When we last saw the Dollagangers, they were escaping the attic in which they were locked up for almost four years, plotting revenge against their evil mother, and incest-kissing like it’s going out of style (has it ever ever been in style? No, it has never been in style). With their little sister Carrie in tow, Cathy and Chris lug their belongings into a bus to head down to Florida where they can have a new start and make their living as flying trapeze artists. Due to the heat, exhaustion, hunger, and all around weakness (not to mention the arsenic poisoning — spoiler!), the little tow-headed albatross starts throwing up. Cathy and Chris mop up the vomit with some napkins and are told they will be thrown off the bus by the driver when he catches them trying to stick the dirty napkins in between the seats (the disgusting pigs). Luckily, there is a magical and mute old obese black lady in there with them who sees the suffering child and offers to take them to the doctor with her (she carries a notepad around her neck with which she conveys her thoughts). At the next stop, the Dollagangers get off the bus with the old black lady who takes them to a perfect cookie-cutter house where she is the caretaker and housekeeper for a man she calls “doctor-son.” The doctor-son is a debonair, handsome, extremely kind, and lonely man called Dr. Paul Sheffield. If a man who is a complete stranger living in the middle of nowhere offered you and your siblings to live in his mansion-cottage in a lap of luxury, would you take it?

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I’ve never been a particularly religious person. Growing up a Catholic Filipino-American, my exposure to church was my mother dragging me out of bed at the crack of why-am-I-awake on a Sunday, making me put on a skirt, and forcing me to sit on a pew for a whole hour listening to some guy in a dress tell me that it’s not too late, that I don’t have to go to hell, if I just say sorry, my bad, and stop sneaking money out of my mother’s purse. And blaming things on my sister. This routine got old for a while, even for my long-suffering mother, so when I was about seventeen, I woke up to an empty house on a Sunday morning. The car was not in the driveway, my parents and sisters weren’t home, and there was a plate on the kitchen counter with a solitary egg, two pieces of bacon, one dry toast, and a note that said, “Bam” (unrecognizable emoticon. Not happy, not sad. Straight line for a mouth). We never discussed why my mother stopped dragging me to church. Maybe she got tired of shushing me during mass while I made fun of the priest’s Filipino accent to the delight of my equally bored sisters. Maybe I made her feel like a bad person for threatening to kill me if I didn’t shut my mouth for one hour, just one hour, for God’s sake.

So I must not have been in church on the day that they talked about stigmata. I had not heard of it until I saw that awesome-awful movie starring Patricia Arquette. Is there something I’m not understanding about this idea of receiving the wounds of Christ (punctures through the palms and feet, bleeding forehead, a stab through the side, not to mention the wicked-weird visions and God talking to you) and suffering not just pain but people thinking you’re hurting yourself for attention, just because YOU REALLY LOVE the LORD AND THIS IS YOUR REWARD?!? And why would anyone inflict this thing on a 7-year-old Jewish girl whose parents are in the middle of a really bad, really ugly divorce?

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Once upon a time, in a mansion deep in the heart of the South, a beautiful blond princess borne to a heartless, cold woman and a cold, soulless man, fell illicitly in love with a beautiful blond prince. This beautiful blond prince happens to be the very much younger half-brother of her father, which makes him a dirty uncle, though not quite so dirty, and yet dirty all the same. The parents of the princess who are very religious people are not so happy with this. They disinherit the princess and the uncle and throw them out of the mansion. The princess and the uncle, shamed and utterly humiliated, flee in the dead of night, never to be heard from in polite society ever again.

But fate is seemingly kind to pretty, blond people and the princess called Corinne and the dirty uncle called Christopher, change their last name to Dollaganger, manage to build a happy little life together, in love and utterly ensnared with each other’s remarkable golden blond looks. Genetics be damned, the two pretty pretty people make love like pretty pretty blond monkeys and produce two perfectly beautiful blond and blue eyed children with two arms, two legs, and are luckily intelligent and talented in their own special way. The blond girl-child is named Cathy and the blond boy-child is named Christopher, after their father. The two children are so utterly perfect and doll-like that they are nicknamed the Dresden Dolls. The girl-child is beloved by the father and shows signs of growing up to be one of those creatures seeking a man to marry who will love her the way Daddy had loved her. The boy-child is favored by the mommy. The mother Corrine, unsatisfied with her current lot and practically mocking fate to give her mutant deformed babies, gets pregnant again and has two more perfectly golden blond babies, fraternal twins called Cory and Carrie. Cathy pouts when she discovers she will no longer be the baby of the family and solicits a promise from her daddy that he will not love the new girl-child more than he loves her and as a testament to that promise, Daddy puts on a heart-shaped garnet ring on Cathy’s tiny doll-like finger.

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I’m really not sure how to review this book. Lisa Kleypas is an auto-buy for me (though I haven’t yet tried her contemporary stuff) and I normally enjoy her tortured, damaged, will-do-anything-to-have-heroine heroes, but there was something about this particular hero that made me go, “whoa, buddy, say what?” Immediately after finishing this book, my first reaction was that I liked it. Upon further contemplation, however, my opinion began to waver. This is the 3rd book in the Hathaway series (the first one is about the eldest sister marrying Cam Rohan from The Devil in Winter and the second one is about the 2nd sister getting together with another one of Lisa Kleypas’ signature heroes: barely civilized, big as an ox, a little nuts, and all the way nuts about the heroine) and I was really looking forward to reading about Poppy, who was socially inept, could talk the ear off of a deaf man, and adorably self-conscious about her awkwardness. Poppy is everything I like in a heroine: she doesn’t rush head-first stupidly into dangerous situations, speaks her mind but knows when it’s smarter to shut up, and intelligent without being precocious. Harry Rutledge, her romantic counterpart, was at first very yummy. When I read that he likes to tinker and make little mechanical things (and weapons!) and that his enormous hotel boasts a bunch of secret passages, I immediately thought, “Batman!” I was all set and ready to love this hero. He’s tortured, mysterious, reclusive, a genius… hey, he’s even starting to sound like a Jayne Ann Krentz hero, but then he had to go and get a little stalker on me. And while reading the book, I couldn’t shake this niggling feeling that poor, little Poppy was bamboozled and manipulated to marrying her stalker…

Spoilers and stuff below, btw.

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Grade: B-

I accidentally grabbed this book from the pile I have on the passenger seat of my car—I meant to grab the Kleypas one— and didn’t realize my mistake until I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office. Because I didn’t want to go down ten floors on the elevator, walk out to the parking lot, and jay-walk across the street where I parked my car, I was a little more than peeved. Though I had grabbed this book on impulse while I was standing in line at the grocery store with pasta, tomato sauce, and Clementine oranges (I’m addicted to those things. I can eat four in one sitting) in my basket, I was a little leery reading about a heroine called Vanessa Huxtable (who, by the way, is also a middle child. Huh). Seriously?!?! Vanessa Huxtable? Damn, I was expecting Denise to come out, yelling at Vanessa over a sweater she stole while Little Rudy eggs them both on (Man, Little Rudy grew up with some boobies, what?!). But soon enough, I realized that these two Vanessas could not be more than worlds apart. First of all, Tempestt Bledsoe would probably condescend to cutting a bitch if the bitch looked at her cross-eyed and secondly, that Vanessa Huxtable would probably never marry a rich man she doesn’t love right away even if it meant her family could keep their house and be eating nice for a while (like, say, Dr. and Atty. Mrs. Huxtable got kidnapped by Somalian pirates and Denise was the only one holding the family together, and it’s not like Sondra ever gave a shit about any of them anyway once she was out of that house!). Which brings me to my main peeve of this book and every single book that follows this trope: WHAT THE HELL IS SO SELF-SACRIFICING ABOUT MARRYING A VERY RICH, VERY GOOD-LOOKING MAN WHO CAN MAKE YOUR EYES ROLL TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD IN THE SACK?!?! True-love, schmoo-love… fancy jewelry, couture clothes, five meals a day, a goddamn mansion, and an orgasm smorgasbord can go a long way in ushering that nonsense in. Martyrdom, my skinny muscled fanny!

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