take a guess as to what happens by the end of the book.

OK, bagging so much on the plot is kind of unfair. I’ve read and loved books in which not much at all happens, but the beauty of the prose carries it through. The Riders by Tim Winton, for example, is a quintessential example of this sort of book.

This book’s prose drove me apemonkey bonkers.

First of all, I have never seen such rampant italic abuse in a book. Every color noun is italicized, including the word “color.” This is a problem when color words are used with distressing frequency. The various noble houses have colors associated with them, for example, and the Light Guild is able to re-create monochrome colored lights. The names of the Tilirr (of which there are six, one for each color of the rainbow) are all italicized, too, as are the pronouns associated with them. The Tilirr make many, many appearances in the book, and every time they do, a regular orgy of italicized words ensues as every friggin’ variation and shade of color associated with the Tilirr shows up and jiggles its ass on the page. (No, not literally—I might’ve been able to work through this book faster if there had been more ass jigginess, but alas, that was not meant to be.)

Throw in the occasional italics used for emphasis, and I ended up reading this book with some really fucked-up diction. I elect William Shatner as the narrator for the audio book, because that’s who I heard in my head every time those damn italics showed up.

For what it’s worth, I get why the colors are italicized. I get the point, and I noticed when the italics were no longer being used. I just don’t think it was a particularly useful point to make, and its awkwardness far outweighed anything else.

And the dialogue… Egad, the dialogue. Let me give you an example of how people talk in this book:

“I feel sorry for it, Ma!” the little girl said suddenly. “Neither man nor woman—no matter how beautiful, I wouldn’t wanna be like tha’! And I’m scared, Ma! I’m scared of it!”

So that’s an example of what the unwashed masses sound like. Here’s the nobility, showing us how quick on their feet they are in a crisis:

“Master Marihke!” he spoke in a stumbling manner. “And the rest of you! Pardon me, but you must go look outside.”

“What is it?” responded Marihke.

But Ukrt’s eyes were terrified. “Look outside, Masters!” he was saying. “Come now, quickly, look outside at the sky!”

“Indeed!” said Elasand, coming out of his distracted state. “This is the reason I’ve come here in the first place. There is something unusual happening outside! Come, all of you!”

If it had been me, I would’ve trampled over Elasand and gone outside already, because woo damn, when there’s an emergency, I’m going to get my ass moving pronto instead of waiting for some aristo with bad anime hair to tell me to get my ass moving.

But then, I’m the same heathen who thinks J.R.R. Tolkien needed lessons in dialogue writing too, so take this peeve with a grain of salt.

By far the most distracting aspect of the prose was the rampant adjectivitis. I’d be the first to admit that I, too, suffer from adjectivitis, which is a subset of a larger syndrome known as Modifierosis Nervosa. But this book… Oof. Nary a noun goes unmodified. Adjectives are stacked wantonly atop one another, snuggling up against each other without so much as a comma to separate them. Check these two examples out:

In the center, a little toward the back wall, stood a raised stone altar, in the form a large simply hewn crude stone with a somewhat concave surface, round like a very shallow wide bowl.

(…) Ranhe, following him as asked, saw tears glistening in his pale lapis ancient young eyes.

These are the memorably bad ones, but I’m not kidding when I say that almost all the nouns in this book are modified, often with two or more adjectives. Really, Rebecca Brandewyne should get ahold of this book post-haste.

The book is also littered with verbal tics. The one that bugged me the most was the way so many sentences started with “For.” The “for” was largely unnecessary, and their proliferation became especially bad towards the end of the book, as if it was spawning season for them.

But I will say this much about the book: the heroine is very unusual. For one, she’s a vegetarian. Not something I’ve seen much in fiction, unless they’re bad hippie-dipshit caricatures. And for another thing, she’s allowed to be unattractive in a really unusual way. Minor spoiler: She has hair! Like, all over! Including her face! Dude, this chick needs to shave daily. Oh, and her feet stink. It takes courage and skill to create a heroine like Ranheas, and she really stood out.

Unfortunately, I found all the other characters kind of annoying or completely undeveloped. Elasand? I wanted to smack him. Elassir, the head of the Assassins’ Guild? Not quite as annoying, but I still wanted to smack him. And don’t even get me started on the other characters, like the Regent and this poet laureate who’s a minor character but who really got on my tits every time he appeared. It’s not a good sign when I end up rooting for the bad guy and fervently hoping everyone perishes in a big, bloody battle, then feel peevish when not as many of the so-called good guys died as I had hoped.

So, in summary: cool concept, and I really liked Ranheas’ asskickiness (well, aside from her inexplicable love for Elasand). The rest of the book? GAH.

Allyson has decided to leave the business headquarters to direct one of their subsidiaries in Seattle, and Lucas has to figure out how to confess his feelings without losing all sense of pride, since he has no idea how Allyson feels about him.

Meanwhile, Allyson is having a hard time keeping her eyes off Lucas, and is half pushing herself out to Seattle to get away from him, and away from her feelings for him.

This short story starts out with one of my favorite romantic situations: he’s hot for her but thinks she’s not interested, and she’s hot for him but won’t risk the humiliation if he doesn’t return her interest. Moreover, they work together, so they’re around each other in daily doses, but aside from the professional interaction, neither has any clue if they’re the only one with the irmy squirmy crotches where the other is concerned.

Because the story is a quick read, I’ll only give the setup of the plot, because to go any farther would give away too much. However, I did like it, and it went way too quick for my tastes; as I mentioned, I don’t penalize the author for that, though I wish that I’d had more time to get to know the characters, find out how Lucas came into possession of that there genie, and who the other owners are who financed the purchase of its lamp. I’d also like to spend a little more time inside Allyson’s head, because most of the story is from Lucas’ perspective, as he’s the one what has the genie, the magic snake in his trousers, and those three wishes.

When Lucas and Allyson do hook up - of course they do, it’s a romance! - woo damn. But there was only one issue I had there: both of them went from possibly-unreciprocated attraction to hot n’ heavy boardroom boinking with a lot of verbal confidence. I would expect more hesitation between them for their first (very hot!) love scene, but they jumped right into the dirty talk that I would have thought would require more trust between them to allow. With an unknown person it would seem unlikely that they’d use such terms, without first establishing trust in one another. Otherwise it doesn’t sound like an emotional entanglement; it sounds and reads more like hot carnal satisfaction with no background - although it does plenty to make it clear how fiery the attraction is between them.

One word about erotic romance and terminology: do pussies have to weep? Allyson’s wept twice in twenty pages and really, I wanted to get the poor woman a Stayfree. It’s a damn shame that there are so many ways to describe an erection, but so few to describe female arousal, especially in the tropical and emotional sense.

Elias does an admirable job of setting up a story wherein the hero was smart enough to wish for his dream woman, but not smart enough to ask for her guaranteed affections. It’s obviously better that he forgot, since any possible feelings on her part are due to her own attraction, not due to magical influence. The only magic at work around her was his third wish, which would not let her leave him unless he let her go.

Clearly she is meant for him, but aside from the choices of her own behavior, she’s not getting out of his sphere until he lets her go. So not only does Lucas have to own up to his own mistakes in his wishes, but he has to put on his big-boy pants (or, put them back on after tossing them on the floor) and earn his happy ending. And Lucas does so in an admirable, original way that allows Elias to guarantee for the reader that Lucas and Allyson’s HEA is due to their own decisions, and not to external influence, which in turn creates an emotionally and sexually satisfying romance in a convenient snack-sized portion.

Jolie starts out a poor mouse of a woman: she just got fired from her job at a real estate agency and is working the holiday season at Neiman Marcus’ shoe department as she tries to set up her own brokerage. Her boyfriend had disappeared, as has her car – a coincidence that the police put together and presented as a possible theft on the part of said runaway boyfriend – and she’s a brittle, unhappy mess at the start of her story. She ends up spending the first day of her new job waiting on her superficial and possibly dishonest old boss, and running into a multibillionaire with a stack of shoeboxes as she heads for the storeroom. The old boss is predictably horrid, but the multibillionaire is struck by Jolie’s… well, I’m not sure what strikes him about Jolie in the first place. Maybe one of those Manolo’s was a really heavy mofo and smacked him into an altered reality.

Because Jolie, she is alternately insipid, clueless, willfull and then terrified, and utterly, utterly gullible. It’s hard to identify with or cheer for a character who decides to find out what happened to dear old boyfriend but then scares the crap out of herself at every turn, yet does little to figure out how to protect herself better.

So much happens to this woman, and she reacts with such terror much of the time that you wonder why she doesn’t crumple up in the middle of the action. I was so fascinated by the setting and the premise that I kept waiting for Jolie to come busting out of that plain-Jane shell and start kicking ass, but no. She remains as she is described on page 18:

[The mall was] a far cry from her own sheltered upbringing. She had been an only child, a change-of-life baby, and her frugal parents had harbored rather old-fashioned notions of child-rearing. But even if she hadn’t worn the most fashionable clothes or obtained her driver’s license until she was 18, she could thank her parents for loving her and for giving her a good value system. (Bond 18)

What…? Huh? Oh, sorry. I fell asleep transcribing the wonder that is Jolie. Bond hammers the point home with multiple references to the mess Jolie is in and how little she fits in that mess, such as: “How had she, a normal, hardworking good girl become enmeshed in a murder investigation?” (Bond 82) She’s a walking virtue, this Jolie.

Then comes her introduction to Carlotta, a sales woman in Neiman’s couture section. Carlotta is a full-time employee who has cultivated the attitude to keep the customers with intentions to buy involved in securing her attention, while scaring away the ones who are just browsing well out of their price range. Bond goes out of her way to make Jolie unassuming, quiet, and pure-heartedly friendly; why would someone as sophisticated as Carlotta be her friend? Carlotta is savvy, outgoing, clever, a seasoned makeup and wig artist, and she has perfected the art of party crashing. From printing up duplicate tickets to exclusive events to making sure she carries store-bought drink tickets to events that would otherwise require her to purchase them, Carlotta makes her way through Atlanta’s nightlife putting on a show, and hobnobbing with the rich and elite just for fun.

What’s odd about Carlotta is that she’s actually one of them – she’s from old money, though the reason for her pulling the wool over the eyes of people within her social stratus is beyond me, and beyond Jolie. It’s never really addressed, except in Jolie’s expansive ruminations.

My first thought upon reading Carlotta’s introduction into the story was that she was the villain, because I could think of no reason why someone as stylish and cultured as she would befriend someone like Jolie so instantly. But Carlotta does, and brings Jolie along under vague pretenses to a party at the High Museum, and gate crashes her way in with Jolie standing open-mouthed beside her.  Eventually Jolie relaxes and has fun, but afterward she’s not really able to talk about the experience to her friend Leann because “[s]he didn’t want to admit she’d been bamboozled into being bad.” (Bond 86)

The party crashing becomes the crux of Jolie’s moral dilemma, and she spends more time agonizing over that than she does over her decisions whether to tell the police about her suspicions regarding the missing boyfriend. Carlotta purchases couture formal wear and shoes for them from their respective departments, and teaches Jolie secrets as to how to return it all in pristine condition so they get a full refund. How Neiman’s doesn’t catch on to he high number of employee purchases and returns on their accounts is beyond me. Jolie has a horrible time managing her guilt over the swindling of this multibillion dollar department store, and makes occasional comments about how their behavior isn’t “right.” This bugged the ever living shit out of me because there were so many larger issues at hand, from missing, possibly dead boyfriend, to his car being fished out of the river with a dead chick in it, to finding herself in potential danger from either the boyfriend or someone else, and she’s fixated on whether her moral values can handle Carlotta’s purchase of some Manolo’s for the Museum party when she has every intention of returning them. It’s like watching a church burning down and wondering if using the holy water to put out some of the blaze would be a mortal or a venal sin.

Meanwhile, all the party crashing has brought Jolie into contact with some very interesting people, beginning with Carlotta, and expanding to include former business associates of her missing boyfriend, and the very eligible bachelor, Beck, who not only remembers her from being pummeled with a cascade of shoeboxes at Neiman’s while shopping with his sister, but recognizes her through a variety of disguises. Beck starts attending a lot of social events to catch sight of Jolie, though his fascination with her is really never adequately explained, even by Beck himself. He makes several attempts to do so, and each one comes out false and wooden, as if he’s saying the right words at the right moment so Jolie (or I, the reader) will believe his truehearted intentions.

For a romance, which I don’t know that this book really was, there was a complete lack of character development for the hero. Beck was as one-dimensional as many of the supporting characters. He was rich, his father owned a media empire, he was protective of his sister and he called in favors to keep Jolie’s increasing scandal out of the media as much as possible. Ok, great traits, but what about Jolie? He repeatedly tried to help her when she looked alarmed and close to tears about something, and he recognized her when even people who knew her well, such as her former boss, were fooled. When things got particularly hairy, he bailed her out by calling in more favors. He was a regular white knight in beat-up flipflops, with an altruistic heart and a bank account to make one swoon.

He’s hot. He’s rich. He’s disillusioned with the pretense of wealth. He thinks it’s hilarious that she crashes parties he’d rather not have to go to. He’s hot – and rich, did I mention? And he has about three or four modes, like those faces you can hang on your cubicle wall to tell the office, which is made up of people who don’t give a crap anyway, how you are feeling today. Beck is compassionate and concerned. Beck is horny. Beck is using his influence to help you. Beck is ardent.

The man had the emotional depth of an eggshell. He certainly didn’t make me swoon. I was curious how he had that effect on Jolie, because I found his instant concern for her, and the extremes that he went to protect her immediately after meeting her, a little conspicuous. He did take any emotional risks to be with her, and didn’t change or grow, except he bought more shoes as an excuse to see her again. But he wasn’t a hero equal to the heroine; he was a convenient hero. He was hot, he was rich, he was charming, and he was there.

However, I don’t envy Bond the task she set up for herself in this book. It’s not easy to write about a heroine who needs to be involved enough with the missing boyfriend to care about where he is, and yet have enough reservations about that relationship that she won’t beat herself with the Prada shoes when she realizes she has the hots for the new man in her life. She has to care enough to keep looking, but not care so much that she turns down Mr. Hotty McMeanttoBe.

It was almost at times as if she was searching for her brother, only with a lot less personal angst. Just as I never understood what was so interesting about Beck, I never understood what she saw in Gary, the missing dude. It had to be hard to balance Jolie’s affection for and desire to find out what happened to her boyfriend, while at the same time introducing a more appropriate love interest in her life. Gary was a big part of the mystery. Was he bad? Was he not so bad but mixed up with bad people? How did he end up with these people in the first place? And did he care about Jolie or was he using her? Was he kidnapped by aliens? Did he run off in a pair of high-heeled Via Spigas and wear his feet down to stubby ankle bones with the pain of it? How do women walk in those shoes, anyway?

There are a lot of dropped storylines, or false leads that didn’t add to the plot so much as confuse me as to why they were never developed. For example, Carlotta’s brother is mentioned at least a dozen times as the source of her party-crashing equipment, but the reader never meets him. Carlotta also has some problems of her own that are neatly tied up at the end, without ever showing any true angst on Carlotta’s part to indicate how severe or how superficial these problems were.

But by far the one part of this book that made me drop a whole letter grade was the sex scene. This was the most antiseptic sex scene ever. It was almost as if Beck turned to her with a gleam in his eye and a woody in his pants and said, “Female, do you wish to have sex relations?”

This was the essence of life: a magnificent man, and hormones run amok…. Determined to be more participatory than a hat, Jolie returned the favor with equal consideration, then after a few mental calculations regarding expansion, contraction, and overage, she straddled him in what proved to be a gradual yet successful maneuver.

I’m not sure what the goal was here, perhaps an allusion to her real estate career, but this was the height of the many, many times in the last 100 pages I asked, silently, “Are you kidding me?” Overage? It’s humpity humpy hump, not calculus.

By the time I finished reading this book – and it was a fast-paced read that took me about 2 days to and from NYC – I had folded the corner of so many pages of questionable plot twists, bizarre character development, and kooky dialogue that the book looked like it had shark teeth when I fanned it open.

I really wanted to like this book, because the idea of crashing elite parties and mixing with the guests just for the hell of it seemed so outlandish and fun – and the possibilities for romantic suspense in a setup where the main character is dressing up in couture shoes and fashions to sneak into these events are just endless. But a boring heroine, a facetless hero, and a few too many dropped storylines with herrings that weren’t so much red as they were grey, made the resolution to that adventurous start conclude in a bland and tasteless fashion.