Edited to add: I corrected the links. My bad, y’all. Sorry.
An anonymous tipster has turned my gaze to M.A. Bechaz’s review of Evangelynn Stratton’s Lady Blue. This review is so scathing, so incredibly detailed in its ire, and so damn awesome I was sure for a minute Candy was masquerading online as this author. Holy crap, Batman.
Seems Lady Blue is a grammatical accident crossed with a pile of historical anachronisms. To hear Bechaz tell it:
[T]here are so many historical flaws in this book that most of the time all the reader will learn is utter balderdash. I mean, the book is supposed to be set in the late medieval era, but many of the props, places and plot twists in it could not have existed in medieval times—most are from the Regency through to Victorian eras. I’m sorry, but you can’t fob off a Regency novel as a Medieval one; it’s like painting stripes on a dog and calling it a zebra—no matter what you tell people it is, it’s still a dog. And so is this book!
Read the rest of the review. Go on, I’ll wait. It’s marvelous. The image of the heroine dragging her coins through town is enough to set me in a giggle for a good half hour. I’m the last person to get nit-picky about historical bits of misinformation, but to see Bechaz tell it, this book would have left a dent in my wall, too.
But the tempest-y parts are the name-calling reviewers that counter Bechaz’s by stating she’s a “bitter hagâ€, and Bechaz’s response that clearly, the dissenting reviewers who disagree with her are an effort to defend a friend. They give the book a five-star rank “just to offset the cruel attack by M.A.Bechaz.†Would you like a side of honesty with that panty twist?
As usual, those who rally to the defense of the author accuse Bechaz of personally attacking the author. There’s a desperate call for a proof reader and a copy editor, and there’s a scolding of the author for language anachronisms and faulty historical details, but I don’t see her attack the author personally, unless I missed a word. So if you write a scathing review of a book that should have been edited, proofread, and attended to properly, you’re attacking the author? Not so, says this Smart Bitch. But that’s an argument we’ve heard before round these parts. Just envision the Cassie Edwards fan hate mail.
What a pity that Bechaz loses her cool and responds in somewhat ire-ful fashion to those who call her names. Her comments are erudite but also shrill, and really, you have a lot more ground to stand on if you keep your chill along with your Bitchy. However, a review that says in detail specifically why a book disappointed a reader, and what could have been done to fix it? Well played, Bechaz, well played.
I clicked on the links, and got the dreaded 404 Error message. Could the links be wrong, or is the information removed?
the links didnt work, but I went to Amazon (because I was mad curious)…
Ma Betchez gave coherant arguments with examples of why she didnt like the book… never once did she attack the author personally, unless you could call telling her she needed a editor. Which was a pretty valid thing to say, if Ma’s examples are true..
Funny how a reviewer got more excitement than the book did itself…
Loved the review. The anachronisms would’ve had me first dog-earring pages for errors, then tossing it hard enough to damage my drywall.
My security phrase: fact64. I’m tickled, since Ms. Stratton clearly didn’t check hers.
From a reply: “I find errors in many books, even in ones by Danielle Steele and Anne Mccaffrey.”
Ms. Head, meet Mr. Desk.
This is reminiscent of the reviews that crop up everytime LKH subjects the world to the adventures of Anita/Merry. Predictably the negative reviewers are bashed for being prudes, and jealous haters.
It seems to me that an ad hominem attack is employed when someone really can’t intelligently counter any of the points that were raised. It’s so much easier to just bash the reviewer.
I’m not a history buff, but even I would’ve noticed those anachronisms. What I think makes it more egregious is that the author claims that she’s being accurate. I can forgive people a certain level of ignorance, but it really bothers me when people claim expertise and then demonstrate total ignorance.
Yeah, the links are bad, and while I’m at it, you want “its ire,” dear. ; )
My favorite quote from the Amazon reviews:
“Ms Stratton, certainly captures the essence of medieval times, so enjoy exploring it!”
Uh huh. Teapots? Stuffy girls’ boarding schools? Museums? If that gets to be the essence of medieval times, I get to be Nora Roberts, okay?
Heck, I was reading a book today by an author who’s a self-described “stickler for accuracy,” yet has the Battle of Waterloo taking place in 1816… I doubt there’s a writer out there who hasn’t made a mistake at some point, but in the Age of Google, stuff like this is just unforgivable.
Marlys, your post made me realize that if an author TRULY captured the essence of the Medieval period, the readers would likely be staring at the book in abject horror. By no stretch of the imagination was it a romantic time.
I sometimes think authors base their model of Medieval Europe on ‘A Knight’s Tale’.
Links are fixed. My bad – sorry about that. Bad Sarah for typing an entry quickly in MS Word, which doesn’t much like HTML coding and tries to change everything for me.
But the it’s/its was all me – that’s probably my #1 boo boo and I always have to double check “it’s/its” to make sure I’m right. I know the RULE but my brain doesn’t think “yes apostrophe for it is, no apostrophe for possessive” – it just drops the ’ and moves ahead. Like I said, typing fast in MS Word? Bad SB Sarah.
And “A Knight’s Tale” as called by Hubby: “When Knights Shop at the Gap.”
You know, maybe by a grasp of “Medieval Times” they meant she was a shareholder in Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament? That would explain some of the inaccuracies.
Aw, a Smart Bechaz for the Smart Bitches. That’s just too adorable. 🙂
Yeah, I read Bechaz as Bitchaz.
After reading the review, I was reminded of a woman I know who actually wrote the word “midevil” on a paper. Maybe I’ll buy a copy for her; she’ll never recognize the mistakes.
I belonged to a medieval club in college. This sounds like the kind of book we would have loved to have. The book would have been read out loud and everyone would have to drink a shot when they read any historical anachronisms.
Bitter hag? Holy moly! I’m sure there are vodoo dolls being pinned right after slinging phrases like that around.
OMG I read that book! A friend of mine sent it to me! You have no idea – I gave up when Willow (which in itself is a bizarrely anachronistic name for 1499) said she was a fan of Michelangelo. How the (&^# could an uneducated girl living in a tiny village in horribly backwards England have even heard of Michelangelo? How could she be a painter – and why would her family let her? Where did she get the paint? They didn’t sell paint back then – you had to make it yourself, which was a messy job that took years to learn.
M.A. Bechez hasn’t even scraped the surface of its horridness. For instance, not only does everybody speak English, it’s mentioned in the book that nobody speaks Latin. The church services are in English.
It’s so incredibly historically inaccurate that I might have wondered if it was really an alternative history had there not been so many grammatical and spelling errors. Those are fine on a blog, but in a published book? Somebody is too enamoured with Clippy.
Invisigoth, the problem with using this book as part of a drinking game is that everyone in the room would be unconscious by page 10. I have literally never seen a book this error-ridden.
To me the saddest part is that the book could have been better had it been set in, say, 1870, and had the writer had a good editor.
M.A. Bechez hasn’t even scraped the surface of its horridness. For instance, not only does everybody speak English, it’s mentioned in the book that nobody speaks Latin. The church services are in English.
The church services would definitely have been in Latin—that’s a shocking error—but people in England spoke English as a rule by this time. By 1499 it had already been centuries since Latin was the daily spoken language. English took over from Norman French, not Latin.
Even official documents were in English by that time.
~If that gets to be the essence of medieval times, I get to be Nora Roberts, okay?~
Hey! LOL.
Nora
Yeah, December, Latin hadn’t even really made that big of an impact on English until it came in by way of French with the Normans. Old English sounds like German- with a little Latin mixed in, mostly of a military nature. But English in church? I’m almost afraid to ask if it claimed to be Catholic- either answer would be painful.
I once saw an author post publicly about how there was a review up on Amazon of one of their books that was a personal attack, and how they’d contacted Amazon to get said review removed. Well, I went and looked at it, just out of curiosity, and discovered that—as in this case—the review discussed the flaws in the book and why the reader didn’t like them. Heck, it wasn’t even as biting as the Bechaz review! So I e-mailed Amazon and let them know that I didn’t think they should take it down, since in no way shape or form did it constitute a personal attack, and it would set a bad precedent if they took down reviews just because they hurt the author’s feelings.
Amazon reviews are a weird thing. People will rate a book way higher or lower than they really feel, just to try and change the overall rating. Yet for all that—I’m too lazy to go back and check, but didn’t Bechaz still give the book two stars?
The church services would definitely have been in Latin—that’s a shocking error—but people in England spoke English as a rule by this time. By 1499 it had already been centuries since Latin was the daily spoken language. English took over from Norman French, not Latin.
By nobody, I meant not the clergy, not the Italian intelligencia (including Michelangelo), etc. They didn’t understand it. That is very unrealistic. It’s absolutely true that the English wouldn’t speak Latin – many of them in 1499 didn’t even speak English yet. Cornish was still commonly spoken in the West Country.
Wow. Is her publisher St. Martin’s Press, by any chance? My mother and I both noticed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s they usually had enormous and bad errors in every book they released.
Sadly, I find at least one bad spelling or grammatical error in every romance novel I read. I just picked up a Lisa Kleypas called Suddenly You, and it’s missing periods at the ends of sentences in a few places!
Every romance author should just hire me as a copyeditor. That would solve this problem. 😉 And my word is “money82,” so clearly Bill Gates wants y’all to hire me.
“Is her publisher St. Martin’s Press, by any chance?”
No, she’s self-published through iUniverse. If she bought their editorial package, I’d demand a refund based on what I see in that review.
She uses a bank? And withdraws 50,000 pounds? Given that the richest commoner in England in the late 16th Century was only worth between 7,000-9,000 pounds a year (and that with about 30 pages worth of property listings), I don’t think so. The image of her dragging her coins worth the street is marvelous, though.
This made FandomWank:
http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/
This book sounds like a trip. Now I want to read it to get the complete essence of how awful it is. I haven’t been drunk for a long time anyway!
By nobody, I meant not the clergy, not the Italian intelligencia (including Michelangelo), etc. They didn’t understand it. That is very unrealistic.
Ah. Sorry for correcting you, then—I didn’t undertsand you were speaking of clergymen, who would not only have spoken Latin, but written it as well, so claiming they didn’t is outrageous.
having just come off a punishing discussion on a list about if historical romances should be historical and who cares, this review was gobsmacking in its descriptions.
I was going to say why did a publisher take her, but of course, Iuniverse takes anyone who asks.
I should be writing about the love lives of shapeshifters, but my first love has always been the historical and I hate when people use it as their own personal playground and don’t bother to do proper research.
History actually happened, real people actually lived, loved and suffered there and the least we can do is give them a bit of respect.
BTW, I live in England, and I’ve been to Hunstanton. It saved my life once. But it would only be considered as a busy town by someone from the middle of the desert.
Nice ice cream, though.
Since when has correct spelling, correct grammar and proofreading become a radical concept? Or historical accuracy?
And I’ve written scathing reviews on amazon and not one person has bothered to attack me…
I am so jealous…
I’ll take a few misplaced commas over history salad any day! These are some pretty hefty errors (but I’m the kind of girl who has trouble forgiving a Regency miss admiring a fully-clothed man’s butt—which I’ve seen in several recent books by NY houses—since this is freaken impossible to do what with tail coats and all).
Well, here’s a good test of M.A.B.‘s credibility as a reviewer: Has she ever given any laudatory reviews?
Now my curiosity is so peaked it’s nearly leaking out of my pores. One of my fellow authors was apparently savaged by her, just recently, and took great umbrage…in addition to being hurt, which is certainly understandable. The incident generated quite a bit of self-righteous indignation and “there-there” back rubbing on da loop. So in one week, I’ve heard of M. A. Bechaz twice after never having heard of this person before.
Gotta look into it.
Hmm. Just returned from my recon mission. It appears Bechaz does indeed effuse…over quite a few books, in fact. It also appears the author to whom I alluded managed to get either Amazon or M.A. to pull her one-star review. Egads, such Court-worthy goings-on!
Hmm after the feature in Smart Bitches, Anne Hope took down her review today.
A lot of people commented on her mature response in her review of Lady Blue wherein she said that she cross referenced the “facts” in Stratton’s book with her college education.
Other reviewers started snarking on where she got that education since she could not even spell Da Vinci (DaVinchi in Anne Hope’s Review) correctly.
This is such a riot. ROFL!
You know, I have four shelves worth of historical non-fiction at my house, and even then there were things I still had to hunt around for when I wrote my medieval.
Not to mention, my editor pretty much made me provide documentation for every single thing.
Not to mention, I still ended up including an Author’s Note at the end,partly just because I love Author’s Notes, but also to explain the one or two, no-huge-deal deliberate liberties I took, simply because I didn’t want anyone to ever be mistaken about historical fact because I decided to cheat a little on my heroine’s age or what King John did about the Welsh uprisings. Yeah, I used the “this is a novel, not a dissertation” line—but that was about one minor liberty, not a complete lack of understanding or facts about the period and place in which I was writing!
Stuff like this drives me nuts. There’s enough misinformation and inaccuracy out there as it is, without people deliberately deciding it doesn’t matter.
“My University educastion” isn’t a damn resource. Neither is, “somebody told me” or “several people agree with me.” Unless you can give me a title, an author, and the author’s credentials, don’t argue with me.
If someone drew Amazon’s attention to it they would have removed it. Part of the rules are that you cannot refer to other reviewers in your review. I think that might be why Amazon put in the comment section.
You can read the book on the Iuniverse bookstore site. They have a “browse before you buy” option so you can literally read the entire book on the site!!!
I read the first 3 pages. You get sentences like: “I mean, forgive me, Willow, but ‘tis common knowledge that your family [etc etc etc].” Or: “Hell, my own father has …” Then, when both hero and heroine have some news to tell the other, he politely says: “Go on. Ladies first.” She begins to tell him, and he says: “This is sort of what I wish to talk with you about.” I may be jumping to conclusions, but basically it seems that Mediaeval Speak = American Slang plus “aye”, “nay” and “‘tis”. I’m reading on because I’m waiting for the first “forsooth”.
And the language. Oh my. Can someone’s face really “flare with indignation”? And I can’t read about someone’s heart dropping “into desperation” without imagining a kind of “THWUNK!” noise to go with it. Is that just me?
I’m not too sure about the facts either. The heroine meets the hero in the “shrubbery” and pulls her shawl together over her “naked shoulders”. Is that medieval?
Is the humour intentional? Take a passage like this: “[…]‘Tis… _cute_ that you tried to save some money for a dowry, it really is. But, we both must face reality. My father will ne’er accept you as my wife.” Can she be serious? “‘Tis cute”?
(Don’t know how to edit my post, so I’ll add: the questions in the post above this are real, not rhetoric – I don’t know much about romance novels.)
“No, she’s self-published through iUniverse.”
*Sigh* Sometimes people need to stop, take a good look at their writing, and consider WHY a traditional publisher won’t touch their work.
Kalen Hughes said “(but I’m the kind of girl who has trouble forgiving a Regency miss admiring a fully-clothed man’s butt—which I’ve seen in several recent books by NY houses—since this is freaken impossible to do what with tail coats and all).”
Shouldn’t the Regency miss be admiring the man’s well turned out calf? or am I off by a few decades here? I seem to remember going to a re-enactment museum and having the male interpreter talk about how men would stuff their hose to make their calves look fuller. and one of the little old ladies in the tour group asked to feel his calf to see if he stuffed his.
Writing a full-length medieval historical must be a Hydra-headed bitch!
I researched the mid-fourteenth century Black Plague outbreak—for, of all things, an erotic romance—and ended up reading Tuchman’s, Power’s and John Kelly’s books in addition to spending untold hours on the Internet. (I’m also not too terribly bad at reading Middle English, since I had to study it in college.) And my damned story doesn’t even take place in the late Middle Ages! That work was all for the back-story. Yet I’ve no doubt I still screwed up some things, and I know I took some liberties.
Unless one immerse one’s life in medieval studies, it’s impossible to achieve 100% accuracy…especially when it comes to dialogue. Hell, a writer could spend his/her whole life working out a believable modern English rendition of vernacular late Middle English and probably still not get it right!
oh god, I’m very tempted to go over to iuniverse and check out this little bit of hell.
I gave in to my bad self and checked out the first couple of chapters. Needless to say, it does NOT get better. Aside from the “hell” and “cute” stuff, and the just plain badly written stuff, our heroine has a dog she has name Michelangelo (I’m not sure whether she spells it correctly) because he (Michelangelo, not the dog) is “her favorite artist”. I know that this was brought up in the Bechaz review, but you really have to see it in context to appreciate the horribleness. Also, I don’t think Bechaz told us about the dog.
My security word is “somewhat 47”. Which is also my age. Maybe once I turn 48 (and beyond) I’ll describe myself that way.
Oh, those bellowing sails will get you every time.
LOL!
OK, unabashed plug here: try “Angels on Crusade” for a bit more reality in the Middle Ages. (Cerridwen Press)