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

Virginia Sauter is the newly-appointed drum major at her rural Alabama high school. She’s also a former beauty pageant queen who rebelled, cut her hair off, pierced her nose, quit the majorette squad and went band. WAY band. So far band that she was voted co-drum-major.

Unfortunately for Virginia, she shares drum major responsibilities with Drew Morrow, who held the position solo last year, and who has some degree of resentment about sharing the position with a girl this year. There’s never been a girl drum major, and to make matters worse, in their first performance, they suck.

Even worse: Virginia has had a crush on Drew for a long, long time, and he refuses to acknowledge that she exists - a decision that certainly contributes to their suckiness as drum majors.

Seems that drum majors, and I didn’t know this, keep the time and tempo of the band through their conducting. If the drum majors don’t work together, they sound like crap - or, as one character says, like a symphony warming up before a performance begins.

Fortunately for Virginia and the band, the new band director, Mr. Rush, intervenes, and lays down the law. They will work together or they’ll both lose their positions. And further, Mr. Rush has ideas about how they can work their differences to the band’s advantage in competition, beginning with a new, feminine drum major costume for Virginia, and a ballroom dance-style dip for both of them to begin their performance.

The challenge of working together forces Drew and Virginia to become friends, despite or perhaps because of the enormous attraction between both of them, and while there are complications - Drew has an evil girlfriend, and Virginia doesn’t feel sure enough of herself to make any move on Drew - the story gets it’s drama from so many clever, interesting characters and plot points that serve to set this book apart. From the guy who’s harbored a crush on Virginia since forever, to her African-American best friend and beauty queen who cannot wait to leave small town Alabama behind her, to her parents and their secret that Virginia’s keeping from everyone, there’s plenty of drama to keep the book moving.

One of Echol’s gifts in this novel is keeping the story very contemporary without making it seem like she’s name-dropping. Like the writers of a really good teen television drama, she’s able to portray a high school teenager’s thoughts (the book is told from Virginia’s perspective in first person) without sounding like she’s trying too hard. Authenticity of tone and setting come easily to this author.

The two best points of this book for me are Virginia herself, and her friendship with Drew. While it might be difficult for me, a 31-year-old schlubby lady living in Jersey to relate to a teenage beauty queen and drum major in rural Alabama, it is not hard for me to relate to someone feeling like they have been dropped into a situation that seems like too much, too fast, and too emotionally difficult. It’s a mark of brilliance on Echols’ part that the character who doesn’t fit in is a beauty queen who quits the pageant circuit to join the band. One doesn’t think beauty pageant contestants suffer often from feelings of awkwardness, low self-confidence, or alienation.

The other delicious part of this book is the dramatic sexual tension between Drew and Virginia. Forced to work together and talk to each other on long-ass bus rides all over the state, they form a friendship of sorts, and become each other’s confidantes, revealing the truth behind their public images. Virginia shares with Drew the secret she’s been hiding from everyone, and Drew tells Mr. Rush and Virginia why he’s gone from being a laid-back relaxed high schooler to a stressed-out responsibility-driven drum major obsessed about being perfect and getting the highest possible score on his SATs.

The one problem I had with the story was that the HEA didn’t seem 100% guaranteed, because one question -the financial security of Drew’s future - is left unanswered. There’s a throwaway comment by the band director that seems to indicate that everything will be fine, but I wasn’t sure at all by the end, and I wanted a complete happy ending for these awesome characters, because I was rooting for them the entire time.

I have a serious weakness for YA romances, from the 1-800-WhereRU stories to vintage SVH, and this one is a definite keeper. A full band salute to Jennifer Echols from this very giddy Smart Bitch.

Phyllida begins with Andrew Carrington awaking in his home with “no memory of the previous night” and a young male prostitute named Kit in his bedchamber. He’s horrified that he’s once again gone so far down the path of debauchery that he’s blank on the last few hours and seems to have brought his evening’s entertainment into his own home, something he’d never do. Andrew is, however, cordial but guarded with Kit, and is very frank that he’s not a member of the peerage but is “a sodomite, just like you.”

The scene changes to Andrew in the back parlour of his club, the Brotherhood of Philander, where he announces that he’s decided to marry. The members of the Brotherhood are all sodomites, and the club was founded to give them a safe place to socialize and also...socialize. The brotherhood members are appalled at the idea that a dedicated gay man would risk alienating and lying to a woman for an entire marriage just to secure an heir. Andrew does have several points in his favor regarding his ideal marriage, however: he wants to be honest with his wife so he can live his preference without, as he put it, becoming a fugitive in his own country. More importantly, he stands to inherit an earldom upon the death of his uncle, which gives him a larger choice of women, since some families would tolerate just about anything so long as the title and accompanying wealth were guaranteed.

While some of the members of the Brotherhood think that the line might be drawn a few yards away from permitting a sodomite husband, Andrew is not concerned. He doesn’t want a peeress, or even an heiress. He wants an attractive, sophisticated virgin who was brought up to be a lady. His friend Verney has a suggestion: a young woman in the country, the eldest of three daughters of a woman of somewhat questionable reputation.

Phyllida is a wise young woman who immediately suspects the letter Verney sends her mother detailing Andrew’s offer of marriage: if it seems too good to be true, it is. But when she receives Andrew in person in her parlor, fully aware that he’s gay, she finds herself attracted to him anyway. And he is captivated by Phyllida, by her honesty and her bluntness.

The girl nodded. “I see,” she said, smiling as if she had heard good news. “And so you would rather purchase a wife with whom you can live honestly.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow. “This amuses you?”
“It is more of a relief,” she said. “I worried that if you were traveling so far out of your way to find a wife, there must be a sinister reason.”
“And the truth does not worry you?”
“No. I had rather have a marriage based on honesty.”

At first I was very surprised at Phyllida’s ability to accept Andrew’s open preference for men, something that to any other young gentrified lady would be news so shocking she’d pass out cold. I wasn’t sure why she was so open-minded, though perhaps it is attributable to the questionable reputation of her mother.

But Phyllida has some surprising secrets of her own: she’s a gothic novelist, writing under an assumed name. In fact, Phyllida is so proud and protective of her career that she almost refuses to marry Andrew and accept an astonishing windfall of marital wealth if he will not stipulate in the prenup that he will permit his wife to continue her secret career.

Phyllida and Andrew are married almost immediately, and author Herendeen is as brave as Phyllida: she goes right to the part that any reader would be curious about. How will Andrew fare in the bedroom? Will he be able to consummate his marriage with Phyllida with any degree of success, since he is already attracted to her?

I won’t spoil that which for this reader was some very clever writing. But I will say that the scene where Andrew seeks advice from his brother, who is equally a rake but after a different gender, had me practically in hysterics.

The conflict in the story doesn’t actually come directly from Andrew’s relationship with Phyllida; the intricacies of that relationship are only one of the forces acting against their happy ending. There’s also a much-talked-about bet placed at White’s against the success of their marriage, plus Andrew’s deep attraction to another man, the involvement of the Brotherhood in all of their lives, an individual who has intentions of blackmail, allegations of treason and spying, and of course the everyday danger of living in a society where any number of sexual sins are tolerated so long as those sins are heterosexual in nature. To live one’s life as an admitted sodomite, and to frequent clubs and brothels full of men, was to risk just about everything in terms of social status - hence the founding of the Brotherhood.

All these different problems required solutions, and by the end of the book I felt like there was one resolution after another, to the point where the story felt like a miniseries gone three episodes too long. Moreover, some of the resolutions were Big Misunderstandings, and some were very very clever, and the inconsistencies were glaring.

However, there was a great lot to like about this novel, beginning with the writing style. Herendeen has a writing voice that matches the tone and restraint of the Regency, and her descriptions and dialogue are fantastic. Furthermore, the plot was fast paced, but each character had a degree of depth such that no one character was wooden or stock.

Phyllida in particular was an interesting character. I alternated between liking her a lot and wanting to bash her over the head with a hardback for her stubbornness. As a writer who publishes in secret, she has a great deal of courage and belief in herself and in her talent, and thus she is very frank and honest - a perfect match for Andrew. While reading the book I noted in a margin, “Phyllida has balls in all senses except the one that would matter most to Andrew.”

And speaking of balls, there is a third almost-protagonist to this love story: Matthew Thornby. Matthew is the son of a rich merchant-made-baronet, and he and Andrew are immediately attracted to each other. While this is a bisexual Regency, and Andrew is as much a member of a couple with Phyllida as he is with Matthew, Matthew’s entrance into the story and role from then until the final chapter is almost secondary to the much more intricate and clever relationship Andrew shares with Phyllida. But as the title states, this is Phyllida’s story as much as it is Andrew’s.

My problems with the book came at the end, though a solution for how to view those issues came at the end, too. Herendeen has said she was writing a book she always wanted to read, and in the post script notes, “as a romance, it is also a form of fantasy fiction. However, since ‘Phyllida’ is set in a real place and time, certain elements of the story are necessarily based on fact” (529).

I usually skip the Author’s Note at the back of a novel, but I’m glad I read this one because it made a difference that the author acknowledged her own inclusion of fantasy. Against the backdrop of very real and very severe penalties for sodomy in Regency England, certain modern elements in the story were jarring, and could only be accommodated in my mind by this admission of fantasy. Andrew’s position on abortion, for example, and the final scene that creates a happy ending for Phyllida, Andrew, and Matthew were as off-putting to me as Phyllida’s initial comfort with the idea of marrying a sodomite.

However, due to the elegant writing, the otherwise detailed historical accuracy and the likeable Phyllida and Andrew, I enjoyed Phyllida and the Brotherhood of the Philander. There were several, “Oh, come ON, now” moments, but overall, I looked forward to reading more of this novel every time I pulled it out of my bag.

Kate Wexford is “assistant head of ER” at a respected hospital, a woman who describes her work as a physician as “not just a job; it’s who I am.” She finds herself embarrassingly enraptured by a portrait of an 18th century Scottish Highland Clan leader, a man she fantasizes about as if he was real and who unexpectedly becomes real when Kate gets a helpful hand into the museum portrait and into the world of the 1744 Scottish Highlands and the bed of Darach MacTavish.  Luckily for the two surprised leads, Darach’s close friend Hamish turns out to be a time traveler himself who lives simultaneously in Kate and Darach’s temporal planes and who informs Darach and Kate that they called out to each other through time (I didn’t even bother trying to parse through all the rules here, because it only got me frustrated when I tried it during The Time Traveler’s Wife).  Their fates are entwined, Hamish informs them, connected through Darach’s impending death at the bloody Battle of Culloden (although the real battle took place in 1746, LaBrecque has it as 1745), which will also put an end to the MacTavish line.  The romance and the story unfold from there, as Kate and Darach travel back to Kate’s home in 2006 Atlanta in pursuit of information and a strategy to alter Darach’s apparent fate.

What worked best for me in Highland Fling was the interaction between Kate and Darach.  Both characters are ostensibly leaders, and Darach especially is portrayed with a nice balance of cocksure confidence and circumspect concern for the welfare of his Clan.  For the most part I felt that Darach escaped the irritating quasi-alpha fate of having his protectiveness morph into patronizing domination.  It was easy for me to see how his growing passion for Kate was intertwined with his sense of responsibility to his people and not an abandonment of something that supposedly defined him. Kate was a little more difficult for me, because for all her assertions that medicine is her life and her identity, she became quickly and wholly consumed by Darach’s plight and her growing feelings for him.  Several critical decisions Kate made late in the book were particularly troublesome for me, because they seemed to undermine a key element of her character and were made with absolutely no articulated contemplation of their real implications and likely impact on her identity and fate. I love strong and independent women in Romance, but professionally passionate women aren’t necessarily personally wanting and emotionally deprived (it’s often quite the opposite, in fact, at least in real life), and I wish we could move away from this stereotype in contemporary Romance.  While I think I understand what LaBrecque was trying to do with this “healer of men and their souls,” Kate felt relatively shallow to me.  So while I understood how two people from very different temporal moments could find a deep recognition and understanding of each other, my experience of Kate and Darach’s relationship was not very emotionally intense for me.  While I enjoyed their story, I didn’t find enough dimension in the protagonists to really bring their drama to life in my mind or heart. 

The greatest pleasure of Highland Fling for me was the banter between Darach and Kate, as she teases him for his Highland bravado and he teases her for her liberated sass, generating relationship stereotypes and skewering them at the same time:

Darach:  “I love you you daft, crazy, lusty wench.”
Kate:  “I traveled over two-hundred years to find you.  You’re everything I never wanted in a man – arrogant, bossy, too sexy for your own good, and gone in less than a week.”

There was a clever scene involving a condom that LaBrecque used to very good effect, an interesting and amusing common-sense solution to sexually involving two characters early without the promise of everlasting love, and while some of the pseudo-Scottish speak felt over the top and inauthentic (worst line in the book:  “Ah, Katie-love, you have a bonnie set of tits”), it wasn’t so overdone as to be intrusively obnoxious.  There were a few unbelievable moments, most of which related to the ease with which Darach adapted to 21st century life and technology, and frankly I felt that two people with Darach’s and Kate’s intelligence could have arrived much more quickly at the solution to Darach’s dilemma, but the writing and the relationship held a certain good-natured cheekiness that made my reading experience more pleasant than I expected based on the premise of the book.  I haven’t read Outlander and have no idea how that would have influenced my response to this book, but even I recognized some significant superficial similarities that made me hope Highland Fling was written in homage and not duplication.  All in all, I found Highland Fling amiable if not memorably substantial.

Before I wrote this review I visited Harlequin’s writing guidelines for Blaze and was struck by the following:  “The series features sensuous, highly romantic, innovative stories that are sexy in premise and execution . . . and [w]riters can push the boundaries in terms of characterization, plot, and explicitness.” I thought a lot about those two concepts – innovation and boundary pushing – trying to decide whether I should measure them differently for series fiction than I would for single title books. Fair or not, I realized that my expectations for series fiction are somewhat different.  For example, while I noted quite a few clichés in the writing of Highland Fling (i.e. he “kissed her with a need bordering on pain,” “the fire of want . . . licked at them with flames of desire”), I didn’t count them against the book so much, and while I found numerous copyediting errors (i.e. the confusion of lie/lay, borne/born, misplaced modifying clauses, misspellings, and subject-verb disagreements), I was annoyed but not fatally so.  There were things that niggled at me, like the mistaken date of the central historical event in the story, which then made it difficult for me to settle into the historical aspect of the story.  I found myself more actively questioning things along the way, like the image I had of Darach wearing only his great kilt with no long shirt or short coat, as well as some of the language choices (i.e. Darach’s liberal use of “bluidy”/bloody, which I thought was a pretty profane oath in the 18th century, especially to a Jacobite).  None of these things ruined my enjoyment of the story, but they did get me thinking about how the finer details of craftsmanship play a part in distinguishing a merely pleasant book from a memorably compelling one.  Highland Fling was a pleasant C+ read.

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