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

Update: It’s official: I’m a retard, and I should not attempt to read complex sentences before 10 a.m. The sentence is fine as-is. Disregard this entry entirely, or just use it as proof of my general retardedness.




I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Lori Handeland’s Blue Moon, so off I toddled to Amazon.com to see if the book featured one of those nifty “Look Inside This Book!” features. And whaddaya know, it did.

However, I have been completely unable to read past the first sentence. Check it out:

The summer I discovered the world was not black-and-white--the way I liked it--but a host of annoying shades of gray was the summer a lot more changed than my vision.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

Trying to figure out this sentence is breaking my brain.

People who have read this book and grammarians in general: Am I missing something here? Or is the sentence at least two different sentences squished together with some critical words missing? Or is the Amazon.com scan completely wonky?

I need to know. If the sentence in the book is exactly as the Amazon.com page presents it, I can’t read the book. I can’t. That first sentence haunts me. It makes no sense.

Now that a great many of us are Smart Bitches, thanks to the membership feature of this here site, I have a question to the general Bitchery: What is your A book?

I don’t necessarily mean your all-time favorite, since sometimes the book you call your most lovely favorite is a book wherein you must acknowledge the flaws in the structure or plotting or character, and love the book despite its imperfections.

I mean the book that made you go, “Well, beat me with a donkey’s ass, that was a fucking awesome romance novel!”

For me, there are desperately few of these books: Bitten by Kelley Armstrong is one of my A books, because it just knocked me over and I still think about it. It was also the book that created my utter fascination with paranormal romance. 

Also, Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, because this book beat down the weeds in the side yard of the estate of romance and created a whole new field of readng for me: The Holy-Shit Good Romance. Can you imagine the editor’s meeting for that one? “No, really, he’s a immoral, licentious duke, but he had a stroke, and she’s a Quaker, so he’s locked in an institution unable to communicate clearly, and she’s locked in to a different institution that she loves but feels she is betraying - hey, where are you going? This is too a romance!”

I’m still working on my “All About Sarah” entry (I have twice as many cats plus a dog so I have to take a lot more pictures) but since one of the questions is about my A book, I want to know- what’s yours? 

I know, I know--the RWA has suspended the graphics standards, they have an ad hoc committee studying the issue, yadda yadda yadda. But I came across this image for Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and was struck by two things:

1. It’s really, really beautiful. Which isn’t a surprise, because it seems that the artist is Dave McKean, who’s done some really, really cool stuff, including illustrating one of my all-time favorite children’s books, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish (written by the absolutely squee-worthy Neil Gaiman).

2. This cover would not have passed the (now-suspended) RWA cover standards.

There’s some sort of lesson here, I guess. Somewhere.

Also: Cory Doctorow utilizes a Creative Commons License, whereby you can download his books for free. How cool is that? SO FUCKING COOL. Just for that, I’m going to go check out his books from the library (no e-book reader for me, and no comfy chair, so reading books on the computer is not feasible) and if I like ‘em, I’ll definitely buy them.

I say this as if this is in any way different from the way I usually do things, ha!

Thanks are due to Vanessa Jaye, because if it hadn’t been for her blog, I wouldn’t have noticed the cover and a pretty nifty new-to-me writer.

Addendum:

I found more smut. I might add more as the mood hits me.

Christina Dodd wrote a review about a debut novel by Elizabeth Vaughan, Warprize. It praises the book to the skies and provides a pretty bitchin’ plot summary, but to me, here’s the most useful part:

I’ve been trying to compare WARPRIZE to other books I’ve liked, trying to figure out why it struck such chords with me, and I have to say the story is very much a sheik fantasy with a heroine who could have been written by Julie Garwood.

Man, I’m so not going to read this book. It’s not the sheikh fantasy bit--it’s the Julie Garwood bit. Not a fan, never have been, never will be. I think her heroines are uniformly annoying, and her writing style pedestrian.

No, don’t try to tell me that other books I’ve liked like, ohhh, Judith McNaught novels suffer from the same problems. I know this. But something about Garwood sends me to sleep. Either that, or I itch to re-write her sentences while I’m reading her books. Seriously.

I know. What romance reader doesn’t enjoy Julie Garwood? (Answer: the same reader who doesn’t particularly enjoy Nora Roberts or Jude Deveraux. Haaaaa!)

But ye legions of Garwood fans, rejoice! There seems to be a new author on the block who’s totally fabu and her new book features a Garwood-esque heroine. Go check it out and let us know what you think. Do you agree with Dodd’s assessment? Disagree?

(See how I very cleverly push the burden of reviewing a hot new book onto my readership? Again: Haaaaa!)

Angie, Wendy and Karen post about condom usage in romance novels.

One of the primary concerns seems to be birth control. And yeah, condoms are pretty effective (but not as effective as you think--they’re only a few percentage points more effective than coitus interruptus). My big question is, if birth control is such a big deal, why aren’t more romance novel heroines on the Pill?

I mean, even when I wasn’t dating (I made a conscious decision a few years back to not date or have sex for a whole year) I still took my pill religiously. Why aren’t romance novel heroines? It’s a hell of a lot more effective than condoms, not as intrusive as IUDs, and doesn’t require surgery.

I would never rely on condoms as a sole means of birth control, given its relatively high failure rate, and I wouldn’t expect my fiction to reflect that either.

Yes, there are side-effects to the pill. Some of them aren’t pleasant. Some of them are so severe that some women can never go on them Pill. I have a friend like that. She just becomes a puke factory, no matter what brand and dosage level she tried. But the birth control pill is a non-entity in romance novels. It’s not even mentioned.

Condoms are much more useful for disease prevention, though it does shit-all for herpes and human papillomavirus, the virus that causes genital warts. For that reason alone, I like it better when the hero/heroine in a contemporary use a jimmy hat, especially if the two of them end up joggling their nasties within days of meeting each other (*koff*Linda Howard*koffkoff*). However, I’m especially irritated if the hero forgets to use a condom and the heroine decides that barebacking is a sign of TRUE LURVE™ (*koff*Dream Man*koffkoff*) instead of a sign that they should both get tested ASAP.

I do wish that contemporaries featured heroines who used BC methods other than rubbers, though. Or would that make ‘em too slutty?

Anyway, in a sort-of related note, I picked up Hot Spot by Susan Johnson from the library on Friday, and returned it on Sunday, largely unread. I’ve read a few of her historicals and didn’t particularly care for them, but I had hopes for Hot Spot because:

1. The heroine owns a comic book store.

2. I always thought Johnson’s short, choppy sentences and modern voice would be much more suited for a contemporary.

I was browsing through it casually while eating dinner, and I found annoyance number 1 very early on: Johnson uses the word “cuz” instead of “because” fairly frequently--not within dialogue, mind you, but within the narration. Now, I have no problems with a character using the word “cuz” as a contraction. When the narrator does, though, it’s irritating as hell and makes the book sound like it was written by a 15-year-old girl.

Annoyance number 2: Found a sex scene fairly soon (oh, c’mon, what do you THINK I was browsing for?). And seriously? Two paragraphs, if that, from the time the hero inserts his Magical Wonderflesh and the heroine coming so hard she screams the house down.

And every sex scene is that way. He inserts, he pumps, she comes, she screams. All in one paragraph or two. Her hair trigger is envious, but also exhausting to read about. There may be some bantering and/or foreplay, but these remained pretty minimal as well. At any rate, the sex scenes were so short (albeit plentiful), I wondered why Johnson included them at all. Quality, not quantity, people! Unless you’re Emma Holly, in which case the two go hand in hand.

And then there was annoyance number 3: The short, choppy sentences. Very distracting to read. They’re the same length, too. Also, they’re usually punctuated similarly. Makes for monotonous reading. Kind of like this paragraph.

So all three annoyances put together meant I didn’t even bother with Hot Spot, despite the interesting premise and heroine. I’m so glad I checked it out from the library.