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

In a five-second IM conversation one night (because we Smart Bitches have yet to actually speak live to one another - ha!) Candy posited the following: what behavior from a heroine will we never, ever see in a romance novel?

Being who we are, we came up with a very organized list. Behold: our take on Romance Taboos, Heroine-style.

Consider it the romance parallel to the oft-debunked guide on How to Be a Good Wife.

A Romance Heroine:

1. Would never have had an abortion and harbor no guilt and/or regret about it.

2. Would never sleep around just for the sake of doing so, or actually enjoy casual sex (unless it’s erotica). There’s got to be some moment, if the heroine HAS done this, of “OH, my life had no MEANING and I was CHEAP for doing so!”

3. Would never be an atheist and remain that way throughout the book (she would have to Find God!).

4. Would never start out devout and then end up atheist or agnostic - and obviously be happier with this (non) belief system than the religious structure she started out with.

5. Would never be a close-minded conservative, e.g. make anti-gay or anti-working-women statements (or the like). It might be implied but it ain’t said outright.

6. Would never knowingly cheat on her husband, and even in the remote possibility that she does, he probably did it first. And if she cheated on him, they’d never, ever end up together again. This taboo is not held against heroes, of course--The Marriage Bed and Your Wicked Ways are just two books that involve adulterous heroes who get an HEA.

7. Would never admit to liking, or having had, pussy. Maybe in erotic romance, but gay/bi men are much more common (or so it seems to us, anyway).

8. Would never be impatient with and admit to not liking children. This applies to heroes too. Those heroines that don’t want kids (Min, for example) are never mean to kids, and are usually spendidly comfortable hanging out with them.

9. Ditto animals. If either character starts out not liking children or animals, by the end of the book she’ll have babies dangling off her teats and he’ll be covered in dog hair and they’re both Ecstatically Happy with that situation.

10. Heroine would never be physically stronger than the hero, barring a paranormal involving a vampire/werewolf/demon/alien/whatever heroine and a human hero.

11. When involved in a business deal, especially a takeover, the hero HAS to come out on top. If the heroine belongs to the company that’s initiating the merger, her company will portrayed as the Eeeeville Corporation trying to stomp out the plucky competition, and she’ll eventually side with the hero. If vice versa, her company will be portrayed as the incompetently-run business that is saved by the hero’s huge yet amazingly compassionate and ethical behemoth of a company, and again, she’ll eventually side with the hero.

12. Never exists without one nurturing aspect to her personality. She might be tough as nails business-wise, but she grows plants like a gardener on speed. She could be a toned, competitive athlete but she also has sixteen cats and four dogs.

13. If she’s run down, stressed out and unhappy in a small town, she won’t find happiness and fulfillment by running to a large city, revelling in the increased job opportunities and anonymity this affords her, then making a new group of friends who share many of her same interests and finding a new man--one who has never been her high-school sweetheart or childhood crush. In short, she won’t have to go back in time to find herself. (The reverse happens all the time in romance novels.)

You know the drill: hook me up with author, title, and character’s name, and if you’re the first correct answer, you get yourself a Smart Bitch title.

Come and Set Me Free, Baby

Mild-manned antique-fiend, underwhelmed with herself, though most would kill to be her size, seeks man locked in a box of someone else’s making to unleash her desires and emotions. I will follow the right man through past, future, and parallel worlds.

From Charlie All Night by Jennifer Crusie:

“Listen to me,” Charlie said and the intensity in his voice stopped her in midsentence. “One of the biggest problems this country has is that people think a law is only a law if they agree with it. And if they don’t it’s all right to kick [gays] like Joe out of the service and bomb abortion clinics because there’s a higher law at work. And that’s garbage.... The law is the law. If you don’t like it, change it. But don’t break it and then start whining when there are consequences.”

I love it when a character says or does something in a romance novel that makes me stop still and go, “Well, damn hell, that was freaking brilliant.” I’m frequently charmed by the clever reworking of traditional romance structure, and I’m always a sucker for a good, long attraction stage between the hero and the heroine, but when a character or plot development does more than just develop the romance, and makes me think differently about things completely unrelated to my own fictional escape, I am just so impressed, with both the author for the intelligent insight, and myself, well, for reading romance.

What are some moments of brilliance in romance novels you’ve read, beyond plot and character? 

Kate Rothwell asks an interesting question in this post:

I wish there was a subjective method of measuring which aspects of a book--other than the story--hold the most power for reviewers.

Let’s say you don’t know the author, so you can’t really base future expectations on past performance. What do you go with instead?

(...)

We got the expectation based on the cover and the context. I suppose the reputation of the publisher goes with the expectation.

What else? Maybe how well the back cover and the contents match? Okay, yes, there’s a matter of the damn story.

Personally, for me? If starting out with a clean slate, i.e. I’m reading a book by a new-to-me author, my expectations are almost entirely based on the story. Specifically, within the first 50 pages of the book. God knows I have learned not to expect ANYTHING based on the cover or the blurb, especially for romance novels.

It doesn’t bother me to read novels that have been mis-categorized by publishers or bookstores. It doesn’t get my hackles up when I pick up a book marketed heavily as taut romantic suspense and find it to be a light-hearted romp that just happened to involve a murder investigation. I might put it down once I realized the mistake and seek another book if I was really, really in the mood for romantic suspense, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t hold this against the book because I wouldn’t have been invested enough in the book to care how it turned out one way or another.

What DOES bother me is a situation like this: the book sets itself up as taut romantic suspense. The first 50 pages involve a grisly murder, with the hard-nosed detective investigating the case and becoming sexually involved with a mysterious Eastern European secret agent who may or may not be the key to the killing. And then on page 51, dotty Aunt Mabel shows up with her yappy Pomeranian, Poopy-Pie, hilarious hijinks ensue, and the dog ends up solving the mystery.

GAH.

Or, as in one Cassie Edwards novel reviewed by some poor schmuck on AAR, a novel that gave no indication that it was a paranormal of any sort had an eagle talking to one of the protagonists just to further the plot. What. The. Fuck.

Hype does play a small part in my expectations. They used to play a much bigger role, but after getting burned over and over by hyped-up books that turned out to be either mediocre or downright awful, I’ve learned to a) not buy books solely because of hype, and b) forget as much as I can about the hype and evaluate the book on its own merits.  How successful I am in achieving b), I don’t know. Would I have hated, say, Liz Carlyle’s books less if everyone hadn’t been touting them as The Greatest Love Stories EVAR? I don’t know. Maybe, but it’s hard to tell. For what it’s worth, when I think a story sucketh the big hairy one, I have very concrete reasons, and “I was soooo disappointed that this book isn’t as good as what everyone says it is” isn’t usually one of them--not for new-to-me authors, anyway. It’s definitely a factor when reading a book by a favorite author; for instance, I’m not sure if my disgust with The Last Hellion is because it’s a genuinely bad book, or because I placed impossible expectations on Loretta Chase.

I may be full of shit, of course. I may be subconsciously applying different standards when reading different genres, have different expectations based on covers, blurbs, format (trade vs. mass market vs. hardcover vs. e-book), etc., expectations that DO affect how I perceive a story. But from what I can tell, I don’t think these different expectations affect my reading experience in any significant way.

Some sites have “Water Coolers” where you talk about what you want; other sites have open threads to talk about whatever you want.

We have the Open Sesame, because creating an open thread with references to other things that are often “open” in a romance novel would lead to very interesting Google hits, indeed!

So- what’s on your mind? Whaddya wanna talk about?