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

Lina, or Carolina, is the owner of Pani del Goddess, a Tulsa-based bakery. She’s quite an atypical heroine, in that she is older (y’all, she’s 43!) and she’s survived the end of a marriage that left her caught between a lack of confidence – her husband left her for a younger, more fertile woman – and a regrowth of her own capabilities. She’s the sole proprietor of a successful bakery using her grandmother’s Italian recipes, and is doing marvelously well until her accountant gives her horrid advice that leaves her deep in debt to the IRS. Facing a great blow to her ego and her bank account, she goes searching for food items to use in an expanded luncheon menu to try to earn back the money she needs and finds an old cookbook in a used book store: The Italian Goddess Cookbook.

Part recipe guide and part spellbook, the cookbook offers several options for Lina’s luncheon menu, and she decides to try out a recipe at home, since, as a proper Italian woman, she’s got plenty of the core ingredients in her home, including good wine. Gotta love a woman who keeps good wine in her home.

The recipe for Pizza Della Romana, or Pizza by the Meter (nice pun there that only becomes obvious in the following chapters) instructs her to light a candle, say some incantations and verses of gratitude to the Goddess Demeter, and leave an offering of dough sprinkled with wine, which Lina chooses to place outside at the base of a tree in her courtyard.

While she completes the recipe, she begins to feel prickles of sensation gathering around her, and as she places the dough at the base of the tree and makes her personal request of the Goddess as per the instructions, a unique flower blooms suddenly, releasing a beautiful aroma that Lina can’t help but sample. As she leans in for one last sniff, she suddenly finds herself sucked into the flower, and emerges in a completely different world, facing a woman on a throne, who tells her she is Demeter, and that Lina’s request is granted, if Lina will complete a task for Demeter in return.

Lina is stunned, and, much to my admiration, not at all cowed by the Goddess in front of her. She agrees to the request: she will inhabit the body of Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, and descend to the Underworld to lend the presence of a Goddess to Hades’ realm. In return, Persephone, Goddess of Spring, will inhabit her body, run the bakery and restore it to financial health, paying off her debt to the IRS in full and tripling profits in six months’ time.

So Lina descends to the Underworld, where she is greeted as Persephone and treated accordingly. Her presence causes a great deal of attention among the dead, who are more than eager to have a Goddess among them, paying attention to them, and listening to their needs. Then, Lina meets Hades, who is more than confused at the presence of the Goddess of Spring in his realm, and finds herself attracted to him – not at all part of the bargain of her visit to the Underworld.

Lina’s interaction with Hades makes up the most marvelous part of the book. Aside from PC Cast’s talent with description and her imaginative rendering of what the Realm of the Dead would look like, her creation of Lina as a mature heroine was a brilliant move. Lina is old enough to appreciate the young Goddess’s body she finds herself inhabiting, but also woman enough to have to talk herself out of feeling sorry for her aged self, and the body she will ultimately return to. She battles feelings of self-pity regarding body image several times, but rather than growing monotonous and eliciting a “Get OVER it already” response from yours truly, I found myself cheering Lina on, and thinking, “Well, now, that’s a clever way to talk yourself out of the my-butt-is-too-big doldrums.”

Further, Lina is also far from being a naïve woman who is clueless about men, and is able to see past Hades’ inexperience in talking to women, especially Goddesses, and view what must be beneath the surface of his often brusque and distant behavior. She looks at his creations in the Underworld and rightly realizes that a man without passion would never have been able to create such a place, or decorate it in such a thoughtful yet profoundly beautiful manner. Further, she is not at all repulsed by his connection to the dead, as most of the other immortals are, and she respects his attention to his duties as Lord of the Underworld.

And if I can remove my wrist from my forehead for a moment and recover from my maidenly swoon (snort!), let me just say, oh, my stars, that Hades. Tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic, dedicated, passionate, and convinced that he is flawed because he doesn’t view intimacy as a disposable item as the other immortals do. He isn’t interested in mere dalliances, because he has witnessed the bond between mated human souls, and covets that love and dedication for himself, even as he knows that no other immortal will likely fall in love, much less fall in love with him.

Ultimately, what makes this book so delicious for me is that everyone, even Persephone and Demeter, comes to appreciate the value of their own lives and the lives of others. Moreover, this is one of those stories based on a theme or myth that I’m already familiar with, and I began to dread how Cast would handle the ending of that myth, with Persephone spending six months in the Underworld, thus creating fall and winter as her mother, who is Goddess of Earth and Harvest, mourns her daughter and sends the earth into temporary death, and then returning to her mother’s side for six months of spring and summer. I, of course, should have trusted Cast that a happily ever after was easily wrought by twisting the meaning of the established myth into one that focuses more on the female powers of both Lina and Persephone. At no time does Lina fall back into a powerless state, which would be easy since she’s a mortal and she’s wandering around in a realm of Gods and Goddesses. She comes to realize her own power and talent, and appreciate the talent – and flaws – of the immortals around her.

The only caveat I have to this book, my copy of which bears a shocking complete lack of marked corners where I signal passages that were jarring or otherwise peculiar for use in my later reviews, was the curious use of product and concept placement. On one hand, the Batman movie franchise is well known enough that using it as a method of describing Hades as a dark, tortured hero is familiar and certainly appropriate. But when an author mentions specific actors – if you find that actor repulsive, does it ruin the book for you? In my personal case, no, but I have to wonder, for example, if I prefer Michael Keaton and you prefer Christian Bale, and the author prefers George Clooney, who you hate, can you enjoy the book without picturing Dr. Doug from ER? Personally, it’s no problem for me, but I am always curious about the decision to locate a book within reality, though when the book is a complete and total fantasy, grounding it with familiar names and concepts might be a calculated and wise decision on Cast’s part.

However, product placement: this is a pet peeve of mine. At one point Persephone mentions a very specific mid-range bottle of wine by vineyard and name, almost like an advertisement. In my experience, unless you’re referring to one of the few singularly great bottles of wine, a Chateau Petrus or Yquem, for example, which is like college tuition in a bottle, few people refer to mid-range wines by their names, unless they’re ordering from a menu. Plus, and this is certainly particular to me, Cast mentions a specific type of wine that has an absolutely annoying commercial that I hear ALL the time on the radio, so to read about it made me think of that irritating, self-congratulatory monologue about the benefits of this particular wine.

However, I will be frank: that is the only negative thing I have to say about this book. I loved Lina, I loved me some Hades, and I loved the subversion of an established male-centered myth into a happily ever after ending for two women, and the creation of a mortal woman who learns that even if she’s not immortal, she and all other women are certainly possessing of the powers of a Goddess. 

(Side note: This sounds good in theory, but unless the girl keeps her head completely still AND takes care not to mess up the lip-prints of the girl(s) who blazed the trail before her, I don’t see how this would work.)

Gin invites various classmates, all of whom serve as stupendously wooden archetypes. Here’s a quick run-down of several of them:

Sandy: Good-two-shoes girl who’s best friends with Gin because… actually, I have NO IDEA why she’s friends with Gin. Sandy has no idea either. Neither does Gin. This is one of the book’s many mysteries.

Jade: Skinny, hot, popular, smart, into championing causes such as getting rid of the dress code. In short: a tiresome paragon.

Ash and Rose: GOD. These two are so annoying. Every time they came on the scene, I was overcome by an urge to smack ‘em in the face with a two-by-four. They’re the perfect couple and obviously meant to be the book’s moral center. They’ve been dating for over a year, but they haven’t done more than kiss and they don’t plan to do more for a while yet. They’re supposed to be different and cute and inspire admiration for a) their moral and physical purity, and b) their fearlessness about Being Different and Defying Norms and all that, but really, all they inspire in me is heaving nausea.

Hunter: Handsome, amoral asshole with a peener that burrrrrrns, oh how it burrrrrrrns, but oh boy, he sure loves getting head.

Perry: Closeted gay boy who’s allegedly snarky and smart, but more often than not comes across as petulant, delusional and mumbly. I’m not kidding. Dude mumbles all the time in this book, even when Hunter’s dick isn’t in his mouth.

Skye and Rod: The archetypal Teenage Couple Who Has Sex Before They’re Ready. Teenage Premarital Sex: Don’t Do It! Only marginally less annoying than Ash and Rose.

All these characters have about the liveliness and realism of marionettes being worked by a puppeteer on quaaludes. Their motivations are opaque at best and downright puzzling at worst. Gin, for instance: why is she so sexually precocious? What little we see of her family life seems stable, and we’re never provided with any believable reasoning for why she’s so promiscuous.

Also, all those people screaming about how obscene this book is, how it appeals mostly to the prurient interest? Hate to destroy these people’s lurid suck-n-fuck fantasies involving hot, hard-bodied teenage boys getting blowjobs from barely pubescent girls (oh, you KNOW some of that outrage was fueled by a lethal combination of displaced horniness and the accompanying guilt over that horniness), but Tod Goldberg said it best: “The book is about as titillating as a bowel movement.” Well, assuming you’re not the type to be titillated by bowel movements, that is—there does seem to be a terrifyingly large number of these people in certain newsgroups.

At any rate, rest assured there are no explicit sex scenes. There are exactly two scenes involving oral sex in the whole book. The first one takes place off the page: We basically enter the scene as Hunter is zipping up. The other involves Skye and Rod, and…. OK, there’s no way I can do justice to Ruditis’ deathless prose, so here’s a quote:

Her breathing intensified. She grabbed a clump of the comforter in her hand, squeezing tightly. She was feeling all the things she had read about in the trashy romance novels her mom kept hidden under the bed they were on. Skye’s bosom heaved. Her loins burned with desire. Waves of pleasure washed over her body ready to crash on the shore.

The sad thing is, while that scene deliberately attempts to skewer romance novel sex scenes, the rest of the book is written every bit as clumsily. To give you an idea of how clunky it is: Think of an episode of Saved By The Bell. No, not back when it was even remotely amusing and featured Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani-Amber Thiesen and god knows what other hyphenated teenybopper hottie. I’m talking the recent seasons in which Screech is, like, 42 years old and STILL a creepily underdeveloped buffoon amidst a host of bland Hollywood hardbodies trying their best to look like teenagers.

OK, so can you picture one of those episodes in your head? Good. Because seriously? This book bears an eerie resemblance to one of those episodes. The writing is so goddamn stilted that should all the global warming alarmists prove to be right and Earth is flooded in a sea of melted icecaps in the next few years, the prose in this book will remain high and dry.

And while the book isn’t titillating per se, you can tell that Ruditis tries to be all nudge-nudge wink-wink with the occasional double-entendre, and most of these attempts just don’t work. For instance, check out the opening paragraph:

Gin took the slender shaft of the tube in her palm. She gave a gentle tug along the base and watched as the lipstick extended to its full length.

Admittedly, it’s been YEARS since I’ve worn lipstick, but as far as I know, you twist the base to get the lipstick to extend. I’ve never encountered a lipstick that required you to tug on the base; if nothing else, it makes no sense. Tugging the base would logically mean the tip would retreat, unless the lipstick manufacturer created an unduly complicated and completely counterintuitive mechanism that would extend the lipstick when you pulled. Either Ruditis has no idea how lipstick works, or he knows and decided to describe it inaccurately in an effort to preserve this truly pointless (and execrable) lipstick-as-penis imagery.

The book does get the core messages through, and they’re good messages for teens—or anyone, for that matter: oral sex carries real risks and consequences, and having sex before you’re ready isn’t that great an idea. Too bad the message is delivered by such a boring, clumsy messenger. Several other YA books have dealt with teenage sex and relationships with much more depth, grace and readability; the memorable ones for me were Deenie and Forever by Judy Blume, but I’m sure these are pretty dated by today’s standards.

In short, the book and the subject matter had lots of potential, but ended up with all the depth, believablity and complexity of an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers—that is, if the Pink Ranger got all humpy with the Green Ranger and decided to give him a hummer between costume changes, then infected the rest of the team with gonorrhea.

(Actually, there’s probably pornographic MMPR fanfic involving just such scenarios. And what’s worse, I’d much prefer to read this fanfic than watch an actual episode of MMPR. Oh, the humanity.)