Three Mini-reviews, a taste of Rants to come

It's been a while. The Chronicler has been insanely stressed recently, but she's better and hence back. I know the lovely lady at Teach me Tonight has warned me. And I'm aware that not all romance novels are like the following, but...

Anyway, several mini-reviews follow. Full rants may or may not be in progress:

The Restitution, by M. L. Tyndall
Is horrible.

The Anthropologist and Pillywiggin and... well, most of the Loinfire Club is probably utterly sick of this book. It's in the mould of the rapist-hero books from way back when that I've been assured don't get published anymore. It has been thrown at the wall at least thrice during my reading of it.

The Plot? Lady gets kidnapped by pirates. The captain pirated her purity. Nine months later, she's hiding with a pastor, utterly disgraced and nursing his baby. Her baby is then kidnapped and she must now join forces with her piratical rapist to rescue their lovechild. And she must fend off the advances of other, more socially acceptable men and "native" types.

Some plot summaries will tell you he seduced her. They're lying. He raped her. There is no pussyfooting about the subject. He just raped her. It's not a matter of her succumbing to his seductions and then her retroactively deciding that she couldn't possibly have consented, thus launching into an interesting discussion about female sexuality and the constraints/expectations society may place on it. No, he raped her. And he jokes about it later.

No, none of us could get over the fact that he raped her. And that God made him do it to bring about his salvation. Yes, it was all part of God's plan. Including the bit where they retire in matrimonial bliss living off the spoils of his piracy.

There's a lot more to say about how this book repulsed us. And if you find our pain amusing it may entertain you, but that for another day...

Pride and Pregnancy, by Karen Temple
Has a delightful heroine.

She's great. Charmingly tacky, as The Anthroplogist said. She had no massive self-esteem issues. There were no I-am-not-a-Slut complexes. She was highly likable, the swirl of clutter that she accumulates is adorable and we loved her. Lots and lots.

And then the hero was there. And then he got her pregnant in a scene so incredibly moronic, we never really got over it: She was groping around for the condoms and then an ellipsis later, he slipped inside her. The heroine thinks that maybe she should do something about it, but skin on skin apparently felt too good (and like all heroines her braincells died).

We read the passage about five times trying to find some loophole which might mean he was being less of an irresponsible dick. He later seems to think they used a condom and it broke (bad editing? or trying to shift responsibility?) but we know better.

The heroine's issues were believable (though I'm mildly irritated about the anecdote about her cross-dressing ex-husband... admittedly, wearing her underwear is a bit much, but when she adds that it's okay for people to have odd sexual desires, why did she break up with him over it? Is it only okay for people to have fetishes over there in a dark corner of the internet away from you?) I can sympathise with a woman who feels that she "leans" too much in a relationship. Co-dependency is bad. But the author and Mr. Ice Cream mogul never quite resolve these issues with her. The argument that she deserves to be happy seems to be telling me that they're trying to convince that her co-dependency is okay, if not good. And she should just get over herself.

Decadent, by Shayla Black
Is really, really horrible.

SmartBitches read it and it was bad then. It's a bottomless pit of classic romance novel hang-ups with an I-am-not-a-Slut heroine and an Uber Alpha hero (who can be all the more Alpha now that his cousin/fuckbuddy is there to pick up the pieces and ask for consent for him). It's really, really bad.

It was so bad Pillywiggin tried to hide it under the sofa. Twice.


Actually unspeakably awesome is the article Pillywiggin has found me: Mate selection in popular women's fiction. It makes my Original Idea about romance novels being a playing out of the evolutionary goals of women (i.e. have relationship, have kids) a bit less Original, but it's nice to see that I'm not alone in my ideas. Especially since last time I started on that subject on SmartBitches... well, nothing good came of that.