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

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? 

So Candy and I got an email from a concerned reader regarding one of the covers we laid some snark on. Seems the author in question not only wrote the book, but also designed the cover. The concerned reader is also a friend of said author, and begged us to take it down before the author saw our comments and her work held up for ridicule.

Candy and I, to quote Candy, were nonplussed. On one hand, are we mean nasty people in real life? Shit no. We’re pretty snarky but we’re not going to kick your dog. We love dogs. And cats. We spend hours making our animals’ food, for crying out loud.

That said, do we want to take the review down? We’re a review site. As Candy pointed out, it’s a dangerous precedent - if we make someone mad with a review, if Emma Holly gets mad at me for saying I didn’t like “The Demons Daughter” and demands I take down the review, are we going to be able to do that? No. As Candy wrote to me, we’re not assessing effort here, we’re assessing aesthetics.

Now the reviews are our opinion; the covers we just find on Google images and say, “Whoa, damn hell.” However, we also know that the covers are (usually) the product of an art department and a marketing department’s thought of what readers want - and we’re happy to point out examples that show that the marketing surveys kind of missed the whole point of what readers want to see and be seen with. (Man titty comes to mind.)

But in the end, our point was to create a site where we could address romance as a genre worthy of individual review and critique, and have the room to say, “How the hell did that reach publication?” As Candy said, “This is not grade school. We are not obliged to play nice or hold hands and say ‘Good job!’”

I do sometimes think, when I write in response to a book I’ve finished, how harsh can I be in a review? I mean, this is someone’s work, and while I would like to point out flaws, I do worry that sometimes my over-reaching harshness will hurt someone’s feelings. *I* sure didn’t stay up until 4am writing the book, so is it really ok for me to use the words “Sucked Donkey Cock” in a review? For that reason, because I know how hard it is to write a novel, I do point out the favorable items and discuss salient points of solid writing or development. And people who have requested our reviews have thanked us for the balanced critique, saying it will make them better writers.

So in the interest of making a “better website,” we’re asking you: take the offending entry down? Or leave it there, and perhaps the author will find our site and be upset? What’s your opinion?