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

If You Dare features a non-cartoon cover, thankfully, and an art thief, Damien Black, who has just retired to Atlanta, where a scurrilous restaurateur has asked him to take on one more job. Not sure if he wants to trust the client, Damien visits the art museum where the heist is to take place, and meets the new director of the Atlanta Musuem, Angel Lafonte, who is smart, sophisticated, stunning, and the sister of Damien’s rather greasy, pushy potential client.

Angel is immediately knocked flat by Damien, and a puddle from a rainstorm, and he steals her cell phone and leaves her with his in order to ensure that he will see her again. Petty thievery and pickpocketing is a new technique in my experience of “ways the hero meets the heroine” plot devices, and instead of making Angel feel threatened and controlled, it causes her to up the stakes and steal something of his right back. A backbone she has, yes.

But only where the hero is concerned. Her sleazy brother has a tendency to treat her like an object – his object – and it’s more than creepy and gross. He has men following her, forcing her to dodge them in shopping malls, leaving her car at one entrance then hailing a cab from the other side of a crowded store. She tells him repeatedly to have his “goons” stop tailing her, but of course it continues.

He also has significant gambling debts, and has loan sharks after him, hence his pressuring Damien to take on one last job for him, a multi-million dollar heist from Angel’s art museum. Protecting his sister from himself is not something on darling brother’s mind, apparently, but woe be the man who gets near her while his goons are watching.

Meanwhile, a French cop, after Damien on the theory that he is le Phantome, a famous art thief who has eluded capture, has come to Atlanta, and begins following Damien wherever he can, tracking down his childhood friends and guardians, and generally shadowing Damien every step, regardless of what the Atlanta police think of his actions. Sadly, rental cars can’t keep up with Damien’s collection of sports cars, so Damien can lose him on the highway – so long as there’s no traffic.

Wait. I’ve been to Atlanta. How is this thief dude can zoom all over the city without getting stuck in traffic, while the minute I touch down I spend most of my time in Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams? So not fair. I want an art thief chauffer in a Maserati, next time I’m in Atlanta.

The romance in this book is tricky, since the forces working against the couple consist of her brother, and their own unwillingness to be fully forthright with each other, leaving her brother ample room to sabotage their romance by revealing all the things Damien has been hiding from Angel, such as the true nature and origin of his evident fortune.

As an aside: is it not a fantasy complete when one reads a romance with a spectacularly wealthy hero or heroine? I dig contemporaries with seriously wealthy individuals; it’s one thing when the hero is a construction worker or a pharmaceutical salesman. It’s quite another when the hero is a master at his craft and is fabulously successful and well off for his efforts.

My problems with this book are simple: one, there are serious holes in the story, and by the time you realize how the entire puzzle fits together, which I can’t reveal without entire blowing the ending, you feel cheated of the experience of knowing what the technicalities of the art thievery entail. For example, in Mission:Impossible, did you care about the preparatory work, the assignment, or the romance, or did you care about the hero descending from a wire into a room to type on a computer suspended in midair, evading notice from the security system? Is it not much cooler to check out how Charlie’s Angels jump across security beams and trip alarm systems than it is to see them sprawled on Charlie’s couch? Anyone see the movie “Sneakers” with Robert Redford? There’s one scene where his team heats a room up to 98.7 degrees so he can walk very slowly across it, evading both the heat sensors and the motion detectors, to steal something. It’s the best scene, and the ingenuity of the heist is half the fun. So to have an art thief as the hero, and not pay any attention to describing the thiefing that goes on is disappointing, to say the least.

Further, Angel as a character is a bit of an enigma. First, she’s a strong woman who has earned a position as a director of an art museum. She’s knowledgeable about several types and eras of paintings and sculptures, and she’s attractive and savvy, able to go up against a charming, suave and attractive man who swipes her cell phone from her purse and match him charm for charm.

But then she allows her brother to push her into dangerous situations, and never ceases to give him more rope of forgiveness and excuse with which to hang himself. She’s a classic enabler, which makes sense in that he is her family and she feels she should stand by him, but by the time she has realized he has placed her in significant personal danger, she’s forced to rely on others to get her out. Her brother owes significant amounts of money to a uber-villain named Merrick, and Merrick demands Angel as repayment: the opportunity to sleep with her. And her brother doesn’t say no. He begs Angel to go out with him, even knowing that Merrick is dangerous, certainly homicidal, and not above raping her should she say no to giving him what he truly wants.

Even then, she refuses to give her brother the assing he truly deserves. If a sibling offered me up like that, I’d come seriously close to doing them lethal harm. Yet his actions have no satisfying consequences, and as a reader, seeing the villain figure be told his penalty is to have his sister cut him from her life, when she wasn’t all that pleased to have him there in the first place, is disappointing and irritating, especially when you want to root for such an otherwise brave and clever woman.

The primary characters are Meredith “Merry” Vance and Nicolas Craven. The cock in question belongs to Nicolas, in case you were concerned that it was that kind of romantica. Merry is the daughter of a Duke with three older brothers, all merrily married (sorry couldn’t resist that one). Merry is older than she should be to be “on the market” and is a outspoken tomboy, with freckles, frizzy curly hair, and no delusions that she’s beautiful. She’s horse-mad and quite the competent stable master, but her family, particularly her mother, despair of seeing her married.

Merry has decided that she doesn’t want to be married at all. She inherits a small estate from a grandmother in ten years’ time, and is trying to hold out and remain a spinster so she can become a modestly wealthy spinster in the future.

Her mother, however, is being blackmailed into seeing her married off to her husband’s estate manager’s son, a shy, but kind and good-looking man named Ernest. Merry’s mother has gone to great and cruel lengths to keep her daughter from being pursued by other eligible men, and as a reader, you want to hate her. And that’s just fine because the mother is eminently hateable.

Nicolas Craven is a painter with a slowly-growing following among the ton. He’s just finished a portrait of Merry’s father, and he, and Merry, once she sees it hung, feel he’s captured the essence of the older aristocracy: haughty, but completely confused as to what the world is becoming, and powerless to stop it from changing.

Craven is popular as a portrait artist, but only among male members of society, as he is a known rake who frequently entertains loose women in his home. “No decent woman would sit for him,” Merry’s mother says. Oh, ho.

Merry’s mother has meanwhile employed similar blackmail techniques to persuade Merry to marry Ernest, and Merry finds herself in a position to lose those things she truly loves and cares about, including her maid and her stable of horses, in order to preserve her precious freedom.

And so Merry decides, after a deus ex machina encounter with Nicolas in the street, to run off to his house, and sit for him as a portrait subject, thereby ruining herself for marriage and getting her insistent parents off her back.

Merry does not tell Nicolas she is the Duke of Monmouth’s daughter and agrees to sit for a nude portrait of herself cast as Lady Godiva, while living in Nicolas’ house. Further, she agrees to learn the arts of the nouque. Nicolas does not allow Merry to think she is anything but another woman in a long series of conquests for him, even though he finds himself falling for her, and reminds her that her time with him lasts as long has he has any interest in her physically. His friends imply that there is no alternative ending to their story, even as Merry equivocates whether the erotic pleasures she experiences with Nicolas would feel half as good if she weren’t head over curls in love with his Craven self. He wants to hump her; she’s in love with him and therefore is able to enjoy the humping. Odd how I didn’t expect a emotional-attachment-precludes-sex element in a historical romantica, even if it is a Holly novel, where there is a happily ever after ending for at least two of the principal characters in most of her stories.

Nicolas gives Merry a thorough education in the erotic arts, but within the realm of his cock lies the first problem I have with this book. I know that the strict sensibilities of the Victorian era were marked with outrageous subtexts to express all that repressed sexuality. Flower language, for one - I once read a brief article about how one bouquet of the wrong flower -or the right one - could send some serious humpty dance messages. And it’s not like I’m talking about the giant sex flower, either.

Because I was expecting some subtlety in the erotica, or perhaps some acknowledgement of the societal suppression or their deliberate release from that repression, the erotic language of the book struck me as jarring. I can’t decide if it is truly fair to discredit the author for historical details that I was expecting, but I can demerit my rating of the book for the often-startling introduction of the naughty talk used by the characters, particularly the hero. At one point, they’re dancing around their feelings for each other, after the heroine has been ill to the point that the hero worried for her life, then the hero says he wants to “cram her full of every inch of [him] [she] can take.” Well, now. Just slap me over the head with your giant wang, why don’t you, and tell me what you really want to do?

My other problem with this book was the multiple lies the characters tell one another. I could see the big crisis of their relationship coming a mile away: Merry would be able to see past Nicolas’ deceptions and forgive him, but Nicolas would feel that Merry had deliberately made a fool of him, and lied about her true name and social standing to trap him. Aside from the ever-popular “I lied but your lie was much worse” device, how did this man not realize the woman posing for him was not at all a housemaid, and was in fact well-born and well-bred? I mean, he remarks upon her posture, her bearing, her manner of speech. She knows how to dress, and has excellent social skills, even with his friends, who are certainly of a lower class than both Nicolas and Merry. How did he not figure out who she really was?

Further, MINOR SPOILER, he never thought to wonder why a boy the exact age as his estranged and distant son has suddenly taken up a position in his house, exhibits no training or skills in the house-caring department, and wears a scarf over his head to hide his face. I couldn’t even tell you the number of times I thought to myself, “Oh, come on, dude.”

This almost became a novel wherein I could write in the review that the hero was indeed too stupid to live, except that he didn’t so much endanger his life blithely doing what he pleased; he just couldn’t get a clue if he danced naked in a field of horny clues wearing clue musk during clue mating season. 

Another odd piece about this book was that it couldn’t seem to decide whether it was a romantica with exceptional sexual activities featured within it, or if it was a historical romance with some hard-core sex talk thrown in. If it were anyone but Emma Holly, I’d say that the author didn’t really understand what romantica and erotica were. It’s not a romance with the word “cock” and “pussy” thrown in like icing on the cupcake. Having read other Holly books, I expected some elements of sexual exploration, not just explicit descriptions of his ranging wang and her endless orgasms.

There is some mention in reference to the hero’s backstory of ménage a trios with two of his friends who are a Victorian version of a swinger couple, though they seem to engage in affairs to inspire jealousy, but there’s no specific mention of sexual adventures on the part of the hero or heroine, aside from deflowering her and then having sex in untenable positions.

For example, at one page, the heroine mentions how she is petite when she stands in front of the hero. Then, two pages later, they have sex with her facing a door, with the hero behind her. Completely unrealistic – I’m 5’4” and Hubby is 5’8”, and there’s not any way we could have sex standing up. I mean, the height difference is impossible. Even in the few pornos I’ve seen, I’ve spotted a small bench or stool under the female so she can be propped up to the correct height. A nitpicky point, perhaps, but enough to yank me out of the story and dump me back into reality. Unfortunately, I was at that moment sitting next to a particularly stinky person on the train who didn’t cover his mouth when he coughed, and would have much preferred to stay in the story than experience the reality next to me.

To define specifically why I scored this book at the low grade that I did, I have to explain that the story itself was good. Twists and turns, adventures to other countries, and protagonists that I did indeed like, though they often got on my nerves, all made finishing the book a pleasure. But did this book need to be an erotic or romantica novel? No. Did the erotic elements add to the story? Were they elements of his or her character, and did they serve to develop or explore new facets to their personalities? No. It was a fairly done romance with erotic language thrown in. It wasn’t even a spice, like a saffron or a nutmeg taste to a fine sauce. It was like finding whole gherkin pickles in your consommé – jarring and not entirely enjoyable.

The shades of the hero’s backstory and sexual history were interesting, but there wasn’t enough specific interest to make it a valid or valuable part of the story. Further, if he really was that much of a sexual libertine, there was a lot more he could have done with the heroine than what all they did, particularly as a device to explore trust in another person even on a shaky unknown foundation to a relationship. She didn’t know all that much about him, and he didn’t know who she really was, but there were all kinds of soul-shattering orgasms going on. Sexual acts that require trust would have certainly added a spicy element to the development of their characters and to their relationship, and would have justified this being an “erotic historical.” As it was, it was a romance with a giant plastic cock glued on the front.

Yes, product placement in novels is a great marketing opportunity and another way to generate revenue, but frankly, I live in a society already saturated with marketing messages and advertisements; the possibility of one of the few ad-free spaces in my life being actively taken over makes me want to cry.

Yes, novels aren’t entirely ad-free and haven’t been for ages. I own several Harlequin, Leisure and Zebra books with those cardboard book club advert inserts. The back pages are often dedicated to advertisements for other books and excerpts for upcoming books. The difference is, I can skip through those without a beat and without ever missing the story. When the product is mentioned within the story, I can’t avoid it.

Many contemporary novels of all sorts often mention specific brands and products during the course of the story, and like I mentioned in Kate’s blog, I think it often serves as convenient shorthand more than anything else. For example: A pair of white Nikes vs. a pair of white Keds vs. a pair of white sneakers all offer different mental images. And sometimes, items like these can even offer insights into characters. Think of a heroine whose favorite shoes are a pair of battered hot pink Converse All-Stars decorated with glittery Transformers stickers vs. a heroine who wears only high-end Nikes or Reeboks—if she bothers to wear sneakers at all—vs. a heroine who deliberately removes or defaces any obvious logos on her sneakers so you can’t tell what brand she’s wearing. Of course, one can omit the brand name entirely instead and spend a bit of time describing the footwear instead; more words may be expended, but I think this method is oftentimes much more effective than just shooting out the brand name. I mean, think of Min in Bet Me and her shoe fetish. I had a wonderfully concrete impression of all the shoes she wore, and to this day I can remember that the pair Cal gave her was white, fuzzy and featured a bunny face, while she owned a pair with fish on them and another pair that had cherries. I’m pretty positive no shoe designers were mentioned in that book. Betsy from Undead and Unwed? She wore Manolo Blahniks, and that’s about all I can remember.

Too much name-brand dropping can also become a distraction, and it assumes that the reader will get the reference. That’s not necessarily the worst part; a skilled author should be able to work the references in without making it too clunky. What bothers me the most is the compulsory nature of the deal. Just thinking about it makes my stomach ache. (NOTE TO SELF: May very well be the chili dogs I had for dinner talking.) Maybe I’m too much of an idealist when it comes to the notion of maintaining a certain amount of artistic integrity. And hey, I admit it’s also a lot easier for me to rabbit on about the importance of artistic integrity when I don’t make my living with my creative pursuits—I sell my soul other ways instead, mwaha. So I guess my paranoia right now centers around scenarios like this: what if Microsoft pays mega-bucks to an author to mention its products in a flattering light in a book featuring a hardcore computer geek, when many hardcore geeks would rather cut off their left nut than install anything Microsoft-related on their computers?

I mean, what if the heroine is really, TRULY a Coca-Cola girl in a Pepsi-sponsored novel?

Yes, questions like these really do keep me awake at night. And yes, in a very odd but very real way, I think there’s a substantive difference between an author choosing on her own free will to create a heroine obsessed with collecting Hello Kitty figurines vs. Sanrio paying the author money to make a previously Hello Kitty-free heroine into one who won’t rest easy until she has every Badtz Maru coffee mug ever created.