And then the show came out and I thought to myself, “Ooookay, I don’t remember the book being filled with lots of skanky doggy-styling and incest and all sorts of naked craziness. I gotta pick the series back up.” And so I started from the beginning. Much to my surprise, it’s way better this time around, probably due to HBO providing eye candy and skanky nakedness for my noggin (I CAN HAVE THE SHOW INSIDE MY BRAIN). Light up your torches, bitches, ’cause it’s time to get fantastic with snarks and grumkins and dragons and direwolves!

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”

HERE BE SPOILERS

The Plot as I Understood it (Pardon me, but this summary might be as long as the book itself) This epic book is told from the points-of-view of several characters (and there are many) integral to the plot and here they are:

The Wall The Wall is a big ass fence that protects the seven kingdoms of Westeros from whatever unsavory creatures lurking in the woods. For a lot of people, the creatures are nothing more than old wives’ tales and folksy superstition, but a group of tough guys called The Brothers of the Nights’ Watch at Castle Black are stationed at the Wall and sworn to protect the kingdom from whatever lies on the other side of the Wall. At the start of the story, a handful of the Nights’ Watch patrolling outside the Wall encounter some scary shit; people die and one of them runs away.

Ned Stark NED is the patriarch of the House of Stark which is located at Winterfell, far away from King’s Landing, the capital of Westeros, and way up North, where it’s hella cold. It’s so frickin’ cold at Winterfell that the family motto is “Winter is coming.” That’s it. Not “Pick up your big sword and hack away at shit til it dies,” but “Winter is coming.” Several years ago, Ned and the current king, ROBERT BARATHEON, were squires together for Lord JON ARRYN and became life-long friends. They were such good friends that Robert was supposed to marry LYANNA STARK, Ned’s sister, until she was allegedly raped and murdered by RHAEGAR TARGARYEN, the son of the old king. Before the start of the book, Robert, Lord Jon Arryn, and Ned took up arms against the last king, AERYS TARGARYEN, to whom everyone referred as “The Mad King.” Ned’s father and older brother Brandon (who was supposed to marry Ned’s wife CATELYN TULLY) die, but Ned and Robert win against the king, so Robert becomes the new king, Jon Arryn becomes his Hand (his point man), and Ned retreats to Winterfell with his new bastard baby JON SNOW to raise his family with Catelyn. Life has been relatively quiet for Ned and his family, except some weird shit might be happening on the other side of the wall because he had been catching some deserters from the Nights’ Watch (and executing them, as he’s supposed to do) and the last one he caught was scared as hell about…something. Folks say it’s just The Others getting out of control, but some of the more superstitious lot are convinced there are monsters and shit wanting to be starting somethin’. On top of that, Ned and his sons had just come across a dead DIREWOLF, which everyone believed to be extinct, and the direwolf had just given birth to six puppies, one of them an albino. The sigil (mascot) of Clan Stark is the direwolf and Ned Stark has six kids, so it’s fortuitous that they should come across six direwolves. Jon Snow, the bastard child, takes the albino himself. Folks argue that it can’t be good luck to find puppies fresh out of a dead mom, but Ned is convinced by his children to let them keep the direwolves and they take them home.

Ned is welcomed by his wife Catelyn who tells him that his mentor and old friend, Lord Jon Arryn, who was also married to Catelyn’s sister LYSA, has died unexpectedly and Lysa has fled back to the Arryn seat of Vale with their son Robert (named after the king, but Robin in the TV series to avoid confusion). Ned tells Catelyn that she should go to the Vale with the children to be with Lysa during this difficult time, but Catelyn says no and drops the bomb: King Robert and his entourage along with his wife CERSEI LANNISTER and their children are on the way and that means Catelyn can’t leave now. Ned is elated to see the friend he hadn’t seen in years—and WHOA, did Robert get FAT—but that happiness quickly turns to agonized brooding and misery when Roberts asks him to be the new Hand of the King, now that Jon Arryn is dead. Ned is happy in Winterfell and wants to say no, but Robert is his king as well as his friend, so he can’t. When Catelyn receives a super-secret missive from her sister that Jon Arryn may have been murdered with POISON, she convinces Ned that he has to become the Hand of the King and go to King’s Landing to find out who could have possibly murdered Jon Arryn. He agrees to take his two daughters SANSA and ARYA and to leave the boys with Catelyn.

Ned gets to King’s Landing and is quickly disillusioned by all the courtly intrigue and signs of excess that he sees everywhere he looks. Robert and his queen Cersei seem to hate each other and Robert is only interested in whoring, drinking, and killing shit. He bemoans to Ned that he never wanted to be a king and Ned himself should have taken the Iron Throne. Meanwhile, Ned does some amateur detective stuff and discovers that Jon Arryn was investigating some crazy shit before he was killed. Apparently, before he died, Jon Arryn had been visiting the king’s many bastards and asking a lot of questions. He had also been studying a large book filled with the histories of kings and queens as well as their progeny and their descriptions. Like “Robert Baratheon: black hair, blue eyes; son- Joffrey Baratheon: blond hair…” Ned takes it upon himself to retrace Jon Arryn’s last steps, takes a look at Robert’s black-haired, blue-eyed bastards, then at the golden-haired children he produced with Cersei, then thinks to himself, “Damn it, Ned, whatever could you be missing?! Why did this information get Jon Arryn killed? What did he find out?” Ned is also finding out that Robert has been a terrible king; he’s racked up massive debts in order to throw parties and tourneys and has basically passed on the leadership duties to the Hand of the King. Not that the king’s council is any great help: they’re a pit of gossiping, back-stabbing vipers (if vipers had daggers and hands with which to stab them). Some of them report directly to the queen, some of them want the throne for themselves, and some just want to watch the melee and chaos. Ned is the last honorable, principled man in all of King’s Landing and he is starting to realize with a generous heaping of an “oh shit” feeling that it’s likely to get him killed and his ass should have stayed in Winterfell.

Catelyn Tully Catelyn is super-pissed. She’s not overly fond of Winterfell to begin with because she grew up in Riverrun where there’s sun and happy times and lots of people with red hair; she’s even angrier that Ned would cheat on her with some anonymous “away at war” slut and add insult to injury by bringing home his bastard child to raise among his legitimate children. Granted, she is madly in love with Ned and that’s quite lucky, considering she was actually betrothed to Ned’s brother Brandon and Ned stepped up to the plate when Brandon died. But the gods must be conspiring against Catelyn because bad shit is starting to happen in droves. First, her brother-in-law dies and her younger sister goes into exile in the high mountains of the Eyrie with her sickly son in tow. Second, the king comes and demands that Ned take the place of Jon Arryn, her recently dead brother-in-law, as the new Hand of the King. Catelyn is super-not-happy about this, but she figures Ned would be the only one who could figure out who had murdered Jon Arryn since Ned would be right in the thick of it, so she persuades Ned to take up the position, leaving her and the children in Winterfell, with winter coming in to start some cold-ass shit. Third BUT CERTAINLY NOT THE LEAST, some asshole shoved her baby boy Bran out of a tower window and now he’s in a coma and probably going to die. On top of that, an assassin barges into Bran’s bedroom to kill him while Catelyn is watching him and Catelyn gets all cut up for her trouble. Luckily, Bran’s direwolf saves the day and tears out the throat of the assassin. When Catelyn finds out that the dagger that was going to be used to kill Bran belongs to TYRION LANNISTER, the dwarf brother of the queen, Catelyn realizes she has to start her own shit. She is a TULLY, damn it, and Tullys don’t stand idly by while people try to murder their kin. Oh, son, it’s about to get crazy up in here.

Sansa Stark Sansa is your typical teenage girl. She’s pretty, cares a lot about clothes and hair, fights with her younger sister about everything, and falls in love as easily as I burn through a ten-dollar bill. As Ned Stark’s eldest daughter, she has been raised from infancy to be a lady who will one day enter a politically advantageous marriage with one of her father’s allies. She’s a naive, romantic girl, so she thinks romantic love is just like the stuff she hears about in songs and stories. When the king and her father arrange for her to be betroth to Joffrey, the prince and heir apparent, Sansa is super-excited because Joffrey is OMG super-hot and rich and oh-so-gallant. She’s convinced that he’s noble and good and kind like her father. But that would make things too easy for the lucky, already privileged Sansa. Joffrey, of course, is the biggest snot-nosed, sociopathic, narcissistic, pettiest little jerkweed in all of Westeros (with the exception of VISERYS–but more on him later). Sansa just really wants to be with Joffrey because she wants to be a princess and live in a castle and have all his babies, but her stupid, tomboyish sister ARYA just has to muck things up. For instance, when Sansa and Joffrey go out for a walk and come across Arya playing with some commoner and Joffrey starts making fun of Arya’s friend, sparking Arya’s ire, Arya just had to grab Joffrey’s sword and throw it into the river just so Joffrey wouldn’t be able to hurt Arya’s friend. Oh, and Arya’s stupid direwolf just had to attack Joffrey and bite his arm so he wouldn’t be able to strike Arya and her friend. Stupid Arya. She ruins everything. And yet for all her petty teenage cares and rich-girl snobbiness, Sansa has a hidden cunning: girlfriend knows which side of the bread is buttered. Even after she finds out that Joffrey has the soul and personality of direwolf poop to be scraped off from the bottom of a stable-boy’s boot, Sansa plays it cool, pretending she still wants to marry Joffrey and doing everything she can to stay on the queen’s good side in order to save herself, especially after all the shit hits the proverbial fan. She’s pretty and looks guileless; no one will suspect her of anything. She is, after all, a mere slip of a girl. But under her carefully selected outfits and placidly beautiful face, Sansa is always thinking… and figuring out a way to get ahead and on top. Her wolf is called Lady.

Arya Stark Arya knows she’s not as pretty as her sister Sansa. She knows people call her “horse-faced girl” behind her back. She’s hopeless at sewing and making laces and… taking baths and combing her hair and wearing nice dresses. More than anything, she just wants to hang out with her older brother Rob and her bastard older brother Jon Snow, but since she is a Lord’s daughter, she has to learn how to be lady-like and preen and talk non-sense to people she can’t stand. Worst of all, she’s forced to go to King’s Landing with her father, the new Hand of the King, and her stupid bratty older sister Sansa, while her brothers get to stay at Winterfell and do… guy stuff. On top of that, Jon Snow is going to be leaving for The Wall and she’s likely never going to see him again—which is why he gives her a parting gift of a kickass sword that Jon calls Needle. When Arya gets to King’s Landing, she immediately realizes that she’s not GOING. TO. BE. HAPPY. AT. ALL. All the girls her age act like Sansa and only care about stupid things like ribbons and dresses and looking cute. While hiding from her governess and Sansa, she starts hanging out with the other kids, getting dirty and into all sorts of mischief. She even manages to get her father to hire her a fencing suitor who will teach her to become a kickass swordsman. As young as she is, however, even she can sense that SOME BAD STUFF is happening at King’s Landing and her father is in danger. She knows she has to be the strong and quick one to be able to warn her father so they can all go back to Winterfell safe and sound. It’s up to her to save them all, even if she has to smack Sansa senseless and drag her home herself. Her wolf is called Nymeria.

TYRION LANNISTER Let’s go outside the Stark family for a moment and introduce you to the arguably most beloved character of this series. Tyrion Lannister is a dwarf. His older (twin) siblings, JAMIE and CERSEI (Robert Baratheon’s queen) are both tall, preternaturally good-looking, and favored by their father TYWIN LANNISTER, the richest guy in Westeros. Tyrion, on the other hand, is “deformed” and killed his beloved mother on his way out of her uterus and the family has never forgiven him for it. Despite his shortcomings, however, Tyrion is easily the wiliest and smartest character in the series. As he tells Jon Snow who is FOREVER MOPING ABOUT BEING A BASTARD THAT NO ONE LOVES, if people are dead-set on setting labels on you, you just gotta own that shit. Nothing in the world will change the fact that Jon Snow is an ILLEGITIMATE CHILD just like nothing in the world will ever make Tyrion a normal-sized man. Tyrion tells Jon that his ONE advantage over everyone is his ability to absorb knowledge from everything he reads, so that’s why he reads all the time. He can’t fight, he can’t run, and he can’t overpower anyone, but he is smart enough to manipulate any situation to his advantage. After all, if he can’t be a tall and strong man, he might as well be a very smart one. He tells Jon Snow that he needs to find something within himself that he can cultivate and wield over everyone else so that he will be remembered for being more than Ned Stark’s bastard. And then he tells him to stop being a little bitch. Oh, and he really, really loves drinking. And whores. And nothing is better than drinking with whores. That is Tyrion in a nutshell.

Bran Stark is not the littlest Stark—that would be his youngest brother RICKON—but he is a precocious, playful, and curious little boy who just wants to be like his older brothers. At the start of the novel, Bran witnesses his father executing a deserter from the Nights’ Watch and he listens to his brothers when they tell him to keep his eyes open and not flinch when their dad’s sword cuts off the head of the deserter. He is only seven years old. Just like other little boys, Bran enjoys exploring the grounds of Winterfell and especially likes climbing trees and towers. In fact, he is very, very good at it and even though his mother CATELYN hates it when he climbs things like a monkey, Bran enjoys indulging this hobby and has never fallen. Ever. Dun-dun-dun. One day, Bran climbs up a trellis to an abandoned tower where he often plays and sees… something that he’s definitely not supposed to see. All of a sudden, Bran is falling, falling, falling… SMACK. And now Bran is in a coma. While he’s out in Oblivion Land, an assassin tries to take him out. Luckily, his awesome direwolf leaps on the killer and tears out his throat. When he wakes up, Bran is dismayed to find that the lower half of his body is now paralyzed and he will never be able to walk or climb or run ever again. Oh, and everything in Winterfell is just a big ole mess. His dad, along with his sisters Arya and Sansa, have gone away to King’s Landing, his bastard brother Jon Snow has been dispatched to the Wall, his mother Catelyn is away on a mission to warn their father of bad shit going down, and his oldest brother Robb is now the temporary Lord of Winterfell. And is no longer any fun. His brother Rickon cries for their parents all the time and follows Robb around and Bran is stuck in his room with only OLD NAN and MAESTER LUWIN for company. When he needs to go anywhere, HODOR, Old Nan’s mentally deficient giant of a grandson, has to carry him around on his back like a baby in a knapsack. NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME EVER AGAIN. GOD, THIS SUCKS. As if that’s not enough to deal with, he’s been having weird dreams about a crow with three eyes and himself running and running like the wind in the forest. What the hell is going on? When shit REALLY hits the fan, Robb leaves Winterfell to join their mother and seven-year-old Bran is left in charge of Winterfell. Oh, just great. Now he’s the Lord of Winterfell. Awesome. Best plan ever. His direwolf is called Summer.

Jon Snow is a whiny little fourteen-year-old BASTARD. And by that I mean he is the illegitimate child of NED STARK and some camp hussy he supposedly impregnated while he was out fighting wars (when he’s supposed to be SUPER in love with Catelyn and would never cheat on her). Maybe. I have my theories AND THE PEOPLE OF THE INTERNET AGREE WITH ME AND THAT’S ALL I’M GOING TO SAY ABOUT THAT. His last name is Snow because that is the last name given to the illegitimate children of Winterfell because he can’t use the last name Stark. Because he’s a bastard. Nevertheless, Ned treats him as well as he treats his other sons, but his step-mother Catelyn HATES HIS GUTS. Catelyn is not outright cruel to him in action, but is super-rude to his face and never hesitates to make him feel like crap. He knows he’ll never be the Lord of Winterfell like his half-brother Robb and that he’ll never belong anywhere. Which is why he mopes and whines all the time. When his father’s brother BENJEN STARK, a Ranger of the Night’s Watch comes down to Winterfell for a visit, Jon realizes that the best course of action for him would be to “take up the black” himself and become a Brother of the Night’s Watch. The Brothers don’t marry, don’t have families, protect the rest of the kingdom from whatever lies on the other side of the wall, and never, ever, ever leave Castle Black. Jon figures that if he joins the Night’s Watch like his Uncle Benjen, he’ll always have a “family” and a “home” to belong to. Unfortunately, when he gets to the Wall, he finds out that the people who usually “take up the black” are the dregs of society that no one wants to have around; there he finds rapists, thieves, drunks, wastrel younger sons, and other undesirables with nowhere else to go. And there’s no turning back. Ever. Fortunately for Jon, he’s a good fighter and LORD COMMANDER JEOR MORMONT takes a liking to him and requests for Jon to become his personal steward. Jon DOESN’T want to be a steward because he thinks he’s good enough to be a Ranger like his Uncle Benjen and everyone knows stewards are nothing more than nursemaids. Throughout the novel, Jon is torn between his vowed loyalty to the Night’s Watch and his love for the Starks who are suddenly in all kinds of epic trouble. Jon is told repeatedly to forget about his family outside the Castle Black, but he finds it hard to adjust to his new life. And it’s something else for Jon to whine and pout about. His direwolf is called Ghost (the albino direwolf with red eyes).

Daenerys Targaryen or Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons, The First of Her Name, is the sister of VISERYS, quite possibly the only person in this entire series with the only legit claim to the throne. Daenerys and Viserys are the only remaining Targaryens after their entire family is massacred along with their father, the Mad King Aerys II and their brother Rhaegar, rapist of Lyanna Stark. During Robert Baratheon’s rebellion, Viserys was safe in their family’s seat of Dragonstone along with his mother, who was pregnant with Daenerys at the time. Their mother dies in childbirth and Daenerys and Viserys are spirited away by loyal servants across the Narrow Sea to the Free Cities. Viserys becomes known as the Beggar King and calls Robert Baratheon the “Usurper.” In order to shore up an army big enough to challenge current king of the Seven Kingdoms, Viserys uses his only bargaining chip, his sister Dany, whom he marries to a primitive, violent warlord king named Khal Drogo of the Dothraki. He’s like… the king of horses or something. Anyway, Khal Drogo’s got, like, thousands of men at his disposal and Viserys is convinced it’ll be enough to topple over Robert Baratheon. Dany is SO NOT OKAY with this plan, but it’s not like she can do anything about it because surely her brother knows what’s best and he’s taken care of the two of them for years (so she totally owes him) and he’s right that they should totally fight for the Iron Throne, but ewww, she’s the one who has to have sex with a Horse Lord who’s three times her size and he’s totally primitive and doesn’t even speak the same language as they do. On top of that, Viserys is getting more and more unbearable, whining about when Khal Drogo will give him his army so he can fight for the throne already. He’s really mean to Dany and disrespectful to her even in front of her new people and always says shit like, “You do not want to anger the dragon,” because he thinks he’s the last dragon ever. All Dany wants is some peace and quiet, maybe her own place or a home of her own, where she can just… hang out. Maybe next to a lemon tree or something. And not have to deal with dragons and horses and her awful brother and having sex with a giant and forcing herself to learn how to speak Dothraki. Ugh, what’s a thirteen-year-old girl to do?

To Sum Up Robert Baratheon is the current king of the Seven Kingdoms but he sucks at it because all he wants to do is drink, go wenching, and fight in wars. His wife the Queen Cersei hates him and thinks her son Joffrey (who is freakishly blond whereas Robert has black hair and blue eyes) would make a better king. The Hand of the King, Jon Arryn, who was the point-man of Robert, dies mysteriously, so Robert asks his old best friend Ned Stark, the Lord of Winterfell, with whom he defeated the Mad King Aerys Targaryen back in the day, to become the new Hand of the King. Ned doesn’t want to become The Hand, but he also wants to find out who killed Jon Arryn (he was mentor to both Robert and Ned), especially since Jon Arryn was apparently looking into some stuff (which pissed some people off) before he was killed. Robert dies during a hunting “accident” and his brother Stannis thinks he should be the rightful king because Joffrey is obviously not Robert’s son, but his younger brother Renly thinks HE should be king because Stannis sucks. Meanwhile, in the Free Cities, Viserys Targaryen, the lone surviving male of the massacred Targaryen clan, is trying to rally up some troops to overthrow the “Usurper” and claim The Iron Throne once and for all. In short, a bunch of people WANT to be king, but all of that noise won’t even matter in the long run because WINTER IS COMING and there are some monsters and creatures and grumkins from the other side of the Wall who want to join the party. And they’ll probably all die. Except Jon Snow. ‘Cause that’s just the way that shit works.

OH MY WORD ZOMG, I love “The Game of Thrones.” I’m not a huge fan of epic fantasy books and I especially hate when shit ends on a cliffhanger, but I’m totally invested and addicted to this series now. I just finished reading the fifth book “A Dance with Dragons” (and yo, there are dragons in it) and CANNOT WAIT for the sixth book. I ALSO CANNOT WAIT UNTIL GEORGE R.R. MARTIN CONFIRMS WHAT I’VE BEEN SUSPECTING ALL ALONG ABOUT THE PARENTAGE OF A CERTAIN SOMEONE AND I AM DYING. If you’re like me and you’re usually, like, “Ewww, dragons and magic and nerdy shit, not for me. Thanks,” you’d be making a big mistake if you don’t pick up this series just because you don’t think it’s your cup of tea. SISTER, this book is CRAZY EXCITING and HELLA DRAMATIC. There’s incest and betrayal and double-crossing and monsters and back-stabbing and best of all, this book features really strong, really smart female characters who don’t wait around for the menfolk to take care of shit: if anything’s gonna get done in these books, it’s the womenfolk who’s pushing up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. There’s also sword fights and lots of sweaty hot men and SNOW MONSTERS and zombies! WTF. IT IS NUTS. You cannot read these books and not get emotionally invested with these characters, especially because George R.R. Martin tells the HUGE EPIC STORY through the eyes of many, many people and instead of getting confusing, it just adds to the multi-layered narrative because as a reader, you’ll get to see how one scenario plays out from the point of view of different people. It’s like one big soap opera that’s for everyone (except children because there are lots of violence and skanky doggy-style sex). PICK UP THIS BOOK AND READ IT.

And that’s all I gotta say about that.

Duh…SPOILERS.

The Plot as I Understood It James Ryburn, Earl of Islay and future duke of Ashbrook, is in a bit of a pickle. He is nineteen years old and his despicable wastrel of a father has laid waste to the Ashbrook fortune and is on his way to decimating the money of his seventeen-year-old ward, Theodora Saxby (she’d like to be called “Theo,” but James insists on calling her “Daisy”). James has a devil of a time controlling his boorish temper and doesn’t hesitate to call his father a piece of shit and has half-a-mind to consign the worthless dumbass and the duchy to hell. The duke orders James to marry Theodora in order to cover his perfidy and James, who is really fond of Daisy—even though everyone says she’s soooooo ugly—wants nothing to do with this plan and would like nothing more than to go off and be a laborer somewhere, but he knows in his heart that he can’t abandon Daisy to an awful penniless fate. The ton, after all, thinks Daisy has a gigantic fortune and it would go very badly for her if she were to be snapped up by a mercurial fortune-hunter who’ll soon find out that she no longer has any money. Especially because she’s soooo ugly.

Theo is aware that she’s not what the ton may call classically attractive, but she knows her strengths and is crazy about fashion. She knows exactly how to play up her attributes in order to draw attention away from her less than desirable visage, but her mother insists on dressing her like the other pretty little debutantes and thus she is ignored and set aside for the prettier girls. What’s worse is she has the BIGGEST crush on the wittiest (read: bitchiest), well-dressed boy in the ton and she’s convinced they’re meant to be together and they’ll make bitchily make fun of everyone else and talk about fashion forever (…um, wait a minute), but he doesn’t even knows she’s alive. Time to come up with a genius plan! Her ridiculously good-looking foster brother James is one of the most eligible bachelors in the ton and sought after by everyone in the marriage mart, so if she could just convince him to play along and pretend he’s interested in her, she’s super-sure that she can get her crush’s attention. Surprisingly, James—who’s always been her really good friend—is willing to go along with her plan, only much to Theo’s chagrin (and delight), James is acting like he REALLY likes her. Before Theo can even process what’s happening, the two of them are making out in the garden during a party and the Prince of Regent is walking in on them along with everyone else and James is suddenly declaring that he’s always been in love with her and wants to marry her. Say what?! Oh man, when a plan comes together, it REALLY comes together!

After a hastily thrown wedding ceremony, James and Theo are married and Theo could not be more thrilled. She can finally stop dressing like a debutante and oh! she has a super-cute husband, who seems to truly adore her (which is weird, because he’s always treated her like a sister before). James, to his credit, is truly in love with Daisy and forcing himself to believe that this is good and it can totally work out and Daisy never has to know that he married her because his dad forced him to. After all, it isn’t until he’s about to marry Daisy that he realizes he loves her, so he owes his father that much. James also ensures that full control of the estate will go to him upon his marriage to Daisy and he himself will make sure that Daisy will be taken care of, no matter what. He and Daisy enjoy two glorious days of honeymoon coital fuckery through the pink gauzy haze of first love and we see that it might work out for these two crazy kids because they’re willing to work together to get the estates solvent and profitable again, with James acquiescing that Daisy is better than him at figures and Daisy deferring to James on the burlier stuff like sowing the fields and shit like that. But one day, they stumble into the library for some more sexual intercourse and the Duke, Jimmy’s dad, walks in and catches Daisy on her knees in front of James giving his twig-and-berries a how’s-your-father with her mouth. A better man with a marble and a half inside his brain-pan would have discreetly backed out and let the lovebirds stew in their embarrassment (THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR HAVING SEX SOMEWHERE WHERE ANYONE CAN WALK IN, ESPECIALLY IF THAT ANYONE INCLUDES YOUR FATHER-IN-LAW BECAUSE HE ALSO LIVES THERE) and never mentioned the incident to anyone, but James’ dad is a special kind of asshole. What happens next made me cringe so hard, utterly horrified, because OH-MY-FUCKING-GOD WHAT A TOOL. James’ dad actually walks up to him, even as James is gawking at him—pants around ankles and rapidly wilting dangly-goblin flapping against his naked thigh—and congratulates him for getting a blowie-job (that’s what the kids call it, right?) from his ugly-ass wife, especially when wives don’t really do that kind of thing and lordly people usually have to get it from their whorish mistresses, so ugly-ass Theo must be so super-grateful that James married her ugly-ass that she’d give him blow-jays at the drop of a napkin. (GOOD THING that the title of the book is “The Ugly Duchess” and not “The Ugly Countess” ’cause that means the HORRIBLE DUKE is going to die and James will become the new duke). On top of that, Daisy discovers that James only proposed to her because his father gave him no choice, so in her fury, she kicks out her father-in-law and tells James that she never ever ever wants to see him ever again and that he could die for all she cares. Despondent, James takes a ship that Daisy generously gives him and sails far, far away from England to become a pirate.

Your Hero …record scratch. I’m sorry, the ONLY heir to a dukedom was allowed to go become a pirate? Is that even kosher? Weren’t there laws against only heirs going off to certain death or something, especially when there will be no one else who can inherit the title? I DECLARE SHENANIGANS. Anyway, James decides to stay away for SEVEN YEARS (just long enough to his wife declare him dead and a distant cousin to lay claim to the dukedom) to become the Dread PiratePrivateer RobertsJack Hawk with the help of a cousin, who just happens to be—in the great seven seas and all—the first one to try and pirate the shit out of James’ ship. What a coincidence! The cousin decides to take James Jack Hawk under his wing and good ole Jimmy takes it upon himself to shave his head, get a poppy tattooed under his eye, and get Incredible Hulk-buff. But fear not, soft-hearted, romance-novel-reading ladies! Captain Jack Hawk doesn’t make women and children walk the plank and he only raid the ships of bad pirates. In fact, they’re doing a service to England that’s sure to get them tons of accolades and medals from the prince himself. If Captain Jack Hawk ever decides to go back to England, that is. After all, he’s got a tattoo under his eye now and he did it so he wouldn’t ever be accepted in polite society ever again and because he’s never going to be a lordly person again and likely never see his old ball-and-chain ever again, he’s just going to take it upon himself to have sex with all the ladies he and his fellow privateers come across on ports. It’s not like he’ll ever see Daisy again, right?

The Stone-Cold Fox Theo is doing just fine, thank you very much. After single-handedly saving the Ashbury estate from certain ruin and starting up not ONE but TWO successful crafts businesses, Theo decides to go to Paris and live there for a while, like Blair Waldorf, becoming a fashion icon of sorts and forgetting she was ever married to James Ryburn, not that she even knows whether he’s dead or alive because he’s never bothered to tell her otherwise. And it’s not like she’s bitter about it. Much. Anyway, she’s living the life she’s always wanted even though her mom wants her to forgive James because she doesn’t want Theo growing old and lonely and bitter by herself and James really did seem like he cared for Theo. Theo, to her credit, is not all the way stone-cold against the idea of getting back together with James. If he would only send a letter. Or a pigeon, or something. Though the ton now views her as a phoenix of sorts who rose from the ashes to become a sexy-ass fox and purveyor of good taste, Theo still thinks about James, wondering if she could find in her now ice-cold heart to forgive him and take him back. If he ever shows up. Or if he’s not lost at sea and dead. Yes, Theo was really, really mad at him because he totally betrayed her—the jackass—but she didn’t expect that he would REALLY, for REAL leave. She thought maybe he would just sulk for a little bit, lick his proverbial wounds, then beg and plead with her to take him back. He did say he loved her even though the premise behind the marriage was a big ole lie. Still, it’s been almost SEVEN YEARS to the minute since he left and maybe it’s time for Theo to have him declared dead so she can get on with her life and his distant cousin, who’s become her BFF and fellow fashion fiend, can take over the dukedom. After all, if James really means to come back and is still alive out there somewhere, he would have sent word already. Right?!

SPOILER ALERT James comes back LITERALLY minutes before the courts declare him dead. OH-EM-GEE, I KNOH, RITE?!?

Oh My Word Captain Jack Sparrow James Ryburn, Duke of Ashbury, makes a triumphant return and oooooh, he’s so brown and buff and primitive and sinfully delicious-looking and he’s definitely oiling up Theo’s secret hidden parts like that mother just got sprayed with butter-flavored PAM, even as Theo insists to herself that there’s no way she can take him back since he’s a pirate and probably killed people and ew! he’s got a tattoo under his eye, for Prinny’s sake. There’s no way James can possibly fit into her life now. The ton admires and follows her around; she’s a successful businesswoman; she runs her life on schedule like a well-greased clock. And yet here is James, huge and gruff and gravel-voiced, hulking all over her, forcing her to acknowledge that he is her husband. What’s a cool-as-a-frozen-cucumber society maven and fashion pioneer to do?

James, for the most part, changes for the better. Mostly. Before Theo/Daisy punts him out of England, James is restless, uncomfortable in his own skin, angry at the world. At a meeting with an estate manager in the library, James sits in a corner, seething because he’s frustrated at not being able to go outside and work with his hands and just hearing about numbers gives him a headache. He knows his dad sucks at running the estate and the dukedom, but doesn’t know how to fix it himself. He is just another pretty boy who dropped out of college because he can’t sit still in a classroom, whining that his life sucks and no one ever asked him if he wanted to be a duke. Blah-blah-blah, handsome privileged white boy emo-cakes. And oh-noes, because his father enjoyed drinking and wenching, James himself pledged to be something different and not be a dipsomaniac whoremonger. And yet what does he do the moment he shaves his head and gets a tattoo (I think I dated a couple of these guys in college)? He decides to break his marriage vows and sleep with a bunch of ladies. For the record, James had only been with ONE woman before he marries Theo/Daisy and she wouldn’t even let him play with her boobies and touch her pearly shell with his “dirty hands.” Is whoremongering a required checkpoint in a romance hero’s evolution and character development? I’m just askin’. I’ve noticed that the more ladies a “gentleman” has bedded in romance novels, the more desirable he becomes. James loses the pretty-boy good looks, gets paranormal romance-buff, acquires a gravelly voice, ditches the emo white boy whining, but he still needed to put some notches on his bed post just so we can see him as a sexual creature? Boo. There’s an Eloisa James character who is a virgin when he meets the heroine and the heroine is the only person with whom he has sexual intercourse. That shit is romantic. Can’t we make the virgin hero a thing, please? Just once, I don’t want to shudder in disgust when the two romantic leads do it, thinking about all the other whoring the hero has done just before he gets with the heroine. Does anyone know how effective a “french letter” was compared to a modern-day condom? And he was a pirate, man! Those guys are… (shudder) not very picky… I’m serious, why is sexual promiscuity in the hero a sexy, attractive thing, but the lady has to stay pure like Penelope in Odysseus? Sure, I get that James really thought that he and Theo/Daisy weren’t going to see each other again, but in the beginning of the book, when his father tells him that he could just have a mistress once he’s got Theo/Daisy stashed away, James is vehement in saying he would be faithful to Daisy because he could “never” do “that” to her. Pffft… I guess never means two years, eh, James?

In contrast, our heroine Theo/Daisy both flourishes and falters in James’ absence. While she proves herself to be a shrewd business owner and fulfills her wish to become a fashion pioneer despite her unfashionable looks, Theo also becomes stagnant in her emotional growth. Yes, she is finally respected by society—quite a feat for a woman who, according to gossip, was abandoned by her husband after 2 days for being so ugly—and yet she also retreats into a shell that didn’t exist before James’ abandonment of her. Prior to her marriage to James, Theo is happy—a bit insecure, perhaps, but happy, nonetheless—precocious girl, obsessed with crushes and fashion. She’s just an average teenage girl with a teenage girl’s preoccupation. Without James, she is mired down by her neuroses and crippling idiosyncrasies, insisting on an OCD-like way of performing rituals. It is only when James returns that Theo comes to life again, shucking off the neuroses that serve as her protection for seven years; she needed to keep things in order just so she could keep her mental and emotional sanity. She develops into a swan NOT because she’s a fashion maven, but because James comes back and basically proclaims, “I don’t care what you assholes say: Theo IS beautiful, so there.” I’m totally meh about that.

My other complaint about this book is the infamous Sagging Middle. And boy, it was SEVEN YEARS LONG. The first half of the book is great—Eloisa James really excels at dialogue and the bantering between the hero and the heroine. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and fun, even though there’s a pall hanging overhead because YOU ALREADY KNOW that these two young, happy lovebirds won’t be happy for long… and they’ll be separated for seven years. And the separation FELT long. The middle focuses on both Theo and James growing up and coming into their own, but for the most part, it felt really slow. The energy of the book comes from the chemistry of Theo and James and the way they clash and clasp together and they’re separated for what felt like a hundred pages. It immediately picks up again once James returns to Theo’s side in England, but by then, the pacing goes too fast. JAMES LEFT HIS WIFE TO BECOME A PIRATE FOR SEVEN YEARS and it basically takes two, maybe three days for the two of them to get back together. If it hadn’t for the cutesy prologue at the end of the book whereupon James is shown to be a devoted, adoring husband, I would have been sincerely put off by this book. Theo TOOK THE REIGNS of the estate, made it profitable again, and rebuilt everything, while James decided to play Disney pirate; then he comes back, tells a couple of sob stories, and everything is cool again? Oh hell no.

All and all, I still really enjoyed this book because I’m an Eloisa James fan girl and I especially love her dialogue and lively prose. The beginning is superb; the middle SAGS like over-used upholstery, and the third act goes a little quickly for my taste, but I enjoyed James and Theo. Can’t wait for the next book in this “fairy tale” series!

Spoilers ahead.

The Plot as I Understood It The date is June 9, 1976 and Edana Franklin, twenty-six years old and an aspiring writer, has just moved into a new house with her white novelist husband, Kevin. Dana is unpacking and putting their things away when she suddenly gets very dizzy and can feel herself about to black out. She cries out in alarm and only has time enough to scream Kevin’s name before the world around her disappears and she finds herself outside, on the ground, surrounded by trees. In front of her is a river and a little red-haired white boy is drowning. Without hesitation, she jumps into the river, pulls out the white boy, and performs CPR on him even amidst the hysterical wails of the mother for Dana to get her icky negress hands off her son. The father of the boy comes running along and points a shotgun in Dana’s face. Just as Dana is about to get her head blown off while pissing herself in terror, she gets that dizzy feeling again and is sucked back into the present time with her husband staring at her with utter horror. Kevin tells her that he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but Dana REALLY FRICKIN’ DISAPPEARED IN FRONT OF HIM and teleported to the other side of the room in seconds. Dana is wet from the river water, scratched up, and cold, but before she can truly process what just happened, she is yanked back to the nightmarish hellhole she just returned from and this time, finds herself in a bedroom with the little boy—only slightly older—she saved from drowning setting fire to the drapes. Dana throws the burning drapes out the window and demands to know what the hell the little boy is doing. Dickweed Jr. confesses that he set fire to the drapes because he’s pissed at his dad who caught him stealing and subsequently punished him. Dana is flabbergasted and wonders if she should lecture the little shit against stealing and pyromaniac tendencies. Dana is also shocked because the little bastard keeps referring to her as a slave and the N-word, so she tells him that she doesn’t like that word and that she is not, in fact, a slave. Much to her surprise, the little boy Rufus Weylin—to whom Dana refers as “Rufe”—reveals that he saw where she came from and even heard her talking to Kevin before Dana showed up in Rufe’s room. But Dana doesn’t have the time to deal with what Rufus just said because Daddy is about to come through the doors, so Dana escapes out the window and runs to the woods where she finds a cabin occupied by a woman who could have been Dana’s twin. Dana realizes with shock that this must be the mother of Alice Greenwood who is her ancestor. Alice was forced by a white man to be his mistress and she borne him children. Rufus Weylin, the little shit, is actually Dana’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather. Alice and her mother are free, but Alice’s father is a slave in hiding. Angry white men searching for Alice’s dad break the door down and beat the crap out of Alice’s dad as well as her mother. Dana hides and waits until the white men are gone to help Alice’s mother, but one of them comes back and catches Dana as she runs away. As the man begins to rape her, Dana screams herself hoarse in fear, and is promptly thrown back to her own time.

Back with her husband Kevin, Dana realizes that her time-traveling nightmare may never end. It seems her young male ancestor Rufus Weylin, for some reason, has the ability to pull her from her time and into his whenever he’s in trouble. It’s obvious to Dana now that she has to keep little Rufus alive or she would never be born. Kevin insists that Dana must be better prepared for the next time, packing her a back full of first aid supplies and a switchblade. When Dana is about to get sucked into her dizzy wormhole again, Kevin grabs her and inadvertently gets sucked in himself. They find a pre-pubescent Rufus on the ground, his leg broken, courtesy of him falling out of a tree. Rufus’ friend Nigel runs for help and brings back Tom Weylin, Rufus’ father and Luke, a slave. Kevin and Dana had planned ahead of time that it would be better for the both of them if Kevin were to pretend that Dana is his slave, instead of his wife. Dana doesn’t necessarily like it, but both agree that NO ONE in Rufus’ time would cotton to the idea of a white dude marrying a negress. Tom Weylin offers the two of them Southern hospitality and insists they both stay even as the couple plans to escape to the North where they would be safer. In the meantime, Kevin becomes a guest of the Weylins while Dana sleeps with the other slaves in the attic and helps out at the kitchen and around the house. Dana is also assigned to read out loud to Rufus, who is recuperating from his broken leg. Rufus’ mother is suspicious of a “slave” who can read and write and is constantly hostile to Dana, but is super-flirtatious to Kevin, who is getting a little more than freaked out. When Dana gets caught teaching Rufus’ slave friend Nigel how to read and write, she is dragged to the whipping post by Tom Weylin and is severely whipped. Fearing for her life, Dana is flung back to her own time, but incidentally leaves Kevin behind since he was out of her reach at the time.

Back at home, Dana realizes that even though she had been gone for several weeks, only a day has passed in her own time. Worried sick about Kevin, Dana waits and waits to get called back, but it takes a full eight days before Rufus summons her again. This time, Dana finds a post-adolescent Rufus getting the shit beaten out of him by Issac, a slave, because Rufus had just raped Alice Greenwood. She manages to convince Issac not to kill Rufus and for Rufus to deny that Issac had kicked his ass, then drags Rufus back to the plantation while Issac and Alice run away. The two of them get caught anyway and Alice is severely beaten and attacked by dogs. In punishment for helping Issac escape, Alice is turned into a slave and Rufus buys her in an auction. Meanwhile, Dana is dismayed to discover that Kevin had moved on and Rufus denies knowing where he had gone. To manipulate Dana into helping him get Alice to “freely” sleep with him, Rufus tells Dana that he knows where Kevin might be and if Dana were to write Kevin a letter, Rufus would mail it to him. This might not be the easiest task for Dana since Alice, who is slowly recuperating, hates Dana for being a “house nigger” and a traitor for colluding with Rufus. Dana finds herself stuck in the hardest place possible, since she is forced to ensure that Alice develops a sexual relationship with Rufus or Dana herself would never be born. When she discovers that Rufus is full of shit and had never sent the letter to Kevin, Dana runs away, but gets caught and is savagely beaten. The house slaves tend to her and help her recover, while Dana resigns herself to possibly dying in the plantation having lost the resolve to run away again to find Kevin. Tom Weylin finds out that Rufus had broken his promise to send the letter to Kevin and remedies the situation. Kevin shows up and finds Dana, who is now a little more reserved than she used to be. The two of them run away together, but are stopped by Rufus who shoots at them. With her life threatened thus activating the wormhole, Dana holds on to Kevin and they return to their own time.

But it doesn’t stop there. Dana’s direct ancestor, Hagar, still hasn’t been born. Dana realizes with defeatist dismay that her enslavement to Rufus will not end until Hagar is born and Rufus himself dies.

The Heroine Dana is a strong, modern woman who is bravely married to a white man at a time when interracial relationships are not quite yet accepted by mainstream society. I’m sure when this book came out in 1979, a few eyebrows went up over this. Dana is smart, knowledgeable of history (which comes in handy during her trips to the past), and unerringly quick to adapt to any type of environment. Dana seems remarkably unfazed by the shit that happens to her in this book, which is characteristic of someone that some bad stuff has happened to. All she can really do is shake her head, take a deep breath, and say to herself, “Well, fuck a duck.” She doesn’t get outraged or react like a modern person living in Southern California with the privilege of civil rights might. She doesn’t say shit like, “But I’m an American and I don’t deserve to get treated like a slave!” She doesn’t have a sense of entitlement. She doesn’t get—as an asshole might say—”uppity.” She just…takes it, which is admirable in a way, but at the same time, kind of sad. Dana is the kind of person who can come into any situation, quickly assess what’s going on, and act accordingly. And she seems to always arrive at the conclusion that shit will just not go down like it’s supposed to and she better prepare for it. She just seems like the kind of person who’s used to being treated poorly or seeing things go south that she’s not surprised at all when it happens. She is world-weary and accepting of a nihilistic, self-punishing society. She’s someone who can be air-dropped into a shitty situation and trusted to look around, sigh at the shittiness, and get right to work. Like I said, while that’s an admirable personality trait, it’s really sad, too. She’s not a Pollyana from the future who teaches the slaves to be happy in their lot in life; she doesn’t teach Rufus to be a better person. She’d most likely to commiserate with you, say something like, “Damn, bitch, that’s tough,” get up and brush the dirt off her pants, then get on with her life. And I don’t blame her. Can you imagine trying to be a little Pollyanna during a time in America when white people enslaved black people? Slavery IS a shitty thing and Ms. Butler sugar-coats nothing. Dana doesn’t rally the troops and encourage them to throw off the yoke of oppression because what good would that do? She doesn’t even try to teach Rufus NOT to be a racist dickbag because she knows he’s a product of his time and no amount of telling him that “Nigger is a bad word” is going to get him to stop saying it. This isn’t a happy story. Dana doesn’t change the way anybody thinks or acts. This enlightened woman from the future doesn’t have that power. Even if Dana did manage to get people to change and hold hands, what good can that possibly do in that day and age?

Oh My Word This isn’t just a time-traveling story about a modern black woman who gets transplanted to a time where she would have been a slave; it’s a deeply personal experience for the protagonist because her very existence depends on the enslavement and continuous rape and abuse of an ancestor by her white master. While Butler effectively showcases the horrors of slavery and people who become so afraid of the whip and the rage of their masters that their fear effectively chains them to where they are without the use of actual chains, there is also the underlying theme of obsessive love. Rufus becomes so obsessed with the free woman Alice that he makes her enslavement happen; if he owned her, then she would have no choice but to stay with him and maybe learn to love him. The idea of “love” is important here because for Rufus, he would not only own Alice’s body but her soul and heart, too. His ownership of Alice would be absolute because he would have her devotion and loyalty. But Alice fights back: she hates Rufus and hell, she hates Dana too, for being “friends” with such a horrible man. But Dana also knows that she would cease to exist if Alice were to win against Rufus, so she would have to facilitate the enslavement of Alice for that purpose. Hell yes, it’s dark. Why would Rufus have a tethered connection to Dana of all people? Is it because Dana herself is willingly in a relationship with a white man and Dana’s direct ancestor was the product of the rape of a black woman by a white man? But Dana herself becomes enslaved to Rufus because for as long as Rufus is alive, he would always be able to call her back to his side, where someone like Dana would not be considered a real person, but property. Damn, son, that is some heavy shit.

This… is not a fun book. It’s a darkly fascinating read, especially since Octavia Butler is known for writing strong, independent heroines who live in challenging worlds determined to crush them. You cannot read this book and not be affected by it in some way. Butler in an interview herself said, “”I was trying to get people to feel slavery[...] I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.” And… she’s right. This book is not just dark thematically, but it feels dark and cramped. You cannot sit back and get comfortable while reading this book. There will be a tightness in your chest, a feeling of unease and… dirtiness. You can almost smell the grease that the slaves use to cook their food in the outdoor kitchen or the salve rubbed into the wounds caused by an overseer’s eager whip. This is what Butler excels at: making sure that we, as readers, are emotionally affected by what we’re reading on the page and what we read is not something we can easily dismiss. And just like every single Octavia Butler book I’ve ever read, Kindred is beautiful, frightening, and dark, but I’ll be damned if I pick it up and read it again.

I have a meanness in me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood.

The Plot as I Understood it That poor Libby Day…God bless her heart. When she was seven years old, her mother Patty and two older sisters were slaughtered in what the newspapers call the Kinnakee Satanic Massacre on January 3, 1985, and Libby told the police that her fifteen-year-old brother Ben did it. After Ben goes to prison for life, Libby is shuffled from one distant relative to the next, living in trailer parks and trapped in situations not much better than what she was born with. Over the years, she has made enough money to live on from interviews, well-wishers who’ve sent cash to the poor Day girl, and cheap, exploitative true crime stuff, but that money is about to run out and Libby has never held a job in her life. She has done quite well isolating herself from the rest of the world; she has no friends and isn’t in touch with any of her relatives, not even her Aunt Diane, who was her mother’s sister. When a true crime fan club called The Kill Club, a “secret” society of nerds obsessed with notoriously grisly crimes, approaches Libby with some money and an invitation to a true crime convention, Libby is tempted to them to fuck off, but she is desperate for money and this bunch of losers might bring her some much needed cash flow. For several years, Libby has fended off attacks from lovelorn women—the same kind of women who write to serial killers in prison—who accuse her of lying about what really happened on the night of the murders because Ben couldn’t have done it. Besides, it was dark that night and Libby was only seven years old and hungry and scared and tired and probably coached by the cops and isn’t it possible that their father Runner Day was the one who did it? Libby is accustomed to dealing with these women, but she didn’t anticipate facing an entire group of people who are all convinced that Ben Day is innocent and all of them have alternate theories. Because she’s a blood relative to Ben and Runner, the Kill Club is convinced the two men will talk to only Libby and tell her what really happened. Libby demands an allowance in return and at first, she tells herself she is only doing it for the money, but as she delves deeper into the events that unfolded January 3, 1985, she begins to doubt that Ben may have anything to do with the slaughter of her family and wonders if she may have aroused the interest of the real killer with her amateur sleuthing.

Meanwhile, interspersed with Libby’s present-day narrative are chapters leading up to the day of the slaughter from the points of view of her desperate, perpetually exhausted mother and her sullen fifteen-year-old brother Ben who at first appears to be an average teenager with the usual adolescent angst. Her mother Patty Day is constantly harassed by her estranged husband Runner for money and the bank is about to foreclose on the neglected, deteriorating farm that has been owned by her family for several years. On top of her financial concerns, Patty finds herself watching her eldest son with mounting worry as he’s taken to screaming at his younger sisters with no provocation, dressing like a depressed hoodlum, and securing his bedroom door with a padlock. And it’s getting harder for her to ignore the rumors buzzing around their small town that Ben has been hanging out with satanists and taking a special, creepy interest in the little girls who attend the same school as his sisters. Patty’s sister Diane is her biggest ally as Diane brings the family food whenever she visits and the girls seem to listen to Diane even as they ignore Patty. Ben, on the other hand, is just… angry. He’s angry that his father Runner is a piece-of-shit loser who does nothing to help his family and the farm; he’s angry that he’s a nobody at his high school; he’s angry that his girlfriend is treating him like shit and taking him for granted. Let people think he’s a satanist and a drug addict; at least they’ll be scared of him instead of laughing at him while talking shit behind his back. And he’s just… sick of everything. He’s sick of his weak, pathetic mother who doesn’t know how to fight back and he’s even sicker of his sisters who bug him all the time and won’t leave him alone. He often fantasizes about running away with his girlfriend and getting a job somewhere, saving what little money he can so he can just take off and go. But his girlfriend has been treating him like crap lately and there’s this girl, Chrissy, who’s so pretty and nice to him… Sure, she’s still in elementary school, but she seems so mature… and she’s so…sweet…and different from his drunk, abusive girlfriend…

Your Lovely Protagonist Libby Day is not a nice person. She’s inwardly resentful of the cute, little missing white girls that the media splashes all over the TV and newspapers and wonders how much money their families are being sent. Libby herself made a living from well-wishers sending her cards and letters with some money in them because they feel bad about the little red-haired girl whose entire family was murdered by her brother. For years, Libby has been banking on the guilt and kindness of others, and she is totally okay with it. Now that she’s not so young and not so cute, the money has stopped coming and since she’s never worked a day in her life, doesn’t have any other way to make a living.

I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.

As you can see, Libby is not the happiest person in the world, either. She has no friends and hasn’t spoken to any of her relatives in years, not even her Aunt Diane. She keeps to herself, preferring to stay within the walls of her house, almost agoraphobic. Even when she is approached by the Kill Club to help find out who really killed her family, she is reluctant to do so. She doesn’t want to believe that she sent her only brother to prison where he’d been cooling his heels for the last twenty-five years. She doesn’t really want to relive the memories that she’d worked so hard to forget. Or at least stop thinking about. The only thing that convinces her to help the Kill Club is the money they offer her in exchange. Libby is not a sympathetic character, but she is merely a product of her own environment. She was born and raised poor; her mother was murdered and her father is a homeless, alcoholic drunk; she was shuffled from one relative to another while growing up, never truly experiencing a steady home life. She is haunted by the fact that she told the police she saw Ben killing her family, but in truth, she only heard what was going on. And yet her testimony was enough to send her brother to prison. She doesn’t want to even imagine that she was wrong about Ben; if she were truly wrong about the events of that night and her brother had gone to prison for twenty-five years just on her say-so… it’s just not something that Libby likes to think about. If it’s all the same to everyone else, Libby would just like to get on with her life and to hell with everyone else. I wouldn’t call Libby selfish, exactly. She has learned over the years to protect and defend herself; she has never really been able to depend on anyone. She is altogether not too likable, but I understand why she is the way she is. A person couldn’t survive a massacre of her entire family and the subsequent rehashing of the events all over the media for several years with her sanity and optimism intact. Libby knows she can only count on herself and most of the time, she doesn’t have her own best interest at heart, either. She is a surly, self-serving misanthrope and was made that way by her circumstances and her own environment. She couldn’t have turned out any other way.

Oh My Word This book has a smell: stale sweat, cheap gin, cigarette smoke, and deep-friend food, the kind of stench ingrained deep in the cushions of the stools at your local dive bar. And that’s a compliment. What I really enjoy about Gillian Flynn’s writing is how stark and beautifully ugly it is. The padlock on the cover of this novel is really spot on: it symbolizes the heavy lock that Libby had placed on both her emotional and mental memories. Intellectually and emotionally, she doesn’t want to remember what happened the night she accused her brother of murdering their entire family; she can’t. Her thread-thin tether on her own sanity depends solely on the fact that her brother Ben was the true killer, the one who slaughtered not just her mother and sisters, but any chance she might have had of a home life with people who cared about her. And Libby’s not the only one who wants a lock-down on everything. Ben is also unwilling to share with Libby his memories of what happened that night and he might be the only person who knows what really went down. He has “forgiven” Libby, but he doesn’t want to talk about what happened; he just wants to move forward. It could also be said that the padlock represents the “closed” minds of the people in their small town; Ben was convicted in the eyes of the town before he was even arrested and charged because of the “Day blood.” It wasn’t a surprise to them that Ben would commit this atrocious act because they believe that all the Days are bad and crazy and liable to pull shit like this. This is where Flynn excels as a writer: she is able to make you feel and smell the “smallness” of this town and its people, the dark places they all harbor. There’s a particularly alarming scene in the novel where Ben is approached by Chrissy, the pre-pubescent girl he’s accused of molesting: Chrissy is described to be older than she looks; there is something seductive about her, in the way she dresses and the way she acts (she dresses like a flirtatious teenager, wears make-up, and seems to know an awful lot about sex). There’s an implication that Chrissy may also be getting molested at home, but as a reader, I could see why Ben was like, “Yeah, okay, this is wrong. But she’s hot.” THAT’S CREEPY. I don’t want to be thinking it’s cool to make out with an eleven-year-old girl, Gillian Flynn, don’t put that image in my head! And Gillian Flynn really excels at presenting ugly, disgusting things in an oddly seductive way that could make them appealing enough to someone who might be able to rationalize that it’s all kosher. Sure, I can blow off school and drink with my Satanist friends. Sure, I can make out with this hot eleven-year-old girl. ARRRGH! BRAIN BLEACH, STAT! And this is what makes her novels so compelling; Flynn is like the tour guide in a fucked-up tour bus through the deepest, darkest parts of your brain that you work so hard to suppress everyday. She’s gleefully willing to take you there for a price of a tiny, microscopic part of your soul.

And yet there’s something so melodramatic, so tawdry about all of it that reading this book is like having a Lifetime (television for women in peril!) movie unfold right in front of you. You can smell the mold and the stale beer and other undesirable bodily fluids on the dirty mattresses where no-good delinquents may take their skankettes for some juvie hall-flavored bone-down; you can feel the tightness and the stuffy heat of the cramp, dark trailers; you can hear the growling of hungry stomachs and the long-suffering sighs of an soul-weary, mentally-fatigued mother who knows in her heart that her children are never going to rise above poverty or make something of themselves. The gritty realism and the beautifully stark, brutal prose are what elevates this novel from your usual whodunit thrillers. The identity of the killer and whether or not Libby will ever find peace are almost irrelevant; what’s more important is the parsing of the characters and their motivations. In fact, the “big reveal” at the end was almost disappointingly conventional and tonally different. Did I really read a chase scene straight out of an Ashley Judd movie? Gillian Flynn is unafraid to explore the darkness of the human condition and expose the ugliness she unearths from within, yet the ending was just kind of… meh. Libby doesn’t change by the end of the book; in fact, she might be just slightly more damaged, having opened herself to fresh, new hell and a barrage of wounds both physical and emotional. It’s an ugly, dark book and yet, it’s probably one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I totally read this as a White Collar fan fic, by the way. I THINK ABOUT YOU NIGHT AND DAY, MATT BOMER! I LOVED YOU IN Magic Mike!!! ONE DAY WE WILL MEET AND YOU WILL FALL IN LOVE WITH ME!! Ahem. Turn the lights out… it’s time to get criminal… criminally hot, that is.

The Plot as I Understood It Tracy Whitney is a pretty, pretty girl—the original wide-eyed ingenue—who turns heads and sets the tongues wagging. Here she is walking to her big, important job at the bank, smiling and blushing prettily with her bouncy, bouncy hair and her smart, but fashionable office-girl suit, to the tune of Girl from Ipanema. And Tracy has every reason to be happy! Her loving mother, who has been totally bummed out ever since her dad died, is almost certainly back to her old self; her fiance Charles is one of the—if not the—most eligible bachelors in Philadelphia; all her hard work at the bank as the “computer expert” is about to pay off with super-awesome promotion; and Tracy Whitney is about to become a mommy! Sure, Charles is not the sexiest guy in the world, but he’s really dependable and kind and seems really happy about the baby and Tracy is super-sure that he’d make the best husband and daddy ever. But bad things happen to good people. REALLY bad things. After a particularly disastrous meeting with Charles’ parents—they don’t think she’s good enough for Charles because she’s… well, kind of poor—Tracy gets a call from the police in Louisiana and finds out that her mother has killed herself. Tracy is distraught and flabbergasted because she thought her mom has been doing okay, but upon some investigation, she finds out that her mom had been swindled by a gangster named Joe Romano and killed herself due to heartbreak and humiliation. Armed only with a gun purchased from a pawnshop and shaky gumption, Tracy takes it upon herself to avenge her mother’s death and goes to Romano’s penthouse to force him at gunpoint to sign a confession. Silly little girl. Obviously Joe Romano is super-evil and tries to rape Tracy on top of laughing in her face and in the struggle, Tracy shoots him. She shakily cleans herself up and leaves the penthouse, thinking she has killed him, and rushes to the airport, where she promptly gets arrested. She begs for Charles’ help, but predictably, the douchewad is more concerned with his family’s reputation and tells her she do whatever she wants with her baby and to never contact him again. Oh, and by the way, even though the gun shot didn’t kill Romano, he’s telling everyone that Tracy’s real purpose for sneaking into his penthouse and shooting him was to steal a priceless painting, which she must have undoubtedly already fenced in Europe or something. With no money and no support system, Tracy is saddled with a public defender who tells her to plead guilty because he’s sure he can get a sweetheart deal from a lenient judge who’d probably give her time-served because she’s a first-time offender and a good girl and she won’t have to go to prison. With no reason to believe that this nice attorney person would screw her over, Tracy agrees to the deal and BLAM! It turns out that the public defender and the judge are both in the pockets of the Ultimate Crime Boss of New Orleans and consequently, is also the boss of Joe Romano. Fifteen to twenty five years, sucker. An insurance detective by the name of Daniel Cooper figures out that Tracy is innocent (not so innocent, come on! bitch shot a guy!) and has nothing to do with the painting being stolen and visits her in jail, but does nothing to help her (after all, he figured, it’s none of his business). Tracy screams, “Wait, I’m innocent!” even as they slam the prison bars in her face and she spends the next few years going through some shit that would make even Andy Dufresne turn green and pass out. Andy does get a 1-up on Tracy, though, since he gets to crawl though five hundred yards of sewer, but Andy doesn’t get a dirty, unsterilized speculum shoved up his cooch (after it’s been inside God-knows-how-many-women) and he doesn’t spontaneously (SPOILER ALERT!) miscarry a baby after getting beaten up and gang-raped by a bunch of angry, sex-hungry, prison-depraved lesbians. Wait a minute… I’d forgotten about “the Sisters.” Those dudes totally raped Andy every day. So maybe Tracy and Andy are almost Even Stevens. Tracy even gets a magical black friend named Ernestine Littlechap who protects her from all lesbians who want to feast on her young, supple white flesh!

And that’s just the first part of the book! After being released from prison by the governor himself when she saves the prison warden’s daughter from drowning (natch!), Tracy has somehow morphed into an Emma Peel-Catwoman-Macgyver genius super-thief-slash-agent-provocateur and hits the ground running with her own personal “fuck you” list. She takes care of all the men responsible for sticking her in prison in short order—one after the other, like a domino—and sets out to get on with the rest of her life. But Little Tracy Whitney, prison-hardened and just a tiny bit jaded, discovers that no one is willing to hire an ex-convict. Her old boss at the bank who used to kiss her ass laughs in her face when she asks for her “computer expert” job back. With what little money she gets from scamming her old bank—she only takes what she thinks she deserves— she goes to New York, hoping for a new life. She looks up a man, who’s supposed to be “passionate” about helping ex-cons get their lives back (recommended by a fellow convict) and is dismayed to find that the only “job” he has for her is cat burglary. He owns a jewelry store and knows exactly what his clients buy, how much they’re worth, and where the clients live. Tracy tells him to fuck off and leaves. She gets a job at a department store as a clerk and gets promptly canned when a little girl who had seen her on TV cries when she recognizes Tracy as the lady “who drowned that little girl on the news.” Desperate and unable to find a more viable way to support herself, Tracy goes back to the jewelry store owner just to hear what he has to say and decides to take up a life of EVEN BIGGER CRIME. With a variety of disguises and accents and Mcgyver-like resourcefulness, Tracy is able to waltz in and out of sticky situations with millions of dollars in jewelry and priceless works of art as well as a buttload of cash. She meets her match in Jeff Stevens, a suave and handsome art/jewel thief who is just as clever and scheming as herself, and discovers that she is not quite as invulnerable to love as she once believed. As a growing army of cops, Interpol agents, and that creepy little insurance detective Daniel Cooper come after them, Tracy and Jeff must find a way to work together to pull off the biggest, most dangerous heist of their careers as the two of them slowly fall in loooooove.

I can’t believe I’ve never seen the movie version of this book. I lurve Tom Berenger. Is this shit on Netflix? I GOTZTA HAVE IT!

The Heroine If the movie was going to be remade (and doesn’t everything get remade these days?), I would totally cast Emmy Rossum as Tracy Whitney. She’s so fragile and innocent-looking, yet you know she has some hidden cunning. When the book opens, Tracy is the happiest, sparkliest, most wholesome little Mary Sue you ever did meet. She’s pretty and nice and smart and charms everyone she meets. She’s the kind of girl that everyone in a horror movie would die for, like the Final Girl; for example, if she and Hot Black Guy were running from Jason Voorhees in the woods and Hot Black Guy tripped, he’d be yelling at her to “Run, Emmy, run! For God’s sake, save yourself!” even as Jason cuts into him with a weed whacker (where did he even get one in the woods?). Seriously, how does Tracy Whitney learn how to be lock-picking, infrared-light-skipping, nimble-as-a-ballerina thief? She was raised in an upper middle class home, attended a nice private college, then worked in a bank. She is a particularly good liar and is excellent at disguises and accents, but did she really just learn that shit in college doing a couple of plays or something? Is this book some kind of sociological commentary on how prison doesn’t rehabilitate, but just makes better, smarter criminals? During her time in prison, Sidney Sheldon shows Tracy paying close attention to her fellow “Caged Heat” cellmates, especially when they’re talking about picking pockets and other methods of petty thieving. But is that enough? What kind of training do super-duper art/jewel thieves get anyway? Later on, she becomes good friends with an art connoisseur/master fence who contracts her to pull off some really high-profile heists and she just goes for it like a pro. Were there how-to-steal-shit, Karate-Kid-style montages that I’ve missed all this time? I’m telling you, I’ve read this book at least ten times and I’ve never come across those missing, integral scenes. This girl is just the Doogie Howser of thieves. She automatically knows how to disarm alarms, what to look for when casing a joint for security systems, and can outsmart any hardcore, career-criminal types with ease. In fact, she makes one particular career criminal look like a buffoon without even trying. I guess my main problem with Tracy is that… she doesn’t seem to have any vulnerabilities. Everyone loves her; she’s smarter than all the criminals put together; she’s so breathtakingly beautiful that she can use her looks to distract someone while stealing a shitload of gems; she can do anything and everyone is just… in awe of her, even the cops who want to put her away. She can do no wrong. I mean, this girl went to prison, got beaten so hard and raped there that she lost her baby; on top of that, her mom committed suicide and her fiance basically left her to rot in a prison cell. DOES THIS WOMAN NOT HAVE A BREAKING POINT?! She’s like a Catherine Anderson heroine spliced with Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne. I was surprised we don’t see Tracy kicking ass using Krav Maga or some Gun Kata or something. In fact, she is so good that there aren’t any scenes where she almost gets caught; by the time the cops get there, she’s already speeding away in a jet-ski or a parachute, her beautiful sable hair blowing in the wind as she throws back her head, laughing with delight. She always leaves the cops scratching their heads, staring at the Tracy-shaped hole on the wall with bemused amazement, saying shit like, “Impossible! How could a mere slip of a girl run away with the Hope diamond with no one the wiser? It was guarded by sharks with laser beams on their heads!” She’s like… the Sterling Archer of cat burglars. (That means she’s good at what she does, but we don’t know how it happened)

Your Hero I gotta tell ya: for such a suave, charming, ridiculously handsome, globe-trotting super-thief with a shit-eating grin and a seemingly magic penile wand in his pantalones that all the rich ladies are clamoring for, Jeff Stevens is such a… commonplace name. You’d think he should have been named Caleb or Hunter or Archer or Stone Phillips… I don’t know… I’m just spit-balling here… Neal Caffrey. **SIGH** Can I get a witness? Jeff’s mother died when he was young and his father immediately married a young woman because he didn’t want to be alone. While Jeff’s father is away on a business trip, Jeff’s young, nubile step-mother crawls into bed with him and attempts to sleep with him. Suitably creeped out, 14-year-old Jeff sneaks out of his father’s house and runs away to his uncle who owns a traveling carnival. It is through his uncle and the carny folk that Jeff learns the tricks and the trade of a professional con-man. By reading books (he especially loves history and anthropology) and observing the people around him, Jeff absorbs knowledge like a handsome thieving savant and develops an aptitude for stealing shit and lying to people in order to steal their shit. When the carnival’s knife-thrower attempts to kill him for Jell-O wrestling with the man’s wife (Ladies Love Cool Jeff), he decides it’s time to leave the carnival life and strike out on his own. Young LL Cool Jeff Jeff meets and marries a beautiful millionaire named Louise who treats him like a cute, but none-too-bright pet she’d like to lock up in her boudoir for sexy time and not much else, while her older brother and his cronies smirk and tell Jeff to his face that Louise is a nymphomaniac who goes slavering-wild at the thought of any kind of PENIS. OH NO YOU DIDN’T. JEFF gets hella pissed and in revenge, decides to bilk $250,000 from the deserving douchecanoes. In his defense, Jeff at first tries to live a good, honest life (just like Tracy attempts to after she got her revenge against the evil bastards who cheated her mother—but society wouldn’t allow her) and even gets a job from his douchebag brother-in-law. But Budge (the brother-in-law) and his friends push and push and push Jeff until he was like, “All right, fuck it. Love don’t live here anymore. You bitches are going down” (the catalyst is Jeff finding out that Louise never loved him and only sees him as a walking, talking sex toy).

When Jeff meets Tracy, he is automatically entranced by her, but not so spell-bound that he doesn’t play “Think fast, gurl, I just stole your shit” with her. In fact, Jeff realizes that Tracy is better than him at figuring out the logistics of stealing shit and he takes advantage of that, allowing her to steal the shit first so he could steal it from her, instead. Even Tracy, as brilliant as she’s supposed to be, is no match for LL Cool Jeff’s magnetic hotness and debonaire charm. Their meet-cute is actually really… cute. Tracy is sent on her first job to steal some jewelry and Jeff intercepts her on her way to the fence by pretending to be an FBI agent who then relieves her of the jewelry. Tracy immediately figures out she’s been had and catches up to him and steals back the jewels, even manipulating a clueless airport policeman into helping her. Jeff decides from that moment on that Tracy is no dummy and begins to fall in love with her. Awesome. What I really like about Jeff is that he respects Tracy’s intelligence and cunning; sure, he thinks she’s hot, but when he realizes that she’s actually his female counterpart, he goes bonkers for her and it’s really adorable. He knows she has her own mind and admires her for it. LL Cool Jeff is a true blue feminist.

Oh My Word I swear to Bob: the only reason any of Tracy’s and Jeff’s Mickey Mouse schemes work is that their universe is populated with idiots. Maybe it’s because I’ve been become jaded by the many heist and cat burglar movies I’ve seen over the years, but all of their cons and scams are so transparent that a suspicious and particularly precocious six-year-old can figure them out. One example is the Chess Con. Everyone knows you can’t cheat at chess, but A-HA(!) you totally can and because the people surrounding Jeff and Tracy are imbeciles, they never figure out what’s going on even after Tracy and Jeff have the money and are miles away on a speedboat. Let me explain: Jeff and Tracy are on the Queen Elizabeth II bound for Europe and on board with them are the world’s two greatest chess champions. Jeff tells one chess grandmaster that Tracy wants to play him for $10,000 dollars and tells the other the same thing; in fact, Tracy will play them both simultaneously and guarantee a draw with both. Of course, the two Russians are obnoxious, sexist, misogynistic, anti-American pigs who think Tracy is just another dumb American FEMALE with too much money, so they both go along with Jeff’s challenge. You know how this is gonna go, don’t you? If you don’t, I won’t ruin it for you. All of the heists and cons that Tracy and Jeff pull on people are completely predicated on the fact that they’re incompetent, bumbling, sexist idiots. They can’t possibly believe that a woman can disguise herself, lie, and get away with stealing some priceless shit just because she can’t possibly have the brains to carry it out. A common refrain in the book is: “But she’s just one woman! How is she possibly doing any of this on her own?” Ironically, only the creepy American insurance detective believes that Tracy is capable of all the things she’s accused of and more, and this dude wants her bad. Seriously, at one point, he sneaks into her room and masturbates with her washcloth. **SHUDDER** He believes that he deserves to be the one to punish Tracy and lock her up so that no man could look upon her ever again. Double-You-Tee-Eff. Dude needs a hobby.

And yet as ridiculous this book is with its Mary Sue heroine, needlessly convoluted plot, Mickey Mouse logic, and buffoonish, stupid-as-hair villains, it’s a frickin’ blast to read. I love how larger-than-life Tracy and Jeff are and how glamorous everything is. It’s like someone took an Angelina Jolie movie, dressed it up in Joan Collins’ clothes, fed it a half dozen martini with olives, and let it loose in the Epcot Center’s version of Europe. I was thrilled to read about a heroine smarter than everyone else in the book (even if it’s because EVERYONE IN THE BOOK is a drooling, cross-eyed cretin) and can save the day blind-folded and with a hand tied behind her back. And it’s nice, once in a while, to encounter a hero who thinks the heroine is smarter than he is and firmly believes that she’s worth more than a pair of tits and three holes on slender, muscled legs. They work well together and make a good team, which makes for a pleasant, romantic read. Sure, you never get a sense that you’re reading anything more than the literary version of an imaginary (fanfic) episode of Dynasty in which Alexis pretends to be Cat Woman trying to seduce Batman as played by Jefferson D’Arcy. But that’s okay! As lurid and melodramatic and ostentatious it all is, it’s immensely readable. Hell, that’s part of the book’s charm. Reading it will give you a sense of stepping into a world of shoulder pads, gold lamé, Commodore 64, smoking-section-only in airplanes, and cheap, bottom-shelf gin, but man, what a blast. If you’re looking for a thrilling, melodramatic, heist romance, give this one a shot.

(WOO-HOO, I just found the DVD on Ebay and won the bid. I CAN’T WAIT TO WATCH THIS BITCH.)

Oh, and if you enjoy this, you might like Honest Illusions by Nora Roberts.

The Plot as I Understood It Annabelle Miller (mom is Japanese, raised in the U.S. and dad is a white dude) wakes up one morning after a deliciously sexy dream on her eighteenth birthday to find her eyes burning painfully, as though someone plucked out her eyes, pissed acid in the sockets, and shoved her eyes back in (I hear ya—I’ll never shotgun ten shots of cheap bottom-shelf tequila on a dare ever again). Fearing she’s blind because her eyes hurt so very badly, she screams for her parents who barge into her room and freak out when they see that her pretty brown eyes have turned ice-blue. They drag her out of bed and into the family car to take her to the hospital. Just as they’re about to drive away, a big-ass demon lands on the hood and eviscerates both of her parents while laughing maniacally. Annabelle loses it and runs to the house, covered in blood and holding a knife she had used to defend herself against the demon, to wake up her older brother. Obviously, her brother (who thinks his sister has lost it and killed their parents) doesn’t see the demon and when the cops come, they haul Annabelle away for killing her parents and lock her up in a mental hospital. Brutal.

Four years later, Annabelle is battle-scarred and more than a little worse for wear, thanks to the nightly visits from demons ordered to torture and brutalize her (as long as they don’t kill her). Annabelle has also learned how to fight, even managing to kill a few of the demons who’ve attacked her. Unfortunately, she’s the only one who can see these demons and other nasty beasties due to her (SPOILER – you know what to do)demon-infected eyes, a sure symptom that a demon had taken a liking to her and taken her as a concubine, and everyone still thinks she’s looney tunes. While she may be a bad-ass demon fighter, however, Annabelle also has to contend with lecherous hospital officials and staff who enjoy molesting her and taking pictures of her when she is tied up and sedated. One particular offender is a doctor she calls Fitzpervert and because he’s human, Annabelle can’t kill him or she’d be in bigger trouble. After all, you can kill all the imaginary creatures you want, but if you kill another human being, your ass will probably fry. But since she was declared insane and sent to the loony bin, they’d probably lobotomize her for killing the doctor. I don’t know, my extent of mental hospital knowledge is whatever I’ve seen on Girl, Interrupted and Sucker Punch. But I figure that’s what would happen. At any rate, it would be very bad for Annabelle to kill humans.

Meanwhile, an angel named Zacharel is in charge of an army of other angels who are basically in the reject—marked for a fall to hell—bin. One of the reasons Zacharel and these other angels are in trouble is that they have propensity for chasing down and slaughtering demons at all cost, even to the point of the killing humans they’re supposed to be protecting (for example, if a human were possessed by a demon and an angel cuts off the demon’s head… dead human). Because Zacharel is the biggest offender of all this, any transgression committed by anyone under his command will be taken out on him. This also means that if Zacharel were to “fall,” so will the other angels he’s in charge of. Zacharel is trying his best to reform his angels, but it doesn’t help that the lot of them are a bunch of disrespectful, sassy-mouthed, disobedient assholes. The unusual demon activity in the mental hospital where Annabelle is staying catches Zacharel’s attention and he and his army descend upon the area to check out what’s going on. He follows a demon to Annabelle’s room and he realizes that Annabelle can see him and the demon even though she’s not supposed to be able to (but she has those evil demon eyes, remember?). Zacharel decides that Annabelle must be some kind of demon concubine and is about to leave her to her fate when the door opens and Fitzpervert walks in to molest Annabelle, who is tied up and sedated. Zacharel gets the dirty doctor to go away, rescues Annabelle, and takes her to his cloud (they’re like condominiums for angels) so that she would be safe from the demons who seem to be intent on capturing her and torturing her some more. But Zacharel doesn’t have the noblest intentions for saving Annabelle. The moment the two of them touch, Zacharel feels something that he had never felt before and for an angel who is known for being stone-cold unemotional, this is something worth investigating. While battling their growing desires for each other, the two of them decide to team up and find out once and for all which demon killed Annabelle’s parents and why the demon would stop at nothing to get to her.

The Heroine Annabelle Miller is twenty-two years old and plenty sassy in the way of a Whedonesque character. Her parents were slaughtered by a big-ass demon, her older brother doesn’t talk to her because he believes Annabelle killed their folks, and she gets regularly molested at the mental hospital where she’s locked up for the rest of her life. And yet… she keeps on keepin’ on. This chick is just full of piss and vinegar. If I were her, I would be severely catatonic and sitting in a diaper filled with my own waste, but I’m lazy like that. She’s almost unbelievably full of life and gumption, considering all the shit she’s gone through. And maybe I missed the Karate Kid training montage, but how in the hell does Annabelle manage to win a fight with demons? Is it because she’s Asian and instinctively knows how to fight? Ha ha, I’m kidding. No, seriously. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who has supernatural power and skills, had to train under the tutelage of Giles everyday just so she could kick all sorts of demon/vampire asses. I get that the demon who orders her constant persecution and torture doesn’t want her killed, only molested, so maybe the minions take it easy on her? But then again, she’s had four years of fighting demons, so maybe she just hones the ass-kicking skills on her own or something. Anyway, she seems to be extraordinarily self-reliant and able to bounce back pretty quickly from whatever is thrown her way. She’s not an idiot and can take care of herself. She doesn’t headlong into danger and can actually handle herself. My only problem with Annabelle is that she’s too… capable. It’s almost a little hard to believe considering she was only 18 and living with her parents when all the shit hit the fan. I’m assuming she had a happy home life and she didn’t have to worry about fighting for her food or stealing cars and selling them to chop shops in order to have money for rent. Pre-demon Annabelle seems to come from a happy, middle-class home with no worries, so… how does she learn to be so tough and resilient? I guess witnessing a demon eviscerate your parents and consequently getting imprisoned for their murder can really mature a person and teach one how to kick demon ass or something. I would have liked to see scenes (even flashbacks) of Annabelle encountering her first demon and trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Or Annabelle trying to make sense of everything. I mean, she just takes to everything like a duck to water. There doesn’t seem to be an adjustment period for this chick; she just goes for it.

The Hero Zacharel has a deep, deep pain inside. This is because when he was a younger angel, his twin brother was captured by demons and tortured to near death (angels can die in this ‘verse). When the brother—I forget his name, let’s call him… Mackerel— is returned to Zacharel, he is in such bad shape that he begs Zacharel for death. There’s only one way to give an angel the TRUE DEATH and that’s to have him drink from the River of Death. Even though it almost kills Zacharel to do so, he goes to the River of Death, fetches the stuff for Mackerel, and gives it to him before setting his body on fire (to kill the body as well as the soul and spirit). Zacharel takes all the love he has in his body and puts it inside the urn that contains his brother’s ashes, so that they will always be together. Because of this, there is a black spot on his chest and it will keep growing like cancer until he dies. Until that happens, Zacharel is focused on straightening out the angels in his army and getting promoted to the Elite Seven, which is a super-special army of warrior angels with golden wings. Meeting Annabelle and being barraged by all sorts of crazy feelings for her are definitely not part of the plan. He doesn’t want to get into anymore trouble with the Deity and yet he finds himself breaking the rules for her. He finds himself putting the safety of Annabelle above everything else and focusing on finding out who killed her parents, even as his own immortal soul becomes imperiled.

Oh My Word! I liked Annabelle and Zacharel (hey, their names rhyme!). I think they’re a good pair who bring their own strengths and experiences to the relationship. They complement each other very well. Even though Zacharel is an immortal being, Annabelle has her own contributions too. What kind of bothered me was that they went through the Romance Novel Stages of Luuurve a little too quickly. Dislike to distrust to mental lusting to love in quick succession. Annabelle has been locked up in a mental hospital for four years where she has been assaulted and molested practically everyday; even though there are a couple of scenes that show how she was adversely affected by this traumatic time of her life, the effects seemed almost… shallow at best. She freaks and lashes out at Zacharel the first time they almost get groiny, but she gets over it fairly quickly and is soon on her way to Sex Goddessdom. Meanwhile, Zacharel, who has spent thousands of years being an unemotional block of ice, is all of a sudden acting like a hormonal 14-year-old boy with a huge, raging crush on Olivia Munn. Basically, he starts out mistrusting her because he thinks she’s a demon’s concubine, then he’s suddenly crushing on her and wondering if her skin is as soft as it looks, then before you know it, he’s gung-ho on risking everything to keep her safe because he’s soooo in lurve with her. I realize there’s a reason for this: (SPOILER ALERT!) THEY’RE MATES! MATES! MATES! but that’s such a cop-out and a tired romance novel trope in a story that I was really enjoying for its originality. While I liked their chemistry and really enjoyed them as a couple, I just couldn’t buy that two such emotionally damaged people could come together (so to speak) so very quickly.

And then there are the sequel baits. Surprisingly, even though this is the beginning of a series and each of the other “bad boy” angels are going to eventually get their own books, I was not really annoyed by their presence. Usually, these characters are extraneous and serve no purpose at all to the narrative (except to pimp out their own books), but they actually help out the story this time. I really like the camaraderie and closeness that three of the guys share; it vaguely reminds me of the Butch/Vishous/Phury dynamic of J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series (they’ve been through some really bad, traumatic stuff together, so they basically like to hang out and decompress together after every battle). I like these guys. The next guy to get his own book even plays an integral part in saving the day… though, come to think of it, he plays a bigger role than the hero in saving the day. Hmmm… I’m really looking forward to his story, though, so I guess the author was successful in that endeavor.

I was sort of annoyed by the side characters from the OTHER books. It seems this series shares the same universe as Showalter’s “Lords of the Underworld” series, so there’s a few characters from there that pop up and just clutter everything up. There’s a scene in this book where a bunch of them pop up and I had trouble keeping up with who everybody was and what they were doing in the scene. It just felt like one big reunion and I wasn’t really excited to see them because I’d never read that series before. At any rate, I was intrigued enough by some of the characters introduced that I kind want to read them, too. DAMN IT. You win again, Showalter!!

And the big bad villain? Figured out who he/she was in the first three chapters, but when the book got to the big unveiling, especially how it was resolved, I still felt a tiny pinch in my heart. My eyes may or may not have gotten watery.

As for the world-building, I found it satisfactory, though not necessarily groundbreaking. How many series of books starring a supernatural band of brothers falling in love while fighting evil and kicking ass have you read in the last five years? Exactly. Expect more of the same, with some bits of mythology from different cultures thrown in together for a big world-building salad. There seems to be a HUGE-ASS WAR brewing in the horizon between the angels and some Greek deities because the Titans have escaped and are looking to start some shit or something. It’s looking like there’s going to be a huge fight… a Clash of the Titans, if you will. *snerk* (Not unlike The Ascension in Kresley Cole’s books, perhaps?) The author doesn’t clarify if the angels are from the Christian mythology, but they do live in the sky and they serve a Deity (capital D) who in turn serves a Higher Power. I’m not sure if all the gods—Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Sumerian—live in the sky together and hang out. But the idea of Utnapishtim playing chess with Vishnu while Jesus and Zeus talked shit in the background amuses me greatly.

What really disappointed me the most about this book is that the author doesn’t take the opportunity to make a “Big Trouble in Little China” joke. There’s a Chinese girl in that movie who has green eyes and Annabelle has blue eyes even though she’s… I’m just kidding. There’s a running “joke” in this book about people referring to the Asian heroine as “china doll” and stuff like that and she tends to get huffy about it because she’s actually half-Japanese. Ha ha, it’s funny when people can’t tell Asians apart. That never gets old. Anyway, before anyone gets too excited, Annabelle’s ethnic background doesn’t mean jack in the story. She’s half-Japanese like I really like the color violet. She doesn’t know Karate (…I think—though she does fight really well), doesn’t out-drink anyone with sake bombs, and there’s no ancient Japanese secret to pull out and save the day. Which is good, I think. Mostly. Though I really think she really could have used an ironic “I Suck at Math” and “No, I will not love you long time” t-shirt to seal the deal. That reminds me: I saw a t-shirt that has an image on the front of Cthulu holding a balut in one of his tentacles with a grossed out look on his face. I thought it was pretty funny. I wish I’d bought it.

Anyway, bring on the next book, Ms. Showalter. I’m ready.

Ahhh, Christian Grey, you make Oedipal dysfunctions fashionable and swoon-worthy. Not. At least you were only birthed by a crack whore; my mother is the queen of the dragon ladies AND tiger moms. Plus she’s Catholic. Let’s see you contend with that, wimp.

I was really, really hoping we would see some “kinky fuckery” this time around that’s outside the usual “yuppies in love experimenting with sex toys,” but alas, that is not to be. We don’t even get anything like the infamous “tampon scene” that everyone’s been gasping about. The spanking scene in Secretary starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader laughs derisively at your pathetic attempts to be kinky, GreySteele.

Instead of Anastasia Steele running far, far away upon hearing Christian’s confession that beating little girls who look like his mommy gets his motor running, this happens:

“So it’s true,” I whisper, glancing up at him. “I can’t give you what you need.” This is it—this really does mean we are incompatible.

What the effin’ fuck. I can’t even…

The Plot as I Understood It At the end of the first book, Anastasia—who feared for many, many chapters that being Christian’s submissive meant serving as his attack dummy at his pleasure, so she begged him not to beat her Oh God, she begged him not to beat her—ran out of Christian’s “Red Room of Pain,” leaving his Escala penthouse forever, tears streaming down her cheeks and collapsing in the elevator, sobbing as if her heart and soul were being torn asunder. YOU’VE ONLY BEEN DATING THIS DUDE FOR A FEW WEEKS. YOU CAN GO TO OKCUPID, CHECK YOUR EMAIL, AND SEE WHO’S NEXT IN LINE. Ahem. Ana goes home, missing Christian ever so dreadfully, and tells herself to get over it because she has to start a new job in Seattle soon. Or she got sane for a second, but that’s asking for too much because oh noes, Jose has a show in Portland and she had promised Jose she will come and she doesn’t have a way to get there because she had Christian sell her old clunker so she could pay him for the new car he bought her even though he’s a billionaire and he insisted it was a gift and it’s practically pocket change for him and now she HAS to call Christian for a ride to Portland since he’s the ONLY person she knows in Seattle. She and Christian go to Jose’s art exhibit on Christian’s helicopter Charlie Tango and get all misty on each other. Duh. Christian sees huge, blown-up pictures of Ana that Jose had taken of her and proceeds to buy ALL OF THEM because he doesn’t want anyone else to have them. Meanwhile, Anastasia is in full psycho mode, glaring at anyone who even looks at Christian. Lord have mercy. These two possessive fucktards deserve each other.

After Jose’s exhibit, Christian and Ana drive back to Seattle (actually, poor Taylor drives—but don’t worry about him suffering through the whingeing and whining of these morons; he’s got an iPod!) so they can talk and make out. Ana tells Christian she’s afraid of him and doesn’t like to be beaten and Christian tells her she SHOULD HAVE USED THE SAFE WORD. Ana is the one who APOLOGIZES for not using a safe word and they get back together.

I… I can’t even…I can’t breathe…starting to see black dots in front of my eyes…

Christian tells Ana that he can’t live without her and makes her promise never to leave him again and that he will try very hard to not be a girlfriend-beating bastard anymore (likely story) and he can totally do vanilla. Don’t all girlfriend-beating bastards promise he won’t do it again, baby—he just got carried away, that’s all—just to get their girlfriends to come back? They haven’t even been reunited for fifteen minutes before Christian is telling Ana how emaciated she looks and practically starts shoving food down her throat. What is it with this guy and feeding Ana? I’m sure he must have some food fetish—does he get off watching her eat?

Anyway, Christian and Anastasia are boyfriend-and-girlfriend again and now Ana has a new job. Christian demands to know why Ana has to work since he’s a billionaire and all and he can just take care of her, but… REALLY?! REALLY?! Talk about wanting to cut off your girlfriend from her friends and the outside world so you can creepily keep her to yourself. Ana’s new boss is a guy named Jack Hyde (*side-eye* yeah, I’m sure this guy will be a prince) and he doesn’t waste any time sleazing all over Ana. Christian and Ana continue to email each other sexually explicit things—have these two jerkweeds never heard of texting?—with Christian insisting that Ana use her Blackberry when she’s emailing him about stuff like spanking. IT DOESN’T MATTER IF SHE’S USING HER BLACKBERRY TO CHECK HER EMAIL. SHE’S STILL USING HER WORK EMAIL TO SEND PERSONAL, SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MESSAGES TO CHRISTIAN. IT WILL STILL BE ON THE WORK SERVER. I’m plenty sure the tech guys are just lolling all over the floor, getting their jollies off reading these horny, turgid emails. Ana doesn’t listen, of course, because she’s a stupid cow and never mind that she signed pages and pages of a Non-Disclosure Agreement before becoming Christian’s love slave when anyone in the IT department can yank these off the server. So Christian has the tech guys constantly scrubbing the emails off the server, but the brilliant Ms. Steele keeps using her work email anyway to message Christian the firmly vanilla things she wants him to do to her.

Oh, by the way, since Ana insists on working, Christian does what any sane person would do in order to ensure that his lover will be safe in the workplace and he can keep an eye on her: HE BUYS THE COMPANY.

I… I don’t…

Meanwhile, the world just won’t let these two lovebirds be together happily for long and obstacles in the form of Christian’s ex submissive Leila and his former lover, “Mrs. Robinson” getting in the way. Ana, of course, is practically insane with jealousy at this point, because she’s convinced that Christian is not happy with their strictly vanilla relationship and that he’d want to cheat on her with women willing to be spanked and butt-plugged by him.

This is something I have to contend with for a long time—other women wanting my man…

Leila, Christian’s ex-submissive, becomes completely unhinged upon seeing Christian and Ana happy together and just starts stalking them. Christian goes into full-protector mode, of course, and practically surgically attaches Ana to his ass so she wouldn’t be out of his sight for a moment. But because Ana is a stupid cow—as we’ve already established—she insists on going out by herself and demands that Christian call off the bodyguards looking after her dumb ass even though there’s a crazy woman out there with a gun who had just thrashed her Audi and basically wants to kill her. As if that’s not enough, “Mrs. Robinson” has started circling around Christian again, passive-aggressively dropping hints to Ana that she’ll never be good enough for Christian, feeding her insecurities more and more. Man, no wonder Leila went nuts. And because Ana is convinced that Christian will soon tire of her and go off looking for a new submissive he can beat up, Christian decides to shut her up once and for all and proposes marriage.

Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea!

The Heroine Female Lead Ana is just… the worst. When Christian admits to her that he’s afraid she’d leave him if she ever discovered how he truly is, she says:

“Why? Because I might think you’re a sicko for whipping and fucking women who look just like your mother?”

She knows he’s messed up because when he was a kid he was severely abused by his mother’s pimp and was to-hell-and-back-traumatized because when he was four-years-old, he was stuck with his mother’s dead body for four days since no one cared enough about them to check up on them. The dude is… not… okay. He needs more than a psychiatrist who seems complicit in this fuckery and acts more like a gossiping, matchmaking aunt than a medical professional. And yet Ana is more concerned with being dumped because she doesn’t want to get spanked once in a while and is afraid Christian will go somewhere else. At any rate, I never want to see “fuckedupness” used in a sentence ever again.

If she had half a brain, she would have run the second she found Christian’s dead mom’s picture and realized she looked a lot like her.

When Leila breaks into Ana’s apartment, severely unhinged and suffering from a major nervous breakdown, Christian embraces her and comforts her, then gives her a bath. Ana witnesses her boyfriend showing kindness to an ex-girlfriend who’s having a tough time and freaks the fuck out, even though Christian’s treatment of Leila is tantamount to… oh, I DON’T KNOW… having sympathy for another human being who is OBVIOUSLY in pain?! When Christian tells Ana that Leila is basically broken and has the emotional capacity of a needy child, we get this:

What the hell would he know about caring for a child? This was a woman he had a very full-on, deviant sexual relationship with.

DEVIANT. Obviously Ana, the judgmental cow that she is, thinks that BDSM is wrong and abnormal. But it’s totally okay when she does it. Ugh.

This girl is such a massive ball of neuroses and insecurities that she is not in any place to get involved with a man who is emotionally damaged himself. What’s really weird about Anastasia Steele is that she basically had a happy childhood with a mother and step-father who loves her. She’s a beautiful, a college-educated, “smart,” white woman who’s never really had anything terrible happen to her and yet she’s convinced she’s unattractive and unworthy of love. She has barely any self-esteem at all and there’s no reason for it. She is privileged by virtue of being a pretty white woman who was born to a middle class family. The only thing she should be worried about is if she were mentally and emotionally equipped to deal with a man who is obviously in need of major mental help. She should be trying to help him in other ways, not encouraging this sick co-dependent relationship. Shouldn’t she be afraid that a relationship with Christian can obviously mess you up enough that when he breaks up with you, you become a gun-toting, non-showering loony who hunts down his new girlfriends?

And the way she attacks “Mrs. Robinson” is just… brutal, calling her a child molester, when she doesn’t even know the full extent of Mrs. Robinson’s relationship with Christian (the author has only provided the scarcest of details). After all, by Christian’s own admission, he was a rebellious punkass mess before Mrs. Robinson comes along and straightens him out. And yet “Mrs. Robinson” is villainized left and right. Would Christian, “smart” as he is, have a full business partnership with a woman who supposedly sexually abused him? (Well, yeah, maybe. He’s a messed-up dude.) There’s a double standard here: when it’s the woman who is in sexual control, she has to be some kind of manipulative Scheherazade and yet, when it’s a dude who is in sexual control, it’s all kosher. It’s even sexy. I’d understand that Ana isn’t comfortable with “Mrs. Robinson” because she had a previous relationship with her boyfriend, but Ana is actually openly hostile with her.

Speaking of crazy, Ana’s “subconscious” and “inner goddess” are back in full force. In her review, Katrina Lumsden rightly pointed out that Ana’s inner goddess is actually a stand-in for her vagina. I laugh with glee at the image of a vagina wearing fuck-me pumps, tortoise-shell framed glasses, and harlot-red lipstick.

Ana reminds me of a young girl who’s just discovered what sexual arousal is. Seriously, she’s wet “down there” so much that I don’t know how she’s not in danger of chronic yeast infection.

The Hero Male Lead I don’t know where to start with this kid. I don’t know how he manages to get anything done throughout the day when all he thinks about is Ana and how he’s going to “punish” and fuck her. Obviously, he has major mental problems. You know how serial killers have a type and mostly only attack victims who look like their type? Christian is kind of like that. That’s why all of his female employees are tall, Amazonian blondes who look nothing like his mother—they are not his type because he has to work with them and can’t see them as sexual objects. Meanwhile, he seems to be intent on finding a woman who looks exactly like his mother so he can punish and degrade her. HE IS ONLY SEXUALLY AROUSED BY WOMEN WHO LOOK LIKE HIS MOTHER. That is some serious Norman Bates stuff. This kid is not okay. This is not your usual “My mother was a whore and I’m all emo about it and want to find a woman who’ll love me like she should have” romance hero; this dude is so angry with his mother that he wants to continually punish and fuck women who look like her… he has sexual desires for women who LOOK LIKE HIS DEAD MOM. And his psychiatrist is complicit in this and actually encourages it!

I can’t talk about this kid anymore. He’s just… messed up. He needs lots and lots of therapy.

Oh My Word! The Madonna/Whore Complex is strong with this one. There seems to be only two kinds of women in the “Fifty Shades” universe: good women and bad women. Anastasia is deserving of Christian’s love because she is innocent and virginal before him UNLIKE HIS DIRTY WHORE OF A MOTHER and therefore is the one who “breaks the spell.” Mrs. Robinson, for example, is placed in the role of the villain for daring to have sexual desires for being… eww, old and daring to have sexual desires. In fact, much emphasis is placed on the fact that Ana is naive and ignorant in the ways of the world and that’s why Christian finds her charming. With Mrs. Robinson, he was the one being led around by a more experienced woman; but with Ana, he’s the dominant and the decision-maker. He’s the boss. He’s the fucking Master of the Universe because Anastasia sees him as a god and idolizes him.

You know how this author shows how “special” Ana and Christian are? Everyone wants to have sex with them. In fact, they’re so hot and sexy and irresistible that people are willing to BREAK THE LAW just to have a piece. Damn, that better be an awesome piece of ass worth going to prison for.

In the first Fifty Shades book, I felt sorry for Anastasia Steele because she IS young and naive and taken advantage of by an older, more experienced man. But after reading this one, I’ve come to realize that Anastasia is actually awful. She’s judgmental, childish, possessive, petty, and selfish. You’d think she would feel sorry for Leila, a woman who was so damaged and broken up by her relationship with Christian that she has a mental break. You’d think that for the sake of female solidarity, Ana would have tried to understand and to some extent, help Leila. Instead, she begrudges the small amount of care and affection that Christian shows Leila when he sees how his abandonment of Leila had affected her. Ana is so wrapped up in what she wants and what she needs and how Christian would fulfill what she thinks is missing from her life, that she doesn’t really see anything outside of her sphere with Christian. She is a narcissistic, manipulative, needy, clingy brat. She is a black hole of insecurities and spite. She is just… terrrrrrible.

Christian is… seriously, how is this kid not a rapist and serial killer? Don’t we have Mrs. Robinson to thank for steering him away from that and turning the rage and darkness he feels inside into sexual energy?

And what is with the people who supposedly care about Christian and Ana? These two have only been together for two months at most and yet when they announce they’re going to get married, everyone is happy-happy-joy-joy! Aren’t Christian’s very wealthy parents worried that their emotionally-damaged son is rushing into marriage with a pretty girl he just met and that she could be some gold-digger? They don’t even really spend a lot of time with her. They don’t know her. All they know is that Christian is smitten with her and they’d never seen him act the way he does when he’s with her. CHRISTIAN COULD BE ON CRYSTAL METH AND THEY’D NEVER SEEN HIM ACT THE WAY HE DOES WHEN HE’S ON CRYSTAL METH (sorry, I’ve been watching a lot of Breaking Bad). The point is, just because the new person in your son’s life is making him act different, it’s not necessarily a good thing. HE IS STALKING HER AND BUYING HER CARS WHEN THEY’VE ONLY STARTED DATING. Isn’t that alarming enough? And what about Ana’s parents? Aren’t they worried that their fresh-out-of-college daughter is marrying a billionaire she has only known for a couple of months? Aren’t there concerned friends (Katherine doesn’t count because she’s dating Elliott, Christian’s brother, and has therefore drank from the Grey Kool-Aid) to tell these two deluded freaks stuck in a “sadomasochistic” codependent relationship to maybe step back, take a breather, and evaluate where they’re at before they take a giant step like marriage?

As for the “kinky fuckery,” there aren’t any to be found. In fact, the sex in this book is even tamer than the previous book. You’d think the sex would be a little wilder and hotter, since Ana’s been “broken in,” so to speak. And yet it’s repetitive. It’s the same old insert-tab-A-into-slot-B foolishness and it’s barely even sexy. There is ONE scene that’s ALMOST daring (but only because for most of Americans, the buttsecks is still a big no-no): Ana goes exploring in the “Red Room of Pain” and finds all sorts of anal toys in a drawer. Naturally, she’s intrigued. For Christian’s birthday, she gives him permission to stick things in her butt by giving him a butt plug, but he tells her the plug is too big for someone untrained like her. He uses his fingers instead and they both get so hot that they start doing it, then cuddle after they finish. AND HE DOESN’T WASH HIS HANDS. HE DOESN’T WASH HIS HANDS.

“Almost Everything” by Tate Hallaway Anastasjia Ramses Parker is a half-witch, half-vampire whose father is the vampire King of the North (Robb Stark?!?). Her mother is a witch who teaches English at the community college. In this world, vampires and witches are arch enemies; because this is the 3rd book of the series, I have no idea how Ana’s parents got together and why they’re split up. One night stand? Anyway, in the previous book, Ana and her ex-fiance/knight protector Elias, were banished from her father’s kingdom for daring to stand up to the king and both now live with Ana’s witch mother. She and Elias seem to be doing the awkward what-are-we-to-each-other dance and I suspect this will be an ongoing theme and will be carried through the bulk of the series. Expect lots of angst and hand wringing.

While Ana and Elias are dealing with the aftermath of their banishment, they come up against a new problem looming in the horizon. Apparently, in the previous book, Ana—ignorant of vampire politics as she was raised without knowing she was half vampire—inadvertently broke a betrothal between someone from her kingdom and the princess of the south. Now that Ana is living in the south and thus in the territory of the southern vampires, she must deal with the consequences of her part in breaking the betrothal. The prince and his entourage descend upon Ana’s mom’s house and demand that Ana find a new suitor for the princess or the impending alliance between the North and South won’t happen and there will be blood. And war. Panicked, Ana offers up the only candidate she can think of: Elias.

The Heroine In the first scene, we encounter Ana sitting out in the patio wearing a raggedy tank top and shorts. She seems to be a spunky, sassy gal—she took on her father, after all—and really would like the life she once had before she found out she was a vampire princess. I don’t see quite yet if she is struggling with her vampire half—though there is apparently a scene in a previous book where she licks the blood off the forehead of an injured hockey-playing boyfriend, much to her chagrin—and I’d be interested to know what “witch” means in this world. Will she be casting spells? Anyway, just like a normal teenage girl, she seems to enjoy ruminating about what she and Elias mean to each other, since they’ve only made out a couple of times, and haven’t really been affectionate ever since they were banished from her father’s kingdom.

The Hero Not much is known about Elias except he’s a knight. Was he a knight specifically assigned to Ana? He seems to be old-fashioned and traditional, as he enjoys afternoon tea with Ana’s indulgent mother. Probably ridiculously handsome with the requisite cheekbones and piercing eyes. That’s about it.

Will I read it? Maybe. I like Ana’s snarky, jovial voice and there is good energy in the prose. I’m a little burned out on the whole will-they-or-won’t-they shenanigans, especially when the hero is a vampire, but the main character is likeable. What’s holding me back from buying the book is that I’d have to go and buy the earlier books in the series because this is very much not a stand-alone. On one hand, this is only the third book, so getting the other books won’t break the bank, but I am slightly put off that I have to read the earlier books to catch up and I’m pretty meh about doing that.

“Dreaming Awake” by Gwen Hayes [SOME MAJOR SPOILERS INCLUDED] I read the first book of this new series sometime last year so I was really excited to come across this excerpt. Gwen Hayes’ writing is so elegant and evocative. Check this out:

Danger doesn’t always greet with bared fangs. Sometimes, it seduces with a willowy caress, a sigh of pleasure, then turns carnivorous with whipcrack intensity.

Beautiful. In the last book, Theia Alderson, a British transplant with a rich, wealthy widower for a father, meets and falls in love with Haden Black, an incubus who enters her life via fire. Literally. As Theia watches from her bedroom window, Haden falls from the sky, every inch of him in flames. Haden shows up later as a student in Theia’s private school and instantly becomes hot commodity. Heh-heh-heh. Haden and Theia are instantly attracted to each other like horny, hormonal magnets, but Haden is reluctant to get involved with Theia because he is supposed to bring a “bride” back to his world whose soul he would trap in a hellish prison and he likes Theia too much to do that to her. But as these things go, these crazy kids get together and Theia is somehow trapped in hell when she sacrifices herself for Haden and shares a blood bond with Haden’s demonic mother. Ah, young love. My high school boyfriend wouldn’t even buy me a movie ticket.

At the beginning of this book, Theia has returned from hell and is trying to adjust to “normal” life. Her overly strict father reluctantly welcomes her back—she’d been missing for a spell—but seems to be colder than ever. Her only respite from her crappy home life is her dreams of Haden, who spins little fantasies for her where they dance and frolic like happy, ridiculously good-looking puppies. But Haden’s mother, the queen of the succubi, definitely wants Theia back and Theia has to deal with the consequences of having demon blood in her body. Is Theia going to turn into a creature that lusts for human souls? Is she going to eat Haden?

The Heroine Theia Alderson is the “perfect daughter, the perfect teen girl, the perfect ingenue from every gothic romance ever written. A doll in a box.” Growing up with an overly strict father and a dead mother of questionable reputation, Theia was desperate to please her dad and never really allowed herself to let loose and have fun until she meets Haden, who ultimately leads to her momentous undoing. At the start of the first book, she was a prim, proper “English rose,” careful and afraid to disappoint her father, but by the end, she had saved Haden and held up her own against the queen of the succubi, his mother. I’m interested in the development of Theia’s character and how the demon blood will affect her and would definitely love to read more.

The Hero Haden Black is more of a standard stock romance novel hero, complete with angst

a dark mystery, a demon with a human soul. He embodied all that shouldn’t be in a glorious presentation of everything that was ideal. His chiseled features would have been too harsh on a mere mortal, but gave him a unique appearance—as if he was sprung from a well of dreams

Uh-huh.

Will I read it? Duh. I’ve already read the first book and really enjoyed the author’s voice and style. I think Theia is a fun character and while Haden hails straight from CW Teen Heartthrob casting, I enjoy their chemistry together. This is just the 2nd book of the series and the author does a good job encapsulating the important events of the first book within a few pages that a newcomer can just dive right in. Still, I definitely recommend the first book. Gwen Hayes is a fabulous, fun writer and I’ll definitely be on the look-out for more of her stuff. Will for sure shell the dough for this book.

“Black Dawn” by Rachel Caine This is the umpteenth book in Caine’s Morganville Vampires series and I haven’t read any of the books since the 1st one (and that was a long while back). I think it’s about a college student named Claire Danvers who moves into a dormitory with vampires for roommates and shenanigans ensue. And no, it’s not Porky’s with vampires, though that would be awesome. Someone make that happen!

Even though I had no clue what was going on and who any of these characters were, I was immediately drawn in by how creepy it was. The city of Morganville is basically run by vampires and these folks are a “cross between old school royalty and the Mafia.” For a while now, the vampires have been at the top of the heap, but now there’s a new baddie in town and their favorite chow is vampire. My skin seriously crawled at the thought of these creatures called the Draug. They’re semi-solid, mostly slimy creatures who can hide in the water and has infected the Morganville water system. In the last book, a few of Claire’s friends and some vampire biggies were captured by the Draug and dragged under water where they were slowly consumed. Claire and her human boyfriend Shane rescue a few vampire friends and they’re now camping out in the Elders’ Council Building. One of the vampires they had rescued is Michael, who is dating a human named Eve, and Eve is currently wary and afraid of Michael because when she fed him her blood to save his life, he almost drank her dry. Another vampire Claire and Shane rescued is Oliver, a formerly hippie-seeming dude who owned a local coffee shop and is actually kind of an evil vampire who wants to take over the territory if the current queen Amelie, who was injured in the last rescue mission and infected by the Draug, dies. Now Claire and Shane have to find the cure for Amelie and save her because their lives would totally suck if Oliver took over.

The Heroine Claire seems scrappy and willing to fight. I don’t learn much about Claire because this story seems to take place immediately after the end of the last book, but she doesn’t seem the type to cower and hide because when Oliver commands her to find a missing vampire, she just goes for it and seems to know what she’s doing. But, then again, this is like, the tenth or so book in the series, so who knows how she has evolved as a character.

The Hero “You feel the need to scream like a girl, let it out, dude. No judging,” is what Shane says to a vampire who has nightmares because HE SPENT SOME TIME CHAINED UP UNDER WATER BEING FED ON ALIVE BY SLIMY, SUCKING THINGS. Seriously? Do not want. Not impressed.

Will I read it? Meh. I’d have to re-read the first book because it’s been so long since I read it, and like I said, there’s quite a few books between this one and the first book. I’m not really looking to go all the way back. It’d be too expensive. I’m intrigued by the creepiness of the Draug, but I’m not really motivated by the expense of buying, like, 10 books just to catch up. It’d probably be a fun series to pick up and start with, though, especially if you like gorier, scarier books, and a young adult series starring older-than-seventeen characters.

“Blood Fever” by Veronica Wolff Here’s yet another series featuring vampires, though this is really about “Watchers.” Does watchers mean the same as human servants or Renfield-type characters? Do they “watch” the vampire and take care of them in the day time or something? Our main protagonist Drew attends a Watcher school in the Isle of Night, which I assume is a hidden island on the Atlantic somewhere. The recruits of the Watcher School are abused kids, runaways, and delinquents who are picked up and brought to the island by vampires. Drew herself was seduced and tricked into going to the island by a sexy vampire named Ronan in a parking lot in Florida. This book is liberally peppered with terminology like “Acari” (which is what our protagonist is—I assume it means “newbie”), “Directorate,” and “Guidon” and I have no idea what any of them mean. No bueno.

In the previous book, Drew had “bonded” with an injured, derelict vampire named Carden McCloud, who is a renegade (yet another term which means nothing to me) that she finds in a cave. Their bond is forbidden, so Drew is very anxious that someone will find out and report them to the “Directorate.” Meanwhile, a “Guidon” named Trinity has been murdered and Drew is looking hella guilty because Trinity used to bully her and her dead roommate. In order to avoid prosecution and punishment by death, Drew must find out who really killed Trinity, while having to contend with her growing obsession with and near constant fantasizing about Carden McCloud. Oh, and she has a new roommate who is a violin prodigy named Mei-Ling Ho (really?) and was apparently kidnapped from her home and dragged to the island. Drew is puzzled by this because all the recruits have to come “willingly,” so she’s gotta find out about that shit, too.

The Heroine I can already tell that Drew and I won’t be getting along because she says things like, “Girls and their stupid hang-ups are beyond me.” Yeah, no.

The Hero “But before you go, for the record, I do not savage young women.” Good for you.

Will I read it? Probably not. This book is just the, what, second book (?) in the series and I’m already totally lost. The author tends to throw around terms that mean nothing to a newbie and not so easy to decipher. The new roommate is a Chinese girl named Mei-Ling Ho who is a violin prodigy and the first thing she asks for when she meets Drew is a syllabus. For real? YOU JUST GOT KIDNAPPED BY VAMPIRES AND TAKEN TO AN ISLAND WHERE YOU’LL LEARN HOW TO… I don’t even know. Watch? AND YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A SYLLABUS? SMH. I think I might stick with Richelle Mead’s awesome Vampire Academy series and skip this one.

“The Farm” by Emily McKay Finally, an excerpt from the first book in a series! Woot! Just the title alone is scary. The Farm refers to a quarantine zone where the surviving children under the age of 18 are being kept after an apocalyptic event called The Tick decimated much of the nation’s population. The Ticks are vampire monsters who sweep across towns like a swarm and consumes everyone in its path.

Our female lead is a seventeen-year-old girl named Lily whose twin sister, Mel, is autistic and can only communicate through nursery rhymes. The farm is located in what used to be a private liberal arts college and the two girls have been hiding themselves in a science building. In the farm, everything is regulated: what time they eat, how much they eat, and what they can have in their possession. Those who violate the rules are tied up outside the fences for the swarm to consume. The people inside the farm are divided into groups: 1) The Greens – Lily and her sister fall under this category, 2) The Collabs – people who work with the Ticks and provide them what they need, 3) The Breeders – girls who agree to get pregnant and give up their babies to… be eaten? Turned into slaves of the Ticks? Anyway, Lily and Mel are about to turn 18 and plan to escape before that happens. Those over the age of 18 are taken out of the farm and tied to a stake outside the fence to be eaten. It would be good to escape.

The Heroine(s) Lily has always taken care of her sister, Mel. And she’s sick of it. Often she fantasizes of killing herself and leaving Mel in the closet to dehydrate and starve—she figures it would be a better fate for Mel than getting eaten by the Ticks. She doesn’t want to be responsible for Mel anymore, but at the same time, she knows she is the only one who can really save the two of them. She’s smart and tough and an interesting character study. She’s a realist who knows she will have to make a really hard decision someday, but wonders if she will have the courage to go through with it.

Mel, on the other hand, is not as helpless as Lily seem to think she is. She hears patterns and plans and music. She hears… everything. She suspects that Lily’s plan for escape might fail, but is unable to communicate it to her twin.

Will I read it? Oh hell yeah. Lily reminds me of Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games because she’s resourceful, tough, and smart. I love reading about heroines who get shit done and don’t spend half their day mooning about the love interest. They don’t wait to be saved; they save themselves. The book is told in first-person POV, alternating between Lily and Mel; I’m interested in learning more about the way Mel’s brain works. I was also captivated by the idea of “The Ticks.” The author doesn’t describe what they look like or where they came from or how they came about, but the fact that they come in swarms and have basically ended human existence is scary enough. Sign me up for this series. I’ll definitely be plunking my dough for it. This is one vampire story I definitely want to read.

The Plot as I Understood it When the story opens, Amy is worrying via her diary that Nick isn’t dealing very well with the lay-offs at his company, but she’s trying to be a “cool chick” about it and not be the kind of wife who’d nag and bitch at her husband because he’s out getting drinks with co-workers recently laid off. Nick works as a pop culture blogger and Amy, who is also in publishing, is a trust fund baby whose parents had amassed a fortune writing children’s books based on an idealized version of Amy called Amazing Amy. Amy has girlfriends who emotionally blackmail their husbands into performing stupid pet tricks like meeting their wives for drinks after work so they can be shown off to the other wives and Amy vows not to be the kind of wife to do such things and to shrug it off when Nick doesn’t show up, ignoring the pitying looks from her girlfriends. Meanwhile, her relationship with her husband hasn’t been so great because Nick is in constant fear of getting laid off and seems to resent Amy who has never really had to worry about money due to her trust fund and wouldn’t have to worry about selling her ass on the streets even if she does get laid off herself. After the two of them get lose their respective jobs, they decide—Diary-Amy indicates that it is mainly Nick’s decision and she went along, like a good wife should—to go back to Nick’s hometown in Missouri to take care of Nick’s ailing mother and to open up a bar using the last of Amy’s trust fund (her parents had made bad investments and the Amazing Amy books are no longer selling, so they borrowed most of her money).

At first, Diary-Amy seems to be determined to make the best of things, even though Nick has taken to spending all of his free time at the bar with his twin sister Dot Go (short for Margot), getting drunk and coming home surly. She makes friends with the neighbors, especially a woman named Noelle who has triplets, and joins community and hobby clubs to pass her time. She even visits her Alzheimer’s-stricken father-in-law at the rest home where Nick and Dot have abandoned him. Above all things, she just wants to bring back the Nick she fell in love with—the sweet, charming guy that every woman had a crush on and every man wanted to be friends with. She does this by staging elaborate anniversary treasure hunts designed to remind Nick of all the little moments during the year that mean something to Amy and the places around town where they happened. On top of that, she would also really like a baby, but Nick has told her—in an increasingly angry manner—that they are neither at the proper financial nor the emotional level to do that. In short, Diary-Amy is miserable because Nick doesn’t seem to see all the hard work she’s been putting in to make the marriage work and she hates where they live and Nick has been getting so very, very angry with her and sometimes… sometimes… it really pushes her to do awful things like go out and buy a gun from the seedy part of town…

And then Amy disappears. Nick doesn’t know where Amy could have gone. He came home one day and Amy was gone. The door is wide open, there are signs of struggle in the living room, and she’s not picking up her phone. There are ugly whispers that Nick possibly murdered Amy—the police did some CSI stuff in his kitchen and it looks like someone had hurriedly cleaned up an awful lot of blood—and Nick, who is ever so used to be being adored, is not liking this one bit. As the evidence against Nick mounts up and public opinion of him slowly goes down the toilet, Nick takes it upon himself to investigate the hours right before Amy disappeared. After all, she had to have gone around town planting clues and love notes as part of her Yearly Anniversary Treasure Hunt, so Nick decides to play the game one last time in hopes it will give him an insight as to Amy’s state of mind. As the days go on and Amy remains gone, the town continues to give Nick the hairy eyeball and his own twin sister begins to question what kind of man Nick could be. Meanwhile, Diary-Amy reveals a rapidly deteriorating marriage on the pages of her diary and how oh-so-perfect Nick is slowly becoming a harsh, short-tempered man who’s taken to grabbing and shoving Amy whenever he’s pissed at her. And he seems to be pissed at her all the time. And she’s trying so hard to be perfect wife for him—she’s supportive of all his plans, takes care of his neglected father, doesn’t bug him too much about the baby she wants so very badly, and when he comes home late at night smelling of booze, she doesn’t even complain too much. So why won’t Nick just… go back to being the guy she fell in love with? At this point, it’s really looking like Nick might have done away with Amy especially since he has a twenty-one year old girlfriend and oh, Amy’s best friend—that NICK DIDN’T EVEN KNOW SHE HAD—is out there telling anyone who would listen that Amy was pregnant and she was so scared about what Nick would do if he found out. Suddenly, it’s not looking too great for our Mr. Handsome Golden Boy, is it? Except there are people out there who just really hated Amy and apparently stalked her over the years and as Nick continues to look into Amy’s last hours, he’s starting to realize that he might not have known Amy at all…

The Female Lead Diary-Amy appears to be a poor, little rich girl neglected by parents who are so absorbed with creating a fictional version of their daughter and making money off of her that they don’t really see Amy. She’s been given a trust fund, attended the best schools, has a good job in publishing and a swanky place in New York, and married a seemingly great guy, but Amy is not happy. Diary-Amy believes in hearts and flowers and falling in love. She loves big, elaborate displays of affection, and doesn’t believe she deserves anything less. After all, she goes through the trouble every year setting up her Treasure Hunts for Nick and flying in lobsters from Maine for the two of them to enjoy; the least Nick could do is… show up, for Pete’s sake. Uncranky. And not drunk. And she so wants to be supportive of Nick wants, even if it means moving back to his hometown in the middle of nowhere to take care of his ailing parents and to financially back up a bar with the last of her trust fund. For all of this, has she ever asked anything from Nick in return? She’s even tried to be a “cool chick” for him— you know, the kind of woman who doesn’t complain that her boyfriend watches too much sports or never sends her flowers, and drinks beer with him and his friends, and doesn’t make him go to stupid chick functions like baby showers, and doesn’t nag him when he comes home too late, and doesn’t get mad when his anniversary present isn’t as grand or lavish as the one she gives him. And Amazing Amy deserves a “cool” guy like Nick, the kind of guy that everyone instantly likes. Amazing Amy Gets Engaged. Amazing Amy’s Amazing Wedding. Amazing Amy Gets Pregnant. The oh-so-perfect protagonist of the books created by her parents just has to be partnered with an oh-so-perfect guy, just like Barbie with Ken. But Nick, whining about his writing career never going anywhere and never asking how Amy’s doing when she’s suffering alongside him, just had to ruin everything, didn’t he? Amy didn’t sign up for the podunk town and the drunken, neglectful husband and the failing marriage. She just wants the handsome, perfect husband and the cute, gurgling baby and maybe the brownstone in New York City. And Nick is just being… a complete… asswipe!

The Male Lead Nick Dunne is the kind of guy you like immediately. He’s a pop culture blogger, so you can probably talk to him about movies, books, and music. He’s good-looking, too, not unlike Cracked.com’s very handsome staff writer, Soren Bowie. He was raised in the Midwest and wasn’t born rich, so he doesn’t have that stench of eau de douchebag like trust fund babies. Nick is used to being adored by everyone, so when people start looking at him like… well, he killed someone, he’s not really too happy about it. Sure, it’s been a good while since he visited his Alzheimer’s-stricken father at the nursing home; and sure, he’s been having sex with one of his students at the community college where he teaches; and fine, he hasn’t been the best husband to Amy—did she really expect him to remember every single moment of their time together—but he’s generally a good guy, ask anyone in town. And yet it’s hard for Nick to play the good guy when he can’t seem to get himself to infuse any kind of emotion into his voice while pleading for Amy’s “kidnappers” on TV to bring her back; he also seems to have a hard time keeping himself from inappropriately laughing out loud or smirking and posing with the tragedy groupies who descend upon the grieving husband like he’s Bret Michaels. And then there’s the twenty-one-year-old girlfriend who won’t leave him alone, even when the police are starting to suspect him for killing Amy, and threatens to come out to press if Nick doesn’t promise to call her back everyday. The thing is, he’s remembering a different Amy than anyone else in town remembers: for one thing, Nick knows that Amy didn’t have a best friend named Noelle and the sainted Amy that everyone keeps talking about tends to talk shit about people behind their backs. And Amy… well, she had a manipulative, devious bent to her that Nick had only seen glimpses of and Nick is afraid that he’s only now seeing what Amy is truly like. And it’s slowly starting to dawn on him that Amy has more in store for him than some chintzy, cheesy anniversary present.

Oh My Word! This is probably the most thrilling book I’ve read in a long time. I can’t even count the number of times I yelped out loud or yelled, “That is so fucked up!” or clutched the book to my chest and closed my eyes for a second because it made me so nervous. The story is told in three parts: 1. Amy and Nick’s courtship (narrated by Amy’s diary) 2. The disintegration of their marriage and Amy’s subsequent disappearance 3. the aftermath of the police finding Amy’s diary. Amy’s side of the story, from the most part, comes directly from the pages of her diary; Nick’s point of view is told in 3rd person limited present day. His POV tells the story as he sees it happening, but we “learn” about Amy in the alternating chapters through her diary. As the reader, you realize immediately that things will go very, very bad for Nick as soon as the police finds Amy’s diary because its pages paint him as a mentally and emotionally abusive husband, who drinks and is frustrated about the state of his career, so he takes it all out on Amy who appears to only want what’s best for him. Diary-Amy is a sweet, romantic woman who naively falls in love with Mr. Handsome and Charming, only to find out that her smart, confident husband is actually insecure and kind of a bullying jerk. Nick, for the most part, while kind of an asshole, seems to be completely baffled as to why Amy would want to buy a gun to protect herself from him when he had never physically harmed her. Yes, he has cheated on her and yes, they’ve been fighting a lot more lately, but he couldn’t even begin to imagine as to why Amy would be afraid of him. He’d never intentionally hurt Amy. He’s just not… that kind of guy.

And that is really the crux of this story: two messed-up people who expected too much of each other, thinking they know each other very well, only to realize that they don’t know each other at all. Amy wants a perfect Ken Doll of a husband to match the Amazing Amy figure that she has been trying to fight all of her life. She presents to Nick the facade of a “cool chick” and that’s the woman he falls in love with. When introduced to a different kind of Amy, Nick withdraws and finds himself repulsed by her because she’s not the woman he fell in love with.

I really enjoyed Rashomon-type of storytelling that the author utilizes to tell this story because it effectively showcases how the same scene might play out from another person’s recollection or point of view. Even when the “twist” finally comes—and it’s not really a “twist” because it comes at you in the middle of the book—it doesn’t play out the way you may think. Amy and Nick are both such master manipulators of each other’s emotions, so perfect at tearing each other down, that there’s just no way the two of them should be with anyone else but each other. In fact, even as Nick finds himself marveling at Amy’s deviousness, he wonders if he could be falling in love with her again. Amy, for the most part, is a diabolical genius and has the power to crush Nick, but holds back because she herself is wondering if she’s falling in love with Nick. It’s funny because the two of them pretend to be other people in order to attract each other and yet only when they see each other at their ugliest do they realize that they may deserve each other after all.

What I found interesting while reading this book is how I devoured it in one sitting—took me four hours (do NOT pick up this book and start it at 9pm if you have to go to work the next day)—even though the two main characters are NOT at all likeable. SPOILER ALERT AMY IS NOT THE SWEET, CARING PERSON PORTRAYED IN HER DIARIES. Nick starts out okay–an affable slacker who never really knew what he wanted to be when he grew up, but the one thing he knows he doesn’t want to be is his father, who was physically abusive to his mother. And so Nick tries hard to be the guy that everyone likes, putting himself out to be charming, funny, and confident, even though he himself is the only one who knows his own limitations, which constantly plague him. He is mildly disdainful of the rich, even if Amy is one of them, because he worked hard to get through college, working in a bunch of odd jobs. He is, on paper, a good guy. And yet something is just a little off about Nick—yes, he’s a cheating scumbag—but the fact that he would spend all of his time in a bar bought with his wife’s money (even as he resents the fact that she was a trust fund baby) and neglect her at home, makes him a douchecanoe in my book. Some people might think Nick is the protagonist in this book fighting against his manipulative, psychotic wife… but I don’t think so. I wanted so badly to like Nick, but I just couldn’t. Whenever he’s about to do something halfway decent, he fucks it up and takes it two steps back. I think he and Amy are both assholes and they deserve each other. Moreover, Nick is worse than Amy in some aspects because he’s a lying, cheating hypocrite (though Amy, admittedly, has a few things over on Nick in a few ways). In this story, there’s really no one to cheer for and yet I found myself riveted from the first page to the last because I was eager to see how far these two psychos could go trying to destroy each other.

A word of warning to some of my fellow readers who may think this is a romance; it’s a love story, in a way, but there’s no happy ending. Nick and Amy are messed up assholes and determined to tear each other down, yet it’s a credit to the author, Gillian Flynn, that I was completely and totally absorbed by the story, wondering how much worse it could get between Nick and Amy. I came away from this book thinking that what the two of them need is a show-down: Mr. and Mrs. Smith-style. Let’s give them both katana swords and see what kind of real damage they can do to each other.

The Plot as I Understood it The Princess Samira Kamal of Tamir has been a very naughty royal. Desperate for the love and attention usually lavished upon her prettier, flashier sisters, the poor middle child throws herself—and her virginity—on a white man named Dominic from their neighboring island of Montebello. Samira has lived a cloistered, secluded life in her father’s castle, thus her wacky ideas of romantic love and how it all works are derived from old movies and TV shows. When she gets knocked up after some hubba-hubba naked presumably-unprotected bump-and-grind with Dominic—so that’s how it happens? JUST WHAT IS UP WITH ROMANCE NOVEL PEOPLE NEVER EVER USING CONDOMS— the poor girl thinks it’s going to be hearts and flowers from here on out and she’d be running into Dominic’s open arms which would sweep her up and twirl her around all to a grand, surprising, crescendoing refrain and My Little Ponies neighing merrily and sunflowers bursting into bloom in the background. Stupid, naive, silly-billy goo-goo. Oh yeah, this Dominic cat, who’s been actively plotting against everyone’s happiness in this 12-book series, is SOOOO going to be thrilled to hear that you’re pregnant, Samira.

Oooooh… we’re going to catch ourselves a husband! Our hopeful, guileless, ugly (she said it, not me) Princess Samira flies over to Montebello—telling her parents she’s just going to be visiting her good female friend over there for shopping and vacation—with a tall, dark, handsome bodyguard named Farid Nasir. From the get-go, Farid is all business. Every time he thinks to himself, “Damn, she’s hot,” he immediately castigates himself afterward because he’s all honorable and noble and shit and the moment he starts thinking of Samira, the body he’s supposed to be guarding, as a sex object, it’d be game over, man. Everybody knows that thought is just as bad as deed. He can’t ever think about boning Samira, he can’t. Impassive face and stiff upper lip instead of stiff… anything else. Samira, on the other hand, can’t wait to see Dominic and impart to him the wonderful news. That is, until she comes across his cabin and sees him through the window making love to somebody else. Ain’t that some shit. Crushed, Samira returns to her own cabin and tearfully confesses everything to her stalwart guard. What is an honorable, unerringly loyal bodyguard to do but to blurt out a marriage proposal in order to save the princess from the humiliation of a birthing an illegitimate child? They would get married, hang around Montebello for a bit to fake a honeymoon, then return together to Tamir as husband and wife with no one the wiser as to the identity of Samira’s baby daddy. Samira is aghast, of course, because she couldn’t sentence Farid to a loveless, passionless marriage and heaven knows it will be loveless and passionless because she doesn’t love him… even though he fits his trousers really well and his face is really handsome and oooh, what a body on that one. Soon enough, Samira sees the light (and the wide shoulders and the slender hips and the abs and the chiseled jaw) and marries Farid; together they decide to sleep in the same bed in the cabin so it wouldn’t be weird when they’re expected to share a room back in their home in Tamir. Bow-chicka-bow-bow. What the hell, Samira’s already pregnant anyway! Let the fizznuckin’ commence! The two of them start playing tourists, hanging out together in the day and boning at night. Ah, young love. They should have really taken some time during this fake honeymoon to talk some stuff through because there’s no way in hell it’s going to work. I mean, a) she’s a princess, he’s a bodyguard b) Farid is almost 100% sure Samira will dump him as soon as they get back to Tamir. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts, kids! I’m sure Samira’s dad, the Sultan, will be really thrilled that his darling daughter is boning her bodyguard!

And then someone cold-murders Dominic, the baby daddy. Dum-dum-DUM!

The Heroine There’s really nothing that separates Samira from her white heroine counterparts. She might have been the neglected, bluestocking daughter of landed gentry parents in Regency England or the quiet, unassuming middle child of a family in Oklahoma who yearns for true love and something…wonderful and romantic and… grand. Ah… the dream of finding a wealthy, well-built, handsome man who will take you on many, many adventures and flights of previously undiscovered passion is universal. But sometimes you find that guy and he gets you pregnant and he turns out to be an infected ingrown dickweed. That happens. But Samira doesn’t seem too fazed by this. When she finds Dominic sucking face with another woman, she runs back to her cabin and pouts and cries for a little bit, then almost immediately gloms on her bootieguard. She feels bad that she’s dooming Farid to a lifetime of loveless marriage so she is resistant to the obvious attraction between the two of them at first, but that doesn’t last long. Ultimately, she almost forgets that her baby-daddy ever existed (until he is CONVENIENTLY MURDERED—deucedly inconvenient for Dom, though) and spends the next two weeks making out with Farid. And who wouldn’t? Yum. What I liked about Samira, however, is that she is fully aware of her own desires and knows what to do with it. She’s not some doe-eyed bimbo who shivers and blinks wildly and gasps at the sight of a man’s naked body. Sure, she’s naive and ignorant about a lot of things, but that can be chalked up to her privileged, yet extremely secluded upbringing. Surprisingly, she’s brave enough to seek out her lover to tell her she’s pregnant with his child; it doesn’t work out and I was disappointed that she didn’t claw his eyes out. Good breeding, I guess. But she gets points for wanting something different other than the life of a privileged royal. You go, gurl. Get some.

The Hero Farid Nasir, our hero, has been working for the Kamal family since he was a teen. He’s loyal, devoted to the family, noble, and… I’m sorry, but dude’s principles collapsed like a cheap tent in a slight breeze in the face of some ooh-la-la. In the start of the story, Farid seems very stalwart and stoic and I’m very much a fan of this type of hero. He offers to marry Samira because he knows that reputation and a good name are very important in their culture and society; he even resigns himself to a life of celibacy, therefore sacrificing any chance he might have at happiness in order to ensure that no one finds out that Samira got herself knocked-up by some foreigner out of wedlock. He is a rock. He is as unyielding as a diamond in the face of temptation. Bullshit. All it takes is a flirtatious smile from Samira, a brush of her hand, or a waft of her scent in his nostrils and he’s a slavering wolf. He folds so quickly. You’d think a royal guard would have had more training in abstaining and self-control. Total fail. I was looking forward to a story where Samira slowly coaxes Farid out of his stoicism and “rigid” set of “principles” with her softness and kindness or something. Instead he’s as eager to jump her as a fourteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend has shown him a quick flash of side boob. And what was the deal with his complete 180 change-of-mind about Samira telling her child about its biological father someday? Wasn’t the whole ruse about Samira keeping the identity of her baby daddy a secret? What was the point of any of it—of telling anyone that he and Samira had a whirlwind courtship and got married in a hurry—if he’s insisting that Samira reveal the secret that he married her to keep? Good lord. I understand that it’s because his mother never told him that the man he thought was his father wasn’t actually his biological father and that he had only married his mother in order to protect her, but why did he do the same thing with Samira if he felt that way about it? “Oh hey, Samira, let’s lie and tell everyone that I’m the father of your kid, but don’t forget to tell your kid who his real father is, okay?” Like what if the kid went up to the Sultan and was like, “Hey, grampa, is it true that my real father is some white guy that my mom had a one-night-stand with and not her former bodyguard that she married?” Way to make things convoluted and messed-up, Farid. SERIOUSLY. Like even if what he was predicting—that Samira will dump him as soon as they got back to their homeland—came about, what would have been the point of telling the Sultan and the kingdom that he was the father of Samira’s baby if he was going to insist that Samira tell the kid the truth? It’s not like they would tell the kid not to tell anyone; Guess what, kid, you’re a bastard. Don’t tell grampa. Did he want the child to be complicit in their lies? WAY TO GO, DICK. It’s like Farid is addicted to drama and just insinuated himself into Samira’s life because his own life is so boring. Ugh, I’m so over this bodyguard schtick. I’m going to volunteer to marry the pregnant princess so I can have some drama in my life. Get over your daddy issues, Farid. It’s not sexy. WHY, IF FARID WAS TRYING TO HELP SAMIRA, DID IT SUDDENLY BECOME ALL ABOUT HIM?! Waaaah! My mommy lied to me about my real dad and now I’m all bitter about it and lying is bad and yet I’m totally okay with Samira lying to everyone and telling them I’m the father of her bastard child. Waaaah! Shut up. Romance novel heroes can be such emo drama queens.

Oh My Word! Does Samira Kamal have any other “secrets”? Like, maybe an exciting one? Could she be some super-awesome assassin with a kickass cover whose plan all along was to kill the smug, arrogant, vaguely evil baby daddy because he’s a traitor selling out his country’s secrets? Maybe she’s MI-6 or CIA? No? **sigh** Yes, she has a handful of secrets. 1. She’s pregnant out of wedlock 2. She marries a man who is NOT the father of her baby, but they’re gonna tell everyone that he is 3. The real father of her child is some opportunistic, scheming jerkweed whom she meets at her brother’s wedding to someone from Montebello and if it were found out that he’d taken advantage of the princess, the tenuous truce between Montebello and Tamir will probably crumble and some serious shit is gonna go down. Now I haven’t read the other books in the series so I have no idea about the relations between the two countries, but do either of them have nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction? If they were to get into a scuffle, would they have the ability to destroy each other? Would the UN have to step in with sanctions? Would the U.S. have to get involved and play referee or big brother? Whose side do you think China will be on? I just want to know. Like, if Sultan Kamal found out that one of the Montebello cousins deflowered and impregnated one of his daughters, that has to be some kind of international incident and somebody would have to throw down. If that were to happen, what would be the global repercussions, if any? Would it have a negative impact on global economics? Will it sink the Euro once and for all? I mean, if the two countries were to fight, what will happen? If trade negotiations between them were to break down, how would it affect the global markets? Could it possibly affect President Obama’s chances of re-election? How awful would it be if President Obama lost to Romney just because a Tamir princess got knocked up by a Montebello cousin?

I also have an important world-building question: since Tamir appears to be a quasi-Arabic country, what religion does its people practice? Are they Muslims? Are they super-duper Muslim and is Sharia law in place? Should Samira be afraid that she will get stoned to death if she were to admit to her parents that she is carrying an infidel’s illegitimate child? Are there harsh punishments for fornication? Would Samira be tied up in public square and whipped if the truth were to come out? This is something I really would have been interested in knowing. Any mention of culture and religion pertaining to the two countries seemed to be wishy-washy and noncommittal. As it is, Farid and Samira don’t seem like anything more but Middle Eastern, religiously-neutral Ken and Barbie. I would have liked it if Samira’s reasoning for marrying a man she doesn’t love is greater than “Oh, my daddy is going to be so mad at me!” I understand if the author didn’t want to get political—always a sticky, muddy pit to get into—but I would have like to learn more about Tamir and Montebello. I know this is a 12-book series written by 12 different authors, so maybe I could glean more info about this world from the other books in the series.

And I know this is just more world-building complaints, but if a princess were to marry her own bodyguard, is she violating some kind of royal protocol? The reason I ask is the Sultan seems to be more pissed off that Farid, a supposed loyal employee, marries the princess behind his back. If Farid and Samira had courted properly in front of him before getting married, would the Sultan have approved? I seem to recall that Farid’s parents were some kind of farmers—ergo, peasants—so would the Sultan have approved of Samira marrying a castle employee, a peasant?

The romance between Samira and Farid was okay, if a bit rushed. After all, they are only given by the author two weeks to get to know each other and “fall in love.” I wasn’t all the way convinced that what they felt for each other was more than lust. Moreover, Farid’s issues felt tacked on, as though an attempt to give Farid the Middle Eastern Ken Doll some layers. Even poor baby daddy’s murder and the subsequent questioning of Farid seemed to have just been added on as a bridge to the next story in the series.

All and all, this was just an okay read. Samira is likable, but Farid tends to be a gloomypuss and not very fun to read about at all. Still, it was cool to read about brown folks getting some love in mainstream romantic fiction and I’ll definitely be on the look-out for more.