Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

S is for Story: A Writer’s Alphabet

Despite the focus on romance novels in the hot pink palace, I buy many other different types of books, including cookbooks (boy is that a problem), computer instruction guides, and children’s books. This past week I’ve found two children’s products - one book and one DVD/CD - that have rocked my socks enough that I wanted to spread the word.

My older son, known online as Freebird, has a book from Sleeping Bear Press called “H is for Homerun.” It’s an alphabetical poem with verses about baseball, from “A is for the All Stars,” to my favorite, “Z is for all zeros, a rare feat with a name: no runs, no hits, no errors, it is a Perfect Game”. He loves this book -  though some of the rhymes are a bit of a stretch. (Pun intended, totally).

So at BEA this year, I stopped at the Sleeping Bear Press booth (which was oddly not at all near the children’s books but upstairs right next to Net Galley) and told the sales reps how much I loved their books. A new one… read more »

Summer Round-Up: Books What I Read While On Summer Vacation, Pt. 1

Y’all, I managed to get more leisure reading done in the past three months than I have in the past two years combined. It’s amazing what being stuck on a plane or a bus will do to one’s reading time, not to mention the one month I spent laid up in bed from a one-two whammy of a really nasty summer flu, followed by strep throat. (Lymph nodes the size of ripe plums, dudes. It was amazing.) In any case, I looked at the backlog of books I wanted to talk about, and realized I was never, ever going to write about them if I had to write my usual 1,000-1,500 word review. So what’s a girl to do? Why, review all of them at once, of course, in abbreviated blurb form. Everything’s more fun when it’s bite-sized!

So here, in approximately chronological order, are the first five of the ten books I’ve read so far this summer, and what I think of them:

What Would Emma Do by Eileen Cook

What Would Emma Do is a smart, unblinking mixture of “The Crucible” meets “Saved,” with one of the most memorable YA narrators I’ve met in awhile. However, it’s not a romance, so I’m not evaluating it as such. More on that in a moment.

Emma is the only daughter of a single mom in a small

Illinois

Indiana* town named Wheaton, which is situated exactly in the middle of rural nowhere. Emma really, really hates living there. Her goal is a track scholarship to Northwestern, and she’s not secret about her goals, or her intense dislike of every aspect of her town. She thinks of it as her mom’s hometown, not her own, and is repulsed by the eagerness with which her mom and her friends and all the adults in her life embrace the town’s social culture, which, to Emma, involves being way to involved in everyone else’s business, and being as limited of mind as possible.

* I mistakenly placed the town in Illinois, and the error was totally mine. My apologies to Ms. Cook.

Emma is out one night with her best friend’s boyfriend, Colin, whom… read more »

Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr

Melissa Marr’s publicist at HarperCollins, also named Melissa, has been gifted with a heaping spoonful of Wisdom Pixie Dust, because after I wrote about the absurdity that was Jane Henderson’s review at the St. Louis Post Dispatch stating that Marr’s novel was a “knock off” of Laurell K. Hamilton, she sent me an ARC of Ink Exchange.

How could I resist the opportunity to find out if indeed Marr’s novel about teens mixed up with faeries outside Pittsburgh does indeed feature over-sexualization of teen girls that may lead to teen pregnancy, or the profound oversexxoring that would lead to a valid comparison of Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series? I couldn’t.

Now that I’ve read the book, I have to say, this book isn’t a knock off of anything I’ve read, unless there’s a giant designer purse made up of meaningful, emotionally wrenching YA storytelling from which this book snatched a tassel. There is no question in my mind that Jane Henderson’s opinion is so wrong, it’s not even in the same county as right.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Sarah reviewed Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist for Romancenovel.tv earlier this week, and I was supposed to get in on the HOT HOT VIDEO REVIEW ACTION, but alas, technical fuckiness got in the way. It ain’t easy being bi…coastal. So you get a review the old-fashioned way instead, which is almost definitely for the best, because appearing on TV presents all sorts of difficulties, such as dealing with the fact that I’m Sarah’s Tyler Durden. (And if you’re wondering whether this is my incredibly roundabout way of saying that I’m actually Brad Pitt…well, I’ll ask you this: have you ever seen the two of us in the same room?

Think about it.)

My corporeal status notwithstanding, here’s what I think of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist:

I like it. I like it a lot. It’s not perfect by any means, and I didn’t fall head-over-heels in love with it, but it is a fresh and daring beastie, and in many ways, it’s a very well-crafted story. The book, not unlike a good pop song, is rife with hooks. Behold:

1. It’s about a… read more »

Major Crush

As a teenager, I loved Sweet Valley High, but particularly the ones that dealt with romance. I almost passed out that one time Bruce Patman put his hand on Elizabeth Wakefield’s breast. It said “breast” in a SVH novel?! DUDE.

Little did I know then the education I’d get from real romance novels, and from YA romances that are actually high quality. Lucky me, as a Smart Bitch, I received an ARC of Jennifer Echols Major Crush. I’m so jealous of the YA readers now who have much better books to read. What was I thinking?

But enough about me.

Rainbow Party By Paul Ruditis

I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I sometimes read books because of how stupid the critics are, and lemme tell you, it doesn’t get much dumber than some of the critics for Rainbow Party, many of whom have never read the book before expressing their horror about such inappropriate subject matter. Teenagers having oral sex! Well goodness me, what’s next, a horseless carriage? Say it ain’t so!

Reading books because the negative reviews came from patently stupid reviewers has served me quite well in the past; I picked up Pat Barker’s wonderful WWI trilogy partly because of the negative reviews I read on Amazon.com, for example. But hoo boy, my decision to read Rainbow Party has really bitten me in the ass. I hate to agree with the hysterical critics, but in some ways, this book is offensive: offensively simplistic in its morality, and quite offensively unreadable.

The plot (if you don’t know it yet—if you don’t, where have been, living under a rock?) is simple: Gin, high-school slut extraordinaire, is throwing a Rainbow Party. This shindig requires each girl to wear a different color… read more »