Time for “Good Shit vs. Shit to Avoid,” with special guest PK, who is looking for a particular kind of heroine:
Oh baby, talk nerdy to me.
There was a great ad for some sort of high end kitchen appliance years ago
that featured a very cute lady with naughty librarian glasses and lab coat
standing next to a male model in a designer suit and it said “IQ meets GQ”
and it always made me smile. I love smart girl protagonists, I love quirky
geniuses! I love sexy doctors/scientists/academics/etc. I am looking for
books with heroines like that. Geeks, nerds, scholastic overachievers, etc.
There seems to be a good chunk of mainstream films where the nerd gets the
incredibly hot girl but I want books with nerdy heroines and perhaps not so
nerdy heroes.I am planning a vacation and would love to load up my Nook with tasty beach
reads and could use some help.
Ready, set, go – bring on your recommendations!
The first book I thought of is Three Fates by Nora Roberts. One of the heroines is a complete nerd/neurotic.
Another book is No Other Love by Candace Camp. It takes place in the early 1800’s, and the heroine is smart and passionate about a number of causes (including equality of the classes). The thing about this book is that it is the final book in a trilogy, so you might want to read the other two books as well (A Stolen Heart and Promise Me Tomorrow). In A Stolen Heart, the heroine is the owner of a shipping company from Massachusetts, who goes to London to meet the tea company owner whose tea she will be shipping to the US. In Promise Me Tomorrow, the heroine is a thief that the hero catches casing their host’s property—not exactly nerd material, but she is smart.
Scoundrel by Zoe Archer also features a very smart, bookish heroine.
I’m delighted that so many of the recommendations above are already in my TBR pile!
NO REGRETS by Shannon K. Butcher. The heroine is a mathematical/linguistic genius who plays with cryptology for fun (natch) and the hero is a hot special forces retiree (mid-30s, maybe?). I re-read that book EVERY YEAR. So good!
I have to 2nd Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Nobody’s Baby But Mine – fav fav fav book and it always makes me laugh! “You’re a Cereal Killer!” Nerd scientist with hot football player indeed.
Great recommendations above! Eek!
Olivia Cunning’s debut erotic romance Backstage Pass features an intelligent and motivated (maybe nerdy, but not extremely so) psychology professor who meets, has hawt sexxoring, and falls in love with a sexy bad-boy rock star. I liked it enough that I immediately bought the sequel and put her on my auto-buy list. It was definitely erotic, but the love story was well-developed, and the romance left me feeling all swoony.
I recommend both The Man Who Loved Pride and Prejudice (book 1) and Morning Light (book 2) by Abigail Reynolds. They’re both set around the research labs at Wood’s Hole on Cape Cod.
“The Demon’s Librarian,” by Lilith Saintcrow. LOVE this one; it’s about a lady librarian who is trying to save her library from budget cuts and save her readers from monsters all at the same time.
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation series has historical story and an ongoing contemporary romance where the heroine is a brainy grad student doing research (thus the historical bits). I like her character a lot, and she get’s the rather dashing/nerdy/possibly a spy hero.
I get irritated when our heroine speaks twelve languages but remains a brainless shrew. I often to find nerdy characters unconvincing. SEP’s Nobody’s Baby is a perfect example of this, although I generally like her stuff, but that supersmart scientist not only never says or does an intelligent thing, but many stupid ones.
It must be hard to write a character who is smarter than you are. Of course, you have to be reasonably clever to write a book at all, but that doesn’t always/often hold up to the standards of novels, where clever isn’t enough. It’s like when our heroine can’t just be beautiful, but has to have purple eyes too. Generally we’re told over and over how some character is such a genius, who just carries on behaving like any average person. For anyone who happens to be with me on this peeve, I’d say avoid the Thompson Nerds, and Willig.
Even with the authors I like, though, intelligence is often simply posited, but for some reason it doesn’t hurt my teeth.
JAK’s other pen names (in addition to Amanda Quick) also tend to have nerdy heroines, she clearly loves a nerdy heroine (although she does ditzy ones too, but you can always tell by the back cover). I agree that Chase, Dare, Thomas, Noble, Enoch, Bliss, and Quinn do well with intelligent characters. I feel like I’m forgetting someone major but I can’t figure out who so I’m off to check out these other suggestions.
Jayne Ann Krentz has a lot of books with brainy heroines, going all the way back to “Sweet Starfire” which is futuristic romance with a librarian heroine & a Mal Reynolds type of hero. Also under her Amanda Quick nom-de-plume they’re all professional women of one kind or another, if not actual nerds.
I agree with a lot the recs, especially Bellweather and Amanda Quick.
If you like novellas, “The Mad Earl’s Bride” by Loretta Chase is good – the heroine is a scholarly medical expert who marries the “mad” earl to both save him and establish a hospital. It’s in Three Times a Bride. And Lisa Kleypas’ “Someone to Watch Over Me” In Where’s My Hero? features a mathematical genius heroine and sexy doctor hero.
Perfect Partners is a JAK novel with a librarian who inherits a sporting goods company (with a hot but skeptical CEO). I haven’t read this one in years, so I’m not sure how it holds up, but I loved it when it came out.
Me Gusta Nerds!!!
I really liked Susan Elizabeth Philips books. One of them is about a woman who is a genius and she really wants to have a baby BUT she’s insistent that the guy be a total idiot so her baby wont be a super genius and have the lonely childhood she did.
Low and behold the man she seduces and gets knocked up by is a football player but is also extremely smart also and she’s distraught over it.
Gah! I think it’s called Be My Baby or something with baby in the title.
“Book smart” doesn’t always = “life smart”.
That’s what made Rosemary so funny & charming. She dissected real life situations with her scientific mind.
She was innocent not stupid. She knew that she was out of her depth with the opposite sex.
Cannot believe that nobody has mentioned Daphne Pembroke from Mr. Impossible yet!
I’d also throw a shoutout to Penelope Featherington in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, as she’s always struck me as kind of a nerd. Though not a major one like Daphne.
Being tempted to spend the grocery money on the Nook….
They are not really romances but Laurie King’s Mary Russell books are great. Both Mary and Sherlock are brainiacs.
Yes! Amelia Peabody is a brilliant, curmudgeonly nerd-heroine. The first book in the series is Crocodile on the Sandbank. They’re by Elizabeth Peters.
I haven’t read Thompson, but I must disagree with you about Willig. Eloise Kelly (and I assume it is she to whom you refer) is never said to be a genius—just a rather nerdy, sometimes ditzy, grad student working on a history thesis. She’s smart, but not a prodigy, and no one claims otherwise. She is also only the narrator of the framing device the runs through the series; each book has a separate heroine and hero.
I do understand your pet peeve, however. I’ve come across some truly egregiously TSTL Mary Sues whose intelligence other characters praised!
This thread makes me think of Candypants’ song “Nerdy Boys”: “I want to bite his pencil neck and make him cry for mommy…” and “He smells like Hai Karate
Says Mulder wasn’t dotty
I want to rip the clothes right off his ectomorphic body”
I”d second (or third) Mr. Impossible by Chase – the way the hero loves the heroine’s intelligence is lovely.
I second the Shelly Laurenston selections and raise you one by her other nom de plume, G. A. Aiken. Dagmar, the heroine of “Last Dragon Standing” is a small, plain, bespectacled, genius, only daughter of a warlord. She is also known as “The Beast”, which causes the hero, a shape shifting, very gorgeous, very vain, hysterically funny dragon, to fall over laughing at their first meeting, thus endangering the treaty he is there to facilitate. I can not recommend this series highly enough, at least the first three …. You could read this as a stand alone, but why deny yourself the pleasure of reading about the romances of his dragon siblings? His character development in the first two books makes this one even more satisfying when he meets his…. uh, not match…. oh jeez, just get this book. It will be on your re-read shelf forever.
OOOOPS, the book I meant to recommend is “What a Dragon Should Know” by G. A. Aiken, NOT “Last Dragon Standing”, which is the 4th and weakest book in this series.
Thank you so much ladies!
Speaking of SEP, First Lady features an adorably nerdy history lover as a heroine, who just happens to be the widowed first lady of the USA. Plus the hero is a journalist who can keep up with her history-ness.
Also Molly from SEPs This Heart of Mine. She writes childrens books and is often described as brainy.
I see quite a few here that I would have listed, especially Ravished, Mr. Impossible, and Bellwether. But in a quick scan, I don’t see Laura Kinsale’s Midsummer Moon, aka the hedgehog book, which features a female inventor heroine.
A lot of G.S and not so much S.T.A.
Okay, this is really unfair of me, but Tessa Dare’s upcoming ONE NIGHT TO BE WICKED features a nerdy girl heroine, and she is so full of awesome. She’s a geologist in a time when people are first beginning to understand the fossil record.
There’s her trousseau. The primeval snail shells. Francine. I can’t say anything more because it’s all spoilery, but it is my favoritest Tessa Dare book EVER, and that is obviously saying something.
(People who watch us know we’re friends, but please don’t discount this just because of that—Tessa and are friends because I loved her writing and begged her to please be my critique partner, so the writing love came first.)
Also, in my haste to tell you how awesome the book was, I got the title wrong. It’s A WEEK TO BE WICKED. Obviously I am the worst pimper ever.
If you want a short, fun read featuring some nerdy, very naughty professors, I highly recommend TALK DIRTY TO ME by Inez Kelley and Ginny Glass!
This may be more geeky than nerdy, but the heroine in SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE by Kristine Grayson is a huge comic book collector, and pretty much all around nerd. It’s part of a paranormal series, but the hero in the story was the basis for the original Superman comic book. Obviously a comic collectors dream man!
I also second Nora Roberts’ Homeport and Three Fates – both the heroines are nerdy with issues, but in a completely believable relatable way and the guys are hotness hotness. Also recommend Hot Shot for laughtastic moments from the middle onwards. That book only took off halfway for me though.
I too wasn’t as much a fan of the Vicki Lewis Thompson books.
Captcha – started28. Now that I read this thread there’s 28 nerd books I’ve not yet started on!
I’ll add Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas. Beatrix is a socially awkward, scholarly, expert on animals. It’s the last in the Hawthorne series but it stands alone pretty well and it’s so, so good. I recommend it on practically every thread. Beatrix is one of my favorite heroines, and she uses her knowledge to help the hero, a (ptsd suffering) vet of the Crimean War.
Could you go for a plump and nerdy dentist who falls for a vampire with an infected fang? Check out Love Fang.
I agree with Annie the Piper, Nora Roberts is very good with her research, from her list I would pick the youngest McKade brother and his story. I love that be falls for a girl against his type who is smart and pushes him to admit truths about himself. Plus there are ghosts and a great set of characters from the previous installments.
Case in point – shouldn’t a genius scientist know that intelligence is not a heritable trait? As a side note, eugenics is sufficiently distasteful to me that I wouldn’t have liked this heroine even if she’d been as smart as she was supposed to be, because her values remain repulsive. So Nobody’s Baby is firmly on my STA list though I recommend SEP in general
@Elizabeth I’m sure you’re right about Willig. It seems the only thing I remember about her books is how much they irk me. I really want to like them so I’ve tried 4 and disliked them all. So even if I apparently can’t tell you accurately why they’re on my STA list, there they remain.
and cleo supplied the author I knew I was forgetting: Kleypas
argh, I meant Hathaway – Love in the Afternoon is part of the Hathaway series not Hawthorne.
Doesn’t Susan Wiggs have a historical where all the heroine wants to do is become an astronomer? Nerdy-plus and very bluestocking in its setting era. The title, alas, escapes me.
@ Deb Kinnard Good call, Wiggs has at least a couple of bluestocking heroines. I don’t remember the title either, haven’t read it in ages, but I’m pretty sure it was set in Washington and she was a senator’s daughter.
i don’t think i saw “bet me” by jennifer crusie mentioned up there, accountant heroine and a very hot (but also intelligent) guy…also, i’d say that alexia tarrabotti from the parasol protectorate series by gail carriger could certainly be considered a bit of a nerd (she sneaks out of a party to check out the library)…
thanks to everyone else for the amazing suggestions…my to read list is impossibly long…at least i know i’ll never be stuck without something to read, you know, EVER!
Arriving very late to the party – Rachel Lee writes some good female nerds. Her “Defying Gravity” has two computer-geek protagonists, and she is a bit short-tempered. In “Serious Risks,” the heroine is also a shy computer geek.
“Miss Emmaline and the Archangel” features a sharp-tongued librarian paired with a former DEA agent. That’s one of Lee’s Conard County books. Oh, and “Exile’s End” featured a somewhat-plain fantasy writer – not a nerd, but not a beauty queen either.
Very late to the party, too.
THANK YOU to whoever said Connie Brockway’s As You Desire. I have been trying to find that book for a few years now. I thought for a long time that I had already read Mr. Impossible because I read that one, then I couldn’t remember who wrote it or anything.
And I love nerds. I’ve written a female nerd with a hot husband (who’s no idiot, but not a nerd at all). All I need now’s an agent and a publisher, right?
ahhhh! THANK YOU Dancing Angel!
I have been trying to remember Defying Gravity for months now 😛 I’m so glad I read the comments today!
thought88- I’ve thought about trying to find this book about 88 times!
@Amber – glad I could help! I loved Tim from that book. I wish she’d written a romance for his brother, Pat, who was one of the funniest supporting characters I’ve ever seen in a romance novel, but I guess she moved on to different things.
Check out Shirley Karr’s “Confessions of a Viscount” where the heroine is one of the first spy Regency heroines and one of the few that had a reasonable explanation for her vocation. She falls for an astronomer. Karr writes really well about two intelligent people developing an interest in each other’s world. Karr’s “Kiss from a Rogue” and “What an Earl Wants” (female finance wiz) are also good summer reads. Sadly, like some other authors, those are her only published books so look in the used books catalog.
I wish I knew why some formula writers keep getting published when good ones don’t.
Another definite nerd vs. rake (if you don’t mind reading erotic novels) is Margaret Rowe’s (aka Maggie Robinson) “Any Wicked Thing” about a medieval scholar and an intelligent wastrel.
From the books already on this list you will have a wonderful beach read.