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

There are few words that make me sigh in happiness like the word “pastry.” So when I read the synopsis and was asked to review this book, I was all up in that pastry idea. While reading this book, I nearly gave up just past the halfway mark, because while I was entirely enamored of some of the characters, like Elisabeth’s brother Rascal, and her mother, Ballard Foster, who has the Best WASP Name Ever, and who has lovely core of strength that shows up when its needed, still wrapped in a white linen and navy blue napkin that’s perfectly folded, there was one problem.

Well, with Elisabeth, there were three problems:

1. I wanted to smack a bitch.
2. The book is told in first person.
3. Go To #1.

At several points, I started talking back to Elisabeth’s narration. “Bitch, you did not just do that.” “Dear Lord, woman, why are you such an asshole? No wait, I know why. Maybe you could both recognize that your family is 75% asshole AND then choose to NOT be an asshole? No?” “Oh, Bitch, you did not just do that.” It is alarmingly frustrating to read about someone who wants to change, says she should, and then doesn’t while commenting in that moment all the ways in which she should change, just act differently this one time.

Elisabeth fully recognizes that her family is profoundly dysfunctional, and how her role in life as a pastry chef is to cook the happiness for each of her customers and “envelop” them in it, and she recognizes that she, by virtue of being raised by a classy mother and a brash father, has a good bit of the Well Bred Asshole in her.

Problem is, she lets herself be an asshole way, way too long. Elisabeth’s story begins with an almost systematic description of all the ways in which her life is stagnant and her daily routine is largely determined by everyone around her. She has a journalist pseudo boyfriend cum fuckbuddy, Will, who stops in to stop in when he and Elisabeth find themselves in the same place. Will is a curious character; Palmer does a deft job of creating his vulnerabilities while still allowing him to demonstrate what a selfish buttmonkey he is as well. In the beginning, Elisabeth and Will are pretty much perfect for each other.

Then shit changes, as shit is wont to do. Elisabeth has an opportunity land in her lap that sends her career into a direction that her father would and does violently protest: television. (It’s evil, you know. Four out of five dentists don’t let their kids watch tv. Or eat pastry.) She watches her brother struggle to play his own FU Card with their mercurial egomaniac of a father. Both the Page children have opportunities come to them purely based on their father’s fame. But what both characters learn is that while the opportunity might have shown up for that reason, their independent and individual success is largely due to their own brilliance.

And that brilliance, on Elisabeth’s part, leads her to meet Daniel Sullivan, a very nice midwestern boy who coaches basketball at UCLA, who bids on a cooking lesson with Elisabeth as part of her mother’s latest charity event - a scene that’s toe-curlingly awkward for Elisabeth but does a laudable job of establishing the imbalance of her character between acting like an asshole and wishing she were nicer - and who is utterly enthralled by Elisabeth, not by her last name, not by her job, not by her wealth or her own relative fame. He likes her, and she realizes the difference between being liked and being used. I wish, though, that Daniel had been more developed as a character. As underdone as he was, he seemed like a catalyst for Elisabeth than a choice on her part. And there is a moment when Elisabeth is so unbelievably horrid to Daniel’s mother that it took a good hour away from the book for me to calm down.

The best part about the book? The writing. Hands down, even with a character who bugged the ever living goddam shit out of me, Palmer is an adept master at the phrase that makes one snort and nod - nod because she’s right about what she’s describing, and snort because she skewers it perfectly. The very best and poignant line of the book comes at the end, when Elisabeth realizes the full ramifications of that fact that ultimately, she has to play her FU card to her own self.

Palmer’s writing is what made the book better than the character in it, a character who so irritated me it was hard to root for her sometimes. While I can’t say I loved this book, I’d happily read another book written by Liza Palmer.

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells, or rented from Paperspine.

Once again the industry of books and music are compared to one another - which is always a rocking good time, because while they have some finer points in common, among them being structurally bugfuck crazy, the two models are very, very different. However, ancillary market profit might be one of the areas that the two medias come to share. The question is, how?

Music sales from “touring, merchandising, and licensing” are becoming mainstays of band profit as “downloads… steadily undermin[e] record sales.”

So, what about books? BEA was all about eBooks, baby, and ebooks are the new market for books. Touting the Kindle-Aid, Krugman draws a parallel between downloaded music and downloaded, aka pirated, books.

How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

I wrote recently about the price tag of ebooks but my problem with the price has nothing to do with the comparative $0.00 sale price of ebooks from pirate sites. For one thing, I like good reading and know that snagging a free book means one less byte of good writing for me in the long run. For another, the formatting is often atrocious, the quality crap, and did I mention the immediate satisfaction vs. future quality reading thing? Yeah. Threaten me with the absence of good books from talented authors, and I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll even clean the sink trap (*ew ew ew ew*).

Krugman points out that newspaper attempts to profit by ancillary subscriptions for content they otherwise give away have backfired - and that free vs. subscription prejudice from consumers works both ways. Count me among those who get very ornery when a magazine I subscribe to prevents me from reading that same content I already paid for on the publication’s web site. (Consumer Reports, are your ears burning? The only reason I pay twice is because you’re a non-profit and your recommendations never fail me).

However, with publishing attempts to market books in innovate ways, the free ebook is making many, many consumers happy, and if it’s working appropriately, then one free download that’s professionally sanctioned (and professionally formatted, please, kthxbye) can make a world of difference in creating new fans and new customers of an author’s backlist of product. 

But here’s the part that really made me stop and ponder:

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

This is the part where I wonder, “Hmm. Do romance readers figure into dire predictions of the death of publishing as we know it?” How many readers here and at other sites swear by paper books, the tactile experience of them, and the pleasure of shopping for them, trading them, borrowing them, and keeping them for rereads?

Books as promotional materials for other activities? I’m confused. I’m still rather startled at the degree to which authors are asked to make themselves in to celebrity representatives for the sales of their own books, and that they allow greater access to themselves for the sake of a voracious readership that wants more, more, more between the issue of each new book.

If you’re a reader like me, you read fast and eagerly, and the finish of one excellent book is a sad event soothed only by the anticipation of the next adventure in a new book, with luck also a good one. Reading is among my very favorite activities (right up there with sleeping, eating pastry, and drinking wine). So whether I’m reading an ebook, or a print book, I’m still after the book, not the promotional reading. I’m a solitary person by nature; I don’t have any desire to sit in a room with other people to listen to my reading. I want to read by myself in the quiet. I’m not after the author and I’m not after the experience of reading-as-interaction. I just want the reading of the book, in any form. And while I do blink at the equal price of ebooks, I still buy the ebook or the paper, because I want to read.

I agree with Krugman that the markets that intend to profit from digital media will have to alter themselves mightily to create new functioning models that account for the sizable difference between pages and bytes. But am I alone in thinking that so long as there are books to be read, there will be folks like me paying for them?

Thanks to SonomaLass for the link.