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

Yes, definitely. Go to our Contact page for our e-mails. We’d love to take a look at your book.

Please note, this is very different from “We’d love your book.”

Life’s a bitch, and the two of us, we’re not going to make it any easier. If you’re just positive we’re going to squeal over your book’s awesomeness the way we would over a basket of fluffy bunnies, please don’t be. Odds are, your book is going to get a C, simply because most of the books we get for review tend to be graded Cs. (If you think about it, it makes sense--how many books that you pick up blind from a bookstore are going to be As?) If you’re lucky, the book will get a B grade of some sort, and even our B reviews can contain quite a bit of snarkage. Once the book verges into C and D territory, you’re going to encounter quite a bit of bitchery. And let’s not even speak about the F reviews. Just be grateful the pixels on your monitor don’t burst into flames.

Here are samples of C, D and F reviews:

• Duchess In Love by Eloisa James (C+, Candy)
• She Drives Me Crazy by Leslie Kelly (C+, Sarah)
• Pirate’s Price by Darlene Marshall (C+, tandem review)
• Blackbird by Grace Draven (C-, tandem review)
• The Naked Duke by Sally MacKenzie (D, Candy)
• Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie (D, Sarah)
• The Real Deal by Lucy Monroe (D-, Candy)
• The Demon’s Daughter by Emma Holly (F, Sarah)

Read those reviews. Now imagine we were saying those things about your book. Imagine Candy nitpicking on stupid details ("Morphine wasn’t isolated until the 1800s!” “Why are people in 18th-century England saying ‘Okay?’") and Sarah tearing your character a new one for being incredibly stupid. Imagine us calling your hero a fucking asshat, and your heroine Tonya Harding on crack — MORE crack than she normally smokes, even.

Does the thought make you want to puke? Enrage you? Make your stomach twist? You might want to think twice about sending your book to us.

If you’ve read those reviews, and you’re SURE you can tolerate the level of bitchiness and snark we’re going to level on it if we decide it’s bad, or even if it’s just mediocre, then go right ahead. Make our day. Punk.

Ummm, yeah. We kinda suck that way, and we freely admit it. We both work full-time jobs, shit happens, pregnancies happen, and we both have writing and website projects outside of Smart Bitches. So please, be patient. We WILL get around to your book, and we WILL post a review, hopefully before tiny snowflakes rain down in Hell.

The very short answer: Because Candy adopted two starving, flea-ridden kittens in 2002.

Extended short answer: Candy adopted two, starving, flea-ridden kittens in 2002, and they weren’t doing all that great on the vet-recommended Science Diet. Not content to switch to a different brand, she did what she normally does when she becomes interested in something: jumped right into the deep end and started researching how to make her own cat food. One day she Googled for raw cat food recipes, and behold, stumbled across an entry on Sarah’s blog. An entry about kitten shits, to be precise. The entry didn’t have any recipes, but Candy was hooked anyway because woo damn, here’s another crazy cat lady with an English degree who feeds a raw diet, and DAMN she’s really fucking funny, y’all. After years of e-mailing each other on and off and Candy stalking Sarah’s blog and leaving loooong comments, they discovered they both loved romance novels. They emailed each other about romance and how hard it is to find good ones sometimes, especially with so many milquetoast reviews out there. One of the soon-to-be Smart Bitches, maybe Sarah, said “We should do a book review site for romance novels full of bitchery, snark, and honest reviews of why a book just sucked the big wang.” And there was much, “Yes!” and “We so should! What shall we call it!?” And behold there were Smart Bitches, and there were Trashy Books. And it was good.

And how many times have you had to go to court to protect your copyright?

Ahhh, yes. A tricky one indeed, and the process was indeed long and arduous. Even Celine Dion was vanquished under our mighty trademarking prowess thanks to our unique spelling of “Luuuurve.” And lemme tell you, that witch can mud wrestle like you would not believe.

Behold, how we do it:

1. Position your cursor where you wish the ™ mark to appear.
2. In Windows, hold down the Alt key and type 0153 on the number pad. (Important: you must use the number pad!)
3. Save file before precious work is hijacked by evil ass-munching gremlins.

Alternatively, if you’re concerned about it displaying correctly for all web browsers, you may wish to do the following:

1. Position your cursor where you wish the ™ mark to appear.
2. Type ™.
3. Save file before precious underwear is hijacked by evil ass-munching underwear gnomes.

Never. Since reading and appreciating literary fiction obviously requires superior mental faculties (especially compared to reading trashy, mass-produced fiction), it would be impossible to gather a large enough gathering of so-called stupid bitches to make a worthwhile website.

(Actually, the thought of blinking angel graphics accompanied by deathless prose such as “OMG i heart graivty’s rainbow lol thomas python is so kewl” and “this book was looooooong and had a lot of words in it” makes our head hurt, though the possibilities for perverse humor in such an endeavor are sort of promising. Stay tuned.)

Star Jones has stolen them and stores them in a secret belly flap, the evil cow. And wouldn’t YOU decide to forsake women forever if you were trapped in Star Jones’s belly flap for years and years before escaping?

Personally, we’d like to know, where have all the cowboys gone?

1. Balls.
2. Balzac.

Describe what is antithetical about Blake’s “The Lamb’’ and “The The Tyger.”

1. When a man and a woman are in a car making love, and he reaches down between his legs… And eases the seat back.
2. Balls.

What evidence supports the idea that Hamlet was not mad? And which do you believe?

1. His hatred of s’mores. What sane person hates s’mores?
2. The fact that De Stijl was the only White Stripes album he liked.
3. S’mores > White Stripes.

Ummm, yeah. That was fine. We’re good. Thanks.

Candy had to spend many hours meditating on this picture of Andy Lau before feeling quite herself again. Sarah, on the other hand, as the magellan of the camel toe, the fearless navigator who finds uncharted toes of the camel, well, she hasn’t gotten up off the couch since she realized that Fabio is a girl.