In Which I Try For Value-Added Propositions
So I've read some books in the past week, and because I'll read pretty much anything these all happened to be romances and X-chan and I were talking about things we hate in romance novels, which inspired my curmudgeonliness here. (Also, as you'll have guessed, I really don't believe in love, so I'm just basically irredeemable.) Fortunately, my library has a large collection of Harlequins to keep us amused, so if enough of you are "entertained" this will probably become a regular feature. (I also plan to get to snarking my huge teen-girl series collection, as promised last year. Life keeps happening.)
I stole the blurbs off Amazon, because I'm interested in mocking the ridiculousness and not the blurbs. It's probably a good idea to assume that everything contains spoilers. It might also be a good idea to assume that the sex scenes are mocked below. So without further ado, let's begin!
Black Magic (Cherry Adair). This book actively enraged me.
SHE HATES USING MAGIC . . .
Ever since the death of her parents, Sara Temple has rejected her magical gifts. Then, in a moment of extreme danger, she unknowingly sends out a telepathic cry for help-to the one man she is convinced she never wants to see again.
HE’S A POWERFUL WIZARD . . .
Jackson Slater thought he was done forever with his ex-fiancée, but when he hears her desperate plea, he teleports halfway around the world to aid her in a situation where magic has gone suddenly, brutally wrong.
THEY’VE BEEN CHOSEN TO SAVE THE WORLD . . .
But while Sara and Jack remain convinced they are completely mismatched, the Wizard Council feels otherwise. A dark force is killing some of the world’s most influential wizards, and the ex-lovers have just proved their abilities are mysteriously amplified when they work together. But with the fate of the world at stake, will the violent emotions still simmering between them drive them farther apart . . . or bring them back into each other’s arms?
RIDICULOUS ROMANCE TROPES:
+ The Big Misunderstanding Is Stupid - As the story unfolds, it's revealed that Sara has had a miscarriage. Jack thinks that she had an abortion because she was, at best, ambivalent about being a parent, and that she DENIED HIM THE RIGHT TO THEIR BABY HURRMAGURD. They never actually sat down and talked about this; Jack just ASSumed.
What makes this really rage-inducing for me is that a.) "spontaneous abortion" is the clinical term for a miscarriage, so OF COURSE it would have been on Sara's medical records, and Jack refuses to believe Sara even after she points out that she had a D&C and why (as is standard procedure after a miscarriage, because tissue that remains in the uterus can become infected and make an already awful experience even worse), and b.) it is further revealed that the pregnancy was ectopic - so it would have been both nonviable and put Sara's life in danger if it had continued. An abortion would have been necessary to save her life.
I've read a fair number of romances in which the heroine just calmly rejects the idea of terminating a pregnancy out of hand. That doesn't bother me. It's just the MASSIVE HARANGUES ABOUT HOW ZYGOTES IZ PPL!!!! that get my goat. (Let's be fair, too - I'd also have a problem with a plotline in which the heroine was made to terminate a viable pregnancy that she wanted.)
And even if Sara had had an elective abortion, that's her right. Which ties directly into the below trope:
+ You Mean A Woman's Body Isn't Mine To Control? - The foregoing, and also Grant's attempt to rape Sara towards the end of the book. Though I had completely lost interest in the characters by that point, I was really glad when he didn't succeed.
+ It's All About Sex, Sex, Sex - I get that this is supposed to be fairly steamy (I'm not sure how romances are rated or where this would fall; each publishing house seems to have its own scale), but to me it just came off like the only thing Jack and Sara had in common was the HAWTT SEX. Which, you know, I got nothing against the HAWTT SEX, except it was amazingly boring. Also, I wish that references to "gently scraping him with her teeth" or "gently biting her clitoris" would just go away; I don't think these were supposed to be S&M sex scenes, and outside that very specific context (because some people do get off on that kind of pain), it just strikes me as clichéd and like the author has never had oral sex (either as giver or receiver).
Also, most straight men probably wouldn't notice Sara's clothes in such excruciating detail; ENOUGH ABOUT THE FUCK-ME PUMPS ALREADY, JESUS. (And I say this as someone who does notice women's clothes and the way they're put together.) Also also, I was sick of hearing about how ZOMGTEHHAWTTZORZ Jack was already, but I'm pretty much a lesbian who is also attracted to Toshiro Mifune. And Gael García Bernal is a bit of all right, too. But mainly Toshiro.
+ I Thought I Wasn't Supposed To Like The Villain - Grant very sensibly points out that if Jack really loved Sara, he wouldn't have jumped to conclusions about her miscarriage without talking it over with her.
+ The Butler Did It! - I guessed that Grant was the villain before Jack and Sara did.
+ Kinky People Are BAD People - You can tell that Grant is the villain because his bedroom suite is filled with sex toys and he has a giant cage suspended over his bed! Only bad people with huge issues like kink. Respectable people all have vanilla missionary sex with the lights off.
+ But Did You Read The Prequels? - Actually, I had read Edge of Danger prior to this, a couple of years ago, and seem to recall there was a robot in it. (Notice what I pay attention to: not the Twooest Twoo Wuv, the damn robot.) I'm sure I'm supposed to know who Duncan Edge and Lark are, but I can't be arsed.
+ SNAAAAAAAAAKE DICK!!!! - At the end of the book, Jack walks in on Grant (in ginormous rainbow snake form) attempting to rape Sara, and I actually have to give Cherry Adair some props here because the scene with the writhing mating smaller snakes was pretty cringeworthy. I have no fear of snakes - I respect them, and I'd tread carefully if I were in an area where I knew them to be abundant, but I'm not phobic about them. Anyway, there is a fairly detailed scene of Jack slashing his way through the writhing snakes and cutting off several of Grant's giant snake dicks. In more or less those words. This struck me as kind of a ridonkulous thing to mention, though since Grant was a Snake Of Unusual Size, I suppose it was all Jack could reasonably reach.
It makes me sad to think that that's probably the only time I'll ever use that ridiculous romance trope.
Texas Two-Step (Debbie Macomber). This one was neutral; it wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it wasn't anything.
Ellie Sheridan and her childhood friend Glen Patterson were always close, but never shared "those" feelings for each other. The folks of Promise, however, knew a good match when they saw one, and Ellie and Glen suddenly found themselves being pushed together more and more often. Though the actions of the townspeople became quite transparent, the friends found that they didn't mind at all...
RIDICULOUS ROMANCE TROPES!
+ The Big Misunderstanding Is Stupid - If Glen and Ellie really know each other that well, shouldn't he know (or be able to guess quickly) that she and Richard Weston don't have anything going on?
+ BFE Is The Best - I freely concede that this could be my personal baggage talking, because I've lived in small towns (I live in one now) and I fucking hate them; until we came back to Indiana when I was 17, I had always lived in or near a major city, and the place I consider my hometown is a good-sized college town (our population is 84000+, not including the student population - so it's not a huge place, but it's not WELCOME TO WEST BUTTFUCK, POPULATION 300 either). Promise sounds like my personal hell. Also, when I was growing up, we moved around a lot, so I don't have the experience of always living in the same place and knowing the same people, and I can't really get inside that mindset. So, you know, my two cents; take 'em with a grain of salt.
Also, I don't like Texas very much as a result of having lived there for two years growing up. I do not care to see the West or anything in it ever again, ever.
+ But I Bought A Suit! - I think this is a trope namer. Richard has given out that he's proposed to Ellie and she accepted, and during a subsequent conversation, Ellie lets him down gently. Richard's response to this is to tell her that he went out and bought a new suit, which leaves Ellie shaking her head. This is possibly the best stupid reason to get married I've ever seen.
+ I Been Down That Road, And It Don't Lead Nowhere - If you're going to introduce the damn ghost town, at least have some stuff happen. We've established that Glen and friends went out there as teenagers, and that Richard has taken Ellie out there. This thread is introduced and doesn't go anywhere. (I think Texas Two-Step is part of a series, so it's possible that the ghost town thread was elaborated upon in other books. I was just annoyed that there was no further exploration of it in this one, because I think a book should be able to stand on its own and make relative sense without reading the others in the series.)
+ Let's Kill All The Matchmakers - Okay, I didn't want to kill Savannah because she was actually fairly low-key as matchmaker characters go. I usually find them annoying as shit and not at all subtle, not to mention that they all need to retake the Bechdel Test until they pass.
+ Nefarious But Not - Richard. Don't get me wrong, his behavior is a series of dick moves, but he's really more of a thoughtless jerk than the second coming of Hitler.
Live-In Lover (Lyn Stone). This one was also neutral.
In ten years with the FBI, Damien Perry had posed as a drug lord, a terrorist, even a hit man. Now the thrill was gone. But what would he do if he quit? Maybe the answer was in the mail, on the card from Marian Olivia Jensen -- Molly, as he remembered her. The earthy redhead who aroused unfamiliar fantasies of a wife and family in his jaded soul.
Molly Jensen was finally safe from her menacing ex-husband -- until he was released from jail. Now the threatening phone calls wouldn’ t stop. Molly knew there was only one man who could help her: Damien Perry. His charade as her live-in lover was ingenious, but how long could she pretend to be pretending?
RIDICULOUS ROMANCE TROPES!
+ Professional Boundaries Are Permeable - Apparently if you're an FBI agent you can just threaten the shit out of people and also sleep with the person you're protecting and it's completely fine! Who knew? I wish I'd gone into the FBI instead of the land title industry.
Admittedly, Damien is not protecting Molly in an official capacity, but still, some stuff goes down that would be considered pretty questionable in real life.
+ Blame It On The Drugs - It turns out that the reason Jack went off the rails on the Crazy Train was because he had a heavy cocaine habit and apparently coke makes you crazy and violent! I don't think this is intentional, but it almost came off as "oh, Jack had a cocaine problem and that was why he stalked the shit out of Molly and pretty much tried to kill her and put her through hell, how unfortunate but it's all over now". I get that when you're under the influence, it's not uncommon to do things that you might not do if you were sober, but I felt like it was just painting Jack as a victim rather than dealing with the complexities of abusive situations, and it had been established that he was already jealous and possessive to begin with - the story worked fine with his just being an asshole.
+ What A Loathsome Child - Ugh. Ugh. As we've established many times, I have no use for real children. I really have no use for the "adorable" child characters in romance novels. Yes, one-year-olds are pretty much pants at cleanliness and fine motor control, but Sydney's grubby sticky gooey nasty repulsiveness was described several times in great detail and oh Jesus it just made me want to go scrub myself until I bled. I think I'm supposed to go "awww what a sweet baby", but every time Sydney was in the scene I kept thinking "sweet Zeus, lady, SCRUB THE DAMN CHOCOLATE OFF THE BRAT'S FACE NO KISSES FOR FILTHY LITTLE URCHINS". When Sydney got kidnapped, I found myself hoping for a resolution involving a tiny, shallow grave, just so I wouldn't have to read about what an awful mess she made while eating.
And th-th-th-that's all, folks! More stuff coming in the future.
I stole the blurbs off Amazon, because I'm interested in mocking the ridiculousness and not the blurbs. It's probably a good idea to assume that everything contains spoilers. It might also be a good idea to assume that the sex scenes are mocked below. So without further ado, let's begin!
Black Magic (Cherry Adair). This book actively enraged me.
SHE HATES USING MAGIC . . .
Ever since the death of her parents, Sara Temple has rejected her magical gifts. Then, in a moment of extreme danger, she unknowingly sends out a telepathic cry for help-to the one man she is convinced she never wants to see again.
HE’S A POWERFUL WIZARD . . .
Jackson Slater thought he was done forever with his ex-fiancée, but when he hears her desperate plea, he teleports halfway around the world to aid her in a situation where magic has gone suddenly, brutally wrong.
THEY’VE BEEN CHOSEN TO SAVE THE WORLD . . .
But while Sara and Jack remain convinced they are completely mismatched, the Wizard Council feels otherwise. A dark force is killing some of the world’s most influential wizards, and the ex-lovers have just proved their abilities are mysteriously amplified when they work together. But with the fate of the world at stake, will the violent emotions still simmering between them drive them farther apart . . . or bring them back into each other’s arms?
RIDICULOUS ROMANCE TROPES:
+ The Big Misunderstanding Is Stupid - As the story unfolds, it's revealed that Sara has had a miscarriage. Jack thinks that she had an abortion because she was, at best, ambivalent about being a parent, and that she DENIED HIM THE RIGHT TO THEIR BABY HURRMAGURD. They never actually sat down and talked about this; Jack just ASSumed.
What makes this really rage-inducing for me is that a.) "spontaneous abortion" is the clinical term for a miscarriage, so OF COURSE it would have been on Sara's medical records, and Jack refuses to believe Sara even after she points out that she had a D&C and why (as is standard procedure after a miscarriage, because tissue that remains in the uterus can become infected and make an already awful experience even worse), and b.) it is further revealed that the pregnancy was ectopic - so it would have been both nonviable and put Sara's life in danger if it had continued. An abortion would have been necessary to save her life.
I've read a fair number of romances in which the heroine just calmly rejects the idea of terminating a pregnancy out of hand. That doesn't bother me. It's just the MASSIVE HARANGUES ABOUT HOW ZYGOTES IZ PPL!!!! that get my goat. (Let's be fair, too - I'd also have a problem with a plotline in which the heroine was made to terminate a viable pregnancy that she wanted.)
And even if Sara had had an elective abortion, that's her right. Which ties directly into the below trope:
+ You Mean A Woman's Body Isn't Mine To Control? - The foregoing, and also Grant's attempt to rape Sara towards the end of the book. Though I had completely lost interest in the characters by that point, I was really glad when he didn't succeed.
+ It's All About Sex, Sex, Sex - I get that this is supposed to be fairly steamy (I'm not sure how romances are rated or where this would fall; each publishing house seems to have its own scale), but to me it just came off like the only thing Jack and Sara had in common was the HAWTT SEX. Which, you know, I got nothing against the HAWTT SEX, except it was amazingly boring. Also, I wish that references to "gently scraping him with her teeth" or "gently biting her clitoris" would just go away; I don't think these were supposed to be S&M sex scenes, and outside that very specific context (because some people do get off on that kind of pain), it just strikes me as clichéd and like the author has never had oral sex (either as giver or receiver).
Also, most straight men probably wouldn't notice Sara's clothes in such excruciating detail; ENOUGH ABOUT THE FUCK-ME PUMPS ALREADY, JESUS. (And I say this as someone who does notice women's clothes and the way they're put together.) Also also, I was sick of hearing about how ZOMGTEHHAWTTZORZ Jack was already, but I'm pretty much a lesbian who is also attracted to Toshiro Mifune. And Gael García Bernal is a bit of all right, too. But mainly Toshiro.
+ I Thought I Wasn't Supposed To Like The Villain - Grant very sensibly points out that if Jack really loved Sara, he wouldn't have jumped to conclusions about her miscarriage without talking it over with her.
+ The Butler Did It! - I guessed that Grant was the villain before Jack and Sara did.
+ Kinky People Are BAD People - You can tell that Grant is the villain because his bedroom suite is filled with sex toys and he has a giant cage suspended over his bed! Only bad people with huge issues like kink. Respectable people all have vanilla missionary sex with the lights off.
+ But Did You Read The Prequels? - Actually, I had read Edge of Danger prior to this, a couple of years ago, and seem to recall there was a robot in it. (Notice what I pay attention to: not the Twooest Twoo Wuv, the damn robot.) I'm sure I'm supposed to know who Duncan Edge and Lark are, but I can't be arsed.
+ SNAAAAAAAAAKE DICK!!!! - At the end of the book, Jack walks in on Grant (in ginormous rainbow snake form) attempting to rape Sara, and I actually have to give Cherry Adair some props here because the scene with the writhing mating smaller snakes was pretty cringeworthy. I have no fear of snakes - I respect them, and I'd tread carefully if I were in an area where I knew them to be abundant, but I'm not phobic about them. Anyway, there is a fairly detailed scene of Jack slashing his way through the writhing snakes and cutting off several of Grant's giant snake dicks. In more or less those words. This struck me as kind of a ridonkulous thing to mention, though since Grant was a Snake Of Unusual Size, I suppose it was all Jack could reasonably reach.
It makes me sad to think that that's probably the only time I'll ever use that ridiculous romance trope.
Texas Two-Step (Debbie Macomber). This one was neutral; it wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it wasn't anything.
Ellie Sheridan and her childhood friend Glen Patterson were always close, but never shared "those" feelings for each other. The folks of Promise, however, knew a good match when they saw one, and Ellie and Glen suddenly found themselves being pushed together more and more often. Though the actions of the townspeople became quite transparent, the friends found that they didn't mind at all...
RIDICULOUS ROMANCE TROPES!
+ The Big Misunderstanding Is Stupid - If Glen and Ellie really know each other that well, shouldn't he know (or be able to guess quickly) that she and Richard Weston don't have anything going on?
+ BFE Is The Best - I freely concede that this could be my personal baggage talking, because I've lived in small towns (I live in one now) and I fucking hate them; until we came back to Indiana when I was 17, I had always lived in or near a major city, and the place I consider my hometown is a good-sized college town (our population is 84000+, not including the student population - so it's not a huge place, but it's not WELCOME TO WEST BUTTFUCK, POPULATION 300 either). Promise sounds like my personal hell. Also, when I was growing up, we moved around a lot, so I don't have the experience of always living in the same place and knowing the same people, and I can't really get inside that mindset. So, you know, my two cents; take 'em with a grain of salt.
Also, I don't like Texas very much as a result of having lived there for two years growing up. I do not care to see the West or anything in it ever again, ever.
+ But I Bought A Suit! - I think this is a trope namer. Richard has given out that he's proposed to Ellie and she accepted, and during a subsequent conversation, Ellie lets him down gently. Richard's response to this is to tell her that he went out and bought a new suit, which leaves Ellie shaking her head. This is possibly the best stupid reason to get married I've ever seen.
+ I Been Down That Road, And It Don't Lead Nowhere - If you're going to introduce the damn ghost town, at least have some stuff happen. We've established that Glen and friends went out there as teenagers, and that Richard has taken Ellie out there. This thread is introduced and doesn't go anywhere. (I think Texas Two-Step is part of a series, so it's possible that the ghost town thread was elaborated upon in other books. I was just annoyed that there was no further exploration of it in this one, because I think a book should be able to stand on its own and make relative sense without reading the others in the series.)
+ Let's Kill All The Matchmakers - Okay, I didn't want to kill Savannah because she was actually fairly low-key as matchmaker characters go. I usually find them annoying as shit and not at all subtle, not to mention that they all need to retake the Bechdel Test until they pass.
+ Nefarious But Not - Richard. Don't get me wrong, his behavior is a series of dick moves, but he's really more of a thoughtless jerk than the second coming of Hitler.
Live-In Lover (Lyn Stone). This one was also neutral.
In ten years with the FBI, Damien Perry had posed as a drug lord, a terrorist, even a hit man. Now the thrill was gone. But what would he do if he quit? Maybe the answer was in the mail, on the card from Marian Olivia Jensen -- Molly, as he remembered her. The earthy redhead who aroused unfamiliar fantasies of a wife and family in his jaded soul.
Molly Jensen was finally safe from her menacing ex-husband -- until he was released from jail. Now the threatening phone calls wouldn’ t stop. Molly knew there was only one man who could help her: Damien Perry. His charade as her live-in lover was ingenious, but how long could she pretend to be pretending?
RIDICULOUS ROMANCE TROPES!
+ Professional Boundaries Are Permeable - Apparently if you're an FBI agent you can just threaten the shit out of people and also sleep with the person you're protecting and it's completely fine! Who knew? I wish I'd gone into the FBI instead of the land title industry.
Admittedly, Damien is not protecting Molly in an official capacity, but still, some stuff goes down that would be considered pretty questionable in real life.
+ Blame It On The Drugs - It turns out that the reason Jack went off the rails on the Crazy Train was because he had a heavy cocaine habit and apparently coke makes you crazy and violent! I don't think this is intentional, but it almost came off as "oh, Jack had a cocaine problem and that was why he stalked the shit out of Molly and pretty much tried to kill her and put her through hell, how unfortunate but it's all over now". I get that when you're under the influence, it's not uncommon to do things that you might not do if you were sober, but I felt like it was just painting Jack as a victim rather than dealing with the complexities of abusive situations, and it had been established that he was already jealous and possessive to begin with - the story worked fine with his just being an asshole.
+ What A Loathsome Child - Ugh. Ugh. As we've established many times, I have no use for real children. I really have no use for the "adorable" child characters in romance novels. Yes, one-year-olds are pretty much pants at cleanliness and fine motor control, but Sydney's grubby sticky gooey nasty repulsiveness was described several times in great detail and oh Jesus it just made me want to go scrub myself until I bled. I think I'm supposed to go "awww what a sweet baby", but every time Sydney was in the scene I kept thinking "sweet Zeus, lady, SCRUB THE DAMN CHOCOLATE OFF THE BRAT'S FACE NO KISSES FOR FILTHY LITTLE URCHINS". When Sydney got kidnapped, I found myself hoping for a resolution involving a tiny, shallow grave, just so I wouldn't have to read about what an awful mess she made while eating.
And th-th-th-that's all, folks! More stuff coming in the future.