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

The book opens with said heroine, Whitney “Pink” Pearl (for the eraser, get it?), testifying before a Senate Finance Committee regarding her former employers, a prominent accounting firm which was being investigated for aiding in the Enron-esque financing shenanigans of Marvel Energy. The firm’s intentions had been to try to pin the entire mess on Pink should the fraud be discovered, even though the responsibility for the monetary monkey business went back several years and up several corporate levels above her head.

The context of testifying gives Pink the opportunity to explain to the committee and the reader what the heck the problem is: she has proof that the executives of her firm and her boss specifically cooperated in the Marvel financial funny business that has bankrupted the company. Her proof is in the form of a single disk with copies of email and documents she swiped from her boss’s computer. But the disk was stashed in a box that was mixed up with another similar box, and sold at a yard sale, along with a blow-up sex doll named Mr. Bob, to a daffy older woman who has since gone on vacation. So Pink has to wait for the woman to get back from vacation, find the box, and bring the evidence to the finance committee to prove she isn’t making all these allegations out of a desire for revenge for having been fired for bringing her findings to her boss in the first place.

The explanation of her testimony sets up the plot marvelously, and gives a great deal of insight into Pink’s character – she’s wicked pissed off on the behalf of all the people who are getting screwed out of their entire investment portfolios because Marvel couldn’t manage to practice sound business ethics, and she’s doubly pissed that she’s broke, notorious, and unemployable in her field while the executives in question are living the same luxury life they always did. But by virtue of being broadcast on television, her testimony creates a situation wherein everyone with an interest in the case itself knows that all that stands in the way of years in the big house for the guilty parties is a sex doll with a disk nestled next to his plastic ass. Plenty of time to interfere, and threaten Pink – which is exactly what happens.

Pink, as the whistle-blower, was not popular with either her former employers or the employees of Marvel Energy, and even though she’s on the news and something of a household name, she’s forced to move back to her hometown of Midland, Texas, to take a job with her mother’s small town accounting firm. Someone is following her, leaving poop on her doorstep, ransacking her hotel rooms, generally scaring the hell out of her, and making the process of rebuilding her life while dealing with her notoriety AND trying to clear her name a pain in the ass, if not a complete impossibility. Doing the right thing can suck a royal wang, is the subtext of this book. It takes a very strong person with a great deal of smarts to actually navigate the consequences of pissing off high powered executives, entire corporations, and investors, all while having to testify live on television in front of members of the US Senate.

This was my first Silhouette Bombshell, and after a bit of exploring online and bothering Candy, I understood the format, which I didn’t quite get at first. The focus is very much on the heroine, and very much on the process of her kicking ass in an untenable situation, and the romance aspect is almost secondary to the ass-kickingness of the heroine. In this book and its sequel, there’s not just one hero, there are two. Possibly three. Any more, and you need an accountant to keep up with them all.

First, there’s Senator Steve Santorelli, who is on the finance committee and an easy person to gaze at while testifying. He seems to believe Pink is trying to do the right thing, but, as a widower and one of the most eligible bachelors of Washington, his seeming romantic interest in Pink is personally flattering and professionally dangerous.

Then, there’s her new direct boss, Sam, who looks like Sammy Hagar from Van Halen, and who teaches her the intricacies of investigating on behalf of their clients. There’s definitely chemistry between Sam and Pink, but it’s never addressed by Pink directly in her narration of the story. She thinks he’s good looking and finds him fascinating, but there isn’t any forthright mention of zings of electric hot mamajama shooting up her arm when she touches his hand. Sam is mostly for noticing but not acting upon.

But then there’s Ed. Ed, he’s got the mamajama zing shooters and she’s got definite intentions of acting upon that zing. Pink spends a lot more time discussing the hots she has for Ed than she does the attraction she may feel towards Steve or Sam. To make matters excellently complicated, Ed is retained by Pink’s mother as Pink’s new attorney after Pink fires the attorney who negotiated a useless immunity deal with the finance committee. Ed is a free spirit hottie who owes Pink’s mother a favor and is equally easy to look at, but at their first meeting lays the core of the situation on the line for her: he will represent her, but due to the sequence of events leading to the missing disk (no one really cared about the sex doll with the disk, and that’s a shame, if you ask me), she has to both stay away from Marvel Energy employees in Midland, and be careful because obviously someone wants her removed from the situation, preferably permanently.

This is where the book started to lose me a bit. This isn’t one of those mystery situations wherein some people know some things, and other people know other things, and once you figure out who knows more than they should, you know whodunit. In this book, Pink tells everyone everything, and is way trusting of the police, her attorney and the people she works with, almost to the point of seeming contradictory to the ass-kicking smart-alec she is. Pink is no dummy, and I sometimes felt the savvy part of her character was often offset by the number of times she filled in one character or another on the details of what had happened to her that day – and in one day, Pink has a crapload of things that can happen to her.

Also, it’s hard to tell who the primary hero of the situation is, because as far as she gets with Ed, and they’ve definitely rounded third, she still doesn’t brush Steve Santorelli off whenever he asks her out and demonstrates how interested he is in spending time with her once the committee business has concluded. Is she feeling pity for him because he’s never, according to his own admission, asked anyone out since his wife died? Is she charmed by his banter whenever he calls her? Is she flattered by the attention from such a powerful, hot man, despite wanting to dive into Ed’s pants at any given moment? It’s almost disingenuous, and doesn’t always come across as “torn between two men” as much as “I really want dude A but dude B doesn’t suck either, in case dude A is too much for me to handle.” Part of her reticence could be from not knowing who she can really trust, or from Ed’s slightly bad-boy lifestyle that reminds her of her ex-husband, or from just not knowing who to pick. And since this is a series, there will be some degree of triangulation going on for a good while. But I was never 100% sure if she was as interested in Steve as she was in Ed, or if she stopped herself from cutting Steve loose out of some need for a safety net in case things with Ed didn’t work out, and vice versa.

As for Ed, there’s a lot to wonder about in his character, too. Not only does she not always listen to his advice (which would make for a boring Bombshell character, I agree) but he’s just this side of suspicious to me. Not only is he ALWAYS around whenever Pink is in danger, but he is alarmingly close by whenever she needs someone to help her out of a seriously tight situation. At one point, he saves her ass and she asks him, “How did you happen to be there?” He spins a tale about seeing her car and following her out of curiosity, but there’s still that lingering doubt in my mind whether he’s legitimate or if he’s a bad guy. He’s just over the border into possible villainy at some points, but then his admitted feelings of zingful hot attraction towards Pink go a long ways to redeeming him. The oddness of Ed keeps him intriguing, and while I found myself annoyed that it wasn’t all spelled out for me, I also had to take a step back and remind myself that this is a series, and that all the questions won’t be answered in the first book.

Now, if you’re going to write a book with an independent, smart woman who investigates crime and attempts to kick danger’s ass, and who is torn between two, possibly three, men, you are going to get comparisons to Evanovich’s Plum series. I don’t want to skirt around the topic, but I also don’t want to even begin to suggest that this is a copycat series. Hardly! But if you enjoy the Plum series, like I do, it is a valid question to ask how one compares to the other.

There’s a definite difference between the two heroines, though both do a good share of stumbling into situations that quickly go beyond what they expected. Pink is perhaps sharper than Stephanie, who often wanders into situations completely unprepared and makes her best way out of them. Also, I don’t know if Plum can add, because if she could, she’d have figured out that she couldn’t be making a living on the number of documented cases she’s brought in.

The similarities between the series extend beyond the heroines, though: both books share a character created by the setting. Texas and specifically small-city Midland, Texas, is as much a character in the book as Trenton, New Jersey is in the Plum series. Further, both women find themselves in situations that most of us would never encounter, and reading about women kicking danger’s ass in various forms is always satisfying.

However, a key difference is that there’s a large streak of humor through the Plum series, from the supporting characters in Plum’s family to the general bizarre hilarity of the situations Stephanie finds herself in. You don’t blink if the next person brought in has coated himself in olive oil and rolled in oregano for that crispy-fried texture.

The situations Pink encounters in this novel aren’t as superficially funny, because corporate shithole-ness reminiscent of Enron and Tyco did happen and there are people all over Texas who lost their entire retirement plans after the fraud was revealed and the company went under. So there’s an element of emotional and factual realism to the story, even if on the surface you’re rooting for a heroine named Whitney who was given a nickname based on a rubber pencil eraser.  Essentially you are rooting for the unexpectedness of the heroine: a woman who had an incredible job and a lavish salary and position – who chucked it all to do what was right because of an unwavering moral compass.

Watching her put her life back together is more of a focus than the romance, but Feagan has balanced quite a few Big Questions, from the integrity of one of the heroes to the future of the heroine’s relationship with the other, in such a way that these questions can continue through multiple books in the series without losing my interest, because my interest is held. By an accountant. No kidding.

From the sounds of it, you’d think that behaving like a pissed-off, marauding soldier (yeah, that’s sexy--ask some Bosnian refugees what REAL marauding soldiers do*) or an unwashed mountain man is the be-all and end-all of platonic masculinity. Real men just take what they want! Real men don’t cry! Real men don’t care what they look or smell like! Real men sprout hair from any and all parts and orifices, and are PROUD of that hair, dammit!

In short: Real men aren’t pussies. In Romancelandia, there seems to be an underlying assumption that the only real men, especially men in historicals, are alpha heroes--VERY alpha heroes who, if they existed in real life, would be jailed for battery and sexual assault.

But if you read literature written by people living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, George Eliot, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, etc. ad nauseam, and if you look at former societal standards of what constituted ideal or desirable manly behavior, there was quite a bit of what would qualify as girly-man behavior going on, especially in the middle and upper classes, which is what most historical romances portray.

Courtly love. Code of chivalry. WIGS, POETRY, SATIN AND LACE, FOR GOD’S FUCKING SAKES. Byron wrote love poetry and he was the fucking rock star of his age. Men who write love poetry NOW?

The word starts with “p” and ends in “ussies.”

So repeat after me: standards of masculine behavior are changeable. Standards of masculine behavior are changeable.

Above and beyond all that, I also find it fascinating when people use comparisons to femininity in a pejorative sense. It’s one thing to not like a certain type of hero and elaborate why; it’s another to drag the opposite gender into it--though I guess I admire the efficiency in slamming both at once. And that thought led to another tangential musing, one that I think I’ve talked about before on this site: It used to be that masculine women were viewed with a certain degree of horror, but nowadays, if given a choice, I think many, many parents (at least those in industrialized nations) would prefer daughters who like toy soldiers and trucks vs. sons who like Barbie dolls and sparkly purses. The stigma of femininity is still very much with us; this is evident in the fact that women get to wear pants but men aren’t allowed to wear dresses and skirts. It seems to me that when blurring of gender roles and lines are allowed, allowing women to adopt superficial masculine traits is more acceptable than the reverse. Maybe because women WANT to adopt those masculine traits, but most men are not as willing to take on traits associated with the weaker sex?

(Um, sorry for sounding like a half-baked women’s studies paper all of a sudden.)

So following on that, is that why many readers of genre fiction--which often concerns itself with well-known and well-worn tropes and forms--are so discomfited, even hostile, to characters who violate gender lines? And I’m not just talking about romance novels, girly-man heroes and female readers. You can also see this sort of reaction in some male SF readers who seem to have an allergic reaction to assertive female characters in their stories.

But then, as I thought more about it, I realized that what PBW and other people complain about when it comes to annoying girly-men heroes aren’t so much feminine traits as they are just plain annoying traits. They’re talking about heroes who sound smothering, ineffectual, clingy and, well, kind of wimpy. These features are more acceptable when found in women, but c’mon: who likes clingy, ineffectual wimps of ANY gender? When heroines do the same thing, we call them doormats.

So why drag girliness or femininity into it at all?

Think about this another way: it’d be like me comparing a particularly violent alpha asshole hero who physically hurts the heroine to, say, a black dude. I’m not comparing him to a thug, or a criminal--those would be undesirable no matter what race you were. Instead, it’s: What’s with all these heroes treating their heroines the way black men treat their women? What’s with all these ne-roes?

When changed so that the comparison is a bit more charged, it gives it a whole other feel, doesn’t it?

Now, I’m not saying I’m exempt from this sort of gender-based shorthand. Check out how many times I use the word “pussy” pejoratively on this website. So in many ways, it’s a case of pot, kettle, black. The messenger has a whole lot to do with the message, too. PBW gets leeway because she’s a woman as well as a writer and reader of romances, leeway I’m not sure a man who doesn’t read or write romances would get, and I’m sure that if I were black, that my hypothetical comparison would take on other dimensions, too.

Still and all: isn’t it interesting?

Personally, I like all sorts of heroes. I like alpha heroes as long as they don’t cross the line and physically or sexually hurt the heroine. Confident, take-charge types are very attractive. The perfect alpha hero for me is Sebastian Dain from Lord of Scoundrels. He’s bad, he’s stubborn, and he’s a Type A personality--but in just the right way, and we get enough of his backstory that we understand why he’s such an asshole at times.

On the other hand, I also like heroes who are angsty and tortured but not necessarily alpha, like the kind Laura Kinsale excels at creating. And I love beta/gamma-type heroes who take on some of the roles that are typically assigned the heroine, such as healer and nurturer.

I’ve noted before that I enjoy it when taboos involving gender lines are broken, or at least bent and bashed around a bit. It’s part of the reason why I like romances involving cross-dressing. When the characters are feeling what seems, at the surface, to be a homosexual attraction? Love it. Love watching the characters struggle with it. Some people are squicked by the idea that the characters, by evincing this attraction, are not 100% hetero. Most of the people I know who are squicked by this aspect almost always say the hero is showing signs of being gay and they’re worried that he might run off with the footman, when really, he’s showing signs of being bisexual, and tendencies towards monogamy are not, as far as I know, exclusively associated with sexual orientation.

Overall, however, the underlying message is a pretty attractive one to me, even if it’s not necessarily realistic: that it’s the essence of somebody that’s attractive, and not necessarily their packaging, even something as powerful like gender. The moment in Shadow Dance when Sophie tells Valerian (whom she thinks is a woman) that she loves him and is willing to follow him anywhere, even after he tells her he’d have sex with her if she does (again, the assumption being that he’s a woman)? One of my most favorite scenes in any book, anywhere.

In real life, I’m attracted to men who aren’t stereotypically masculine. The metrosexual, body-shaving type? OK, I can’t stand people who primp too much, male OR female, but men who *koff* shave and know how to dress well, who know their way around literature, music and pop culture, who aren’t afraid to display or engage in a discussion about squishy feelings when called for, who are able to poke fun at themselves, who are secure enough to wear make-up and a dress when the occasion calls for it? HOT.

So here’s a salute to the real girly men: men who confound gender stereotypes and expectations and look pretty fucking sexy while doing it. Long may you prosper. There aren’t nearly enough of you in Romancelandia.

* Yes, I realize the whole Conquering Hero fantasy is just that: a fantasy, and that it bears no resemblance to the real-life brutalities perpetrated during war time, but allow me this little bit of hyperbole, eh? Hey, if PBW can do it, why can’t I? Oh, wait I review books, and therefore am lower than the lowliest prokaryote. Sorry, forgot that. That lack of a cell nucleus really fucks with my short-term memory. Also, my ability to use commas, em dashes and parantheses with proper discretion. DAMN YOU, CELL NUCLEI!