Switched – Amanda Hocking

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Amanda Hocking has gotten a lot of ink for her non-ink success writing paranormal romance novels for e-readers and self-publishing and marketing them online. She’s also become a millionaire in the process and landed a hefty advance from a legacy publisher. So I read the first volume of her Trylle series in paperback. Switched tells the story of Wendy, a misfit who was nearly killed by her own mother at her sixth birthday party. She is a difficult, surly child and teen who gets kicked out of every school she attends and has grown up fatherless, with a mother confined to a mental asylum and a doting big brother and aunt who go to considerable lengths to protect her.

It’s a very lively story with plenty of violence, smoldering eyes, emotional conflicts, near-fatal misunderstandings and magical trappings. Wendy discovers that dear old homicidal mum isn’t really mum at all—something the woman has insisted since the infant was handed to her in the hospital. Wendy has been switched with a boy who disappears. She is a changeling, and something else—she is a troll.

Hocking says she researched what was selling in an effort to teach herself to write best sellers. She seems to have settled on a good strategy. Reliable YA readers tell me that Switched is a typical paranormal romance with a predictable plot. I thought the characters were flat and clichéd. Those shortcomings seem to make the book no less satisfying to its legions of avid fans. So, huge kudos to Amanda Hocking for pulling off a literary and financial coup.

Switched is readable but there are strange lapses of spelling and grammar that should have been smoothed out by the editors at St. Martin’s—here’s a quote from an educated member of royalty who is portrayed as one of the elite: “She looked at Finn, but gestured to me. ‘This is her?’ ” (sic) That was not meant as some type of colorful idiom. It was just horrible, incorrect English. Came a few paragraphs after a glaring misspelling. Even the open to the book is poor English, obviously so. “A couple things made that day stand out more than any other. It was my sixth birthday, and my mother was wielding a knife. Not a tiny steak knife, but some kind of massive butcher knife glinting in the light like in a bad horror movie. She definitely wanted to kill me.” (sic)

Aaack.

I wasn’t a fan of Twilight—thought it was a terrible example of how to be a vapid female and fall in love with and pursue an abusive and deadly male. Read a couple of the books to try to figure out their appeal and decided they were just stupid. Despaired of the state of intelligence of millions of teenage girls. Nasty bitchy clique books fall into the same discard pile. Now I’ve read the source of much Internet buzz and a personal fortune. It wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be but Switched does nothing to relieve my cynicism.

The English language is so magnificent and there are such powerful storytellers out there. Pandering to the least common denominator may be the way to amass a pile of money. But that’s all it is. Maybe Hocking will develop more sophisticated storytelling now that she doesn’t have to crank out a new book every couple of weeks—and maybe St. Martin’s press will gift her with a more rigorous editor.

Switched (Trylle Trilogy)   Amanda Hocking | St. Martin’s Griffin   2012

Hot Stuff – Janet Evanovich and Leanne Banks

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So there I was hunting in the mystery stacks at the St. Agnes library for some P.D. James I may not have read when I saw it—a slightly shabby paperback with the name Janet Evanovich on the crinkled spine. Curiosity got the better of me. The woman is a catrillionaire. She sells books by the container load. What are all those people reading? I slid it under the bar scanner, slipped it between the James Baldwin and the China Miéville and smuggled it home.

Hot Stuff is a riot of a read. Evanovich and co-writer Leanne Banks have concocted some wacky formula that merges romance with murder mystery and produces a hybrid that strongly resembles I Love Lucy, with corpses. The characters are pretty cliché but a few of them are downright endearing—in this case, one of the adorables is a large, slobbering dog. The protagonist is a heroine, attractive, high–achiever and a little too trusting. She has one of those big, affectionate, nosy Boston Irish families that believes a 26-year-old unmarried woman is a problem in need of a solution.

Cate has her own solutions in mind. She bartends at the local pub where a talented drag queen keeps the till full. She also rents a cheap room in his fab condo in exchange for minding the place when he travels to perform at private parties. Her intention is to finish school and become a first-grade teacher. Bravo for her. She also bakes very sought–after cakes at the drop of a hat. And she collects oddballs and pushy men like flypaper.

Her friends in the condo are a real estate agent obsessed with a mystery tenant no one has ever seen and a transplant from the Ozarks who acts like Dolly Parton’s brainless cousin but is writing the sort of genius roman à clef of her own life that is destined for the best seller list. Maybe Evanovich could write a novel with her. A hairy little basket case named Patrick Pugg attaches himself to Cate, intending to be her knight in shining armor and shagmeister. A hunk at the end of the bar is an ex-cop who doesn’t give too many details about his current occupation. A designer-label society dress hanger is a very nasty bitch.

One day the drag queen heads to Aruba, a massive bull mastiff puppy arrives unannounced, Cate can’t shake the shaggy hobbit and the hunk moves in on her. It’s not entirely logical—there is a lot of missing jewelry, some gangsta types that spring up like mushrooms, copious baking, break-ins and breakdowns and a few breakthroughs in the romance department. There’s a certain Keystone Cops flavor to the tale but it does have the requisite stiff and, as you might guess, it’s no one you have to care about.

Crazy, chaotic and cake-filled. The story ends “happily ever after” for some of the characters. The bad guys get theirs—actually almost everybody gets a little by the last page. Pretty funny and as effortlessly entertaining as a decent sitcom. No wonder travelers about to commit themselves to the tortures of modern aviation scarf these books up by the armload. I’d read one on a dismal flight, too. It would probably last from New York to Miami but you’d need at least two for the red eye coast-to-coast.

Hot Stuff   Janet Evanovich and Leanne Banks | St. Martin’s Paperbacks   2007

Scarlet Nights — Jude Deveraux

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I decided to read a romance. Romances are astonishingly popular and sell like candy and, as an underemployed writer, I wondered if writing romance novels might be a more certain way of earning a living than writing corporate marketing brochures or not-for-profit newsletters. Some cursory research later I concluded that romance writers can rest easy—there won’t be any competition from this corner any time soon. Romances are thick with their own conventions and speak an acquired language that is as coded as a tech manual. They have so many specifically defined categories that just picking one to specialize in would be hard. Reading one is another story—much simpler.

Scarlet Nights by Jude Deveraux was a whole bagful of candy, the kind you start eating like potato chips and stop stuffing your face with when you reach the bottom of the bag. The cover is pink. The hero is ripped. The heroine is beautiful, vulnerable, somewhat virginal and a wicked cook. Oh, and Mike the hero can cook, too. He cooks for Sara, the heroine, and he cleans up. Also works out pre-dawn, is a master of every kind of martial art known to humankind and has a hidden compartment in the trunk of his leather-upholstered car loaded with sophisticated weapons. Which he can use—excellent marksman, high-level undercover cop. He is a vulnerable soul as well and wears very expensive clothes, never went to college, likes opera—although he thinks Andrea Bocelli is an opera singer, hmmmm–and makes a mean margarita. What’s not to love about this guy? Heroine does not love him for about 15 minutes. Then she tells herself why she could not possibly love him for about 250 pages.

It’s fun to read. All the women are either besties or hate each other since high school. Most of them are pregnant or want to be. Everyone is having sex like mad, except the hero and heroine, naturally, for a while. And murder is afoot in a small town in which everyone knows everybody else’s business but more or less likes them anyway. I liked the book. The women are spunky and stick up for themselves, despite all being hellbent on procreation. The men are somewhat flummoxed by the feisty women but bravely take charge at every opportunity and do sweet, secret things to keep the lovely ladies safe. There are enough brand names and luxury items to remind you of how life used to be when people actually had money, bought things and occasionally aspired to high thread-count sheets and meals in expensive restaurants.

Sara gets a huge rock, a massive fortune and a major stud. Mike gets a pretty girl, an historic farm and a perfect life. Some very buff men run around bare-legged and bare-chested in kilts which everyone finds incredibly sexy. Hook-ups happen in baths, showers, on tabletops, beds, hand-loomed carpets and the backs of leather-upholstered cars. It’s the magical dream of the fifties come to life in the wrecked 21^st century. He’s got your back, everything you ever wanted, an insatiable (but tender) appetite for sex and a jones for you that will never die. She’s got a pure heart, a stubborn streak, non-stop homemaking talents, an art history degree and a fabulous figure.

The story begins at Once upon a time (because who lives like this any more? Who ever did?) and concludes with …and they lived happily ever after (because that’s exactly what you were rooting for, that gauzy life so exactly the opposite of your harried, micro-waved, five-pounds-perpetually-overweight existence). In between there are threats, villains, mysteries, evil plots, long-buried secrets, shocking discoveries and homemade cookies with bits of lavender in them. Cookies with lavender. Beats ordinary chocolate chip with walnut hands-down. There is nothing at all believable in this book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Scarlet Nights: An Edilean Novel   Jude Deveraux |  Atria Books   2010

A Discovery of Witches — Deborah Harkness

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A Discovery of Witches was sitting in a display stand on the library desk when I dropped off some books so I snagged it. I love historical tales about witches and Deborah Harkness is a professor of history so I settled in for a good long read. I came close to giving up about a quarter of the way in because the witchcraft was pretty thin, the heartthrobs were pretty thick and the male lead turned out almost immediately to be a vampire. Twilight for grown-ups. No thanks. Muttering through the original had been bad enough.

But I persisted because I have to read one book a day and I’d already had this running start. And it got better—but only a little. There is plenty of history sprinkled throughout the text and any one of the threads would be fascinating to unravel but what dominates in this book is the love story. I am so not a fan of interspecies vampire love stories. Puh-leez, what is the romance about a classic abusive boyfriend set-up in which the besotted undead wouldn’t dream of harming his lady love—except for this teeny little problem he has with his appetites and his teeth?

OK, maybe not fair. Romance aficionados will find this a rich romp through a lot of material that never strays too far from the love story and the travails of the passionate but chaste couple and the somewhat heavy-handed argument for mixed species marriage. The heroine, Diana Bishop, is a scholar spending the summer in Oxford doing historical research at the Bodleian Library. She is also an uncommonly powerful witch who, due to the trauma of her parents’ untimely deaths when she was seven, refuses to use or even acknowledge her powers. When she stumbles across an ancient alchemical text that seems to be alive with mysterious spells, she triggers a witch hunt with herself at the center of it.

Diana runs a lot along the paths at Oxford and she goes rowing in the river solo at odd hours in foggy, deserted landscapes. Very tough cookie in the first half of the novel. Encounters sequential near-death experiences throughout most of the second half when she and the handsome, wealthy, accomplished, urbane, oenophile, ice-cold vampire, who stalks and then seduces her, take on the fearsome and murderous bigots of the magical world.

Matthew Clairmont, charming and cultivated uber-carnivore, has been a kind of very bright Forest Gump throughout most of Western European history and owns the tchotchkes from famous figures to prove it. His taste is exquisite and his fortune formidable. He is a distinguished Oxford fellow and a medical researcher of some renown who attends a weekly yoga class at his country estate that has all the groovy vibes of California, although the yogis are daemons and vampires.

All the creatures—there seem to be few actual humans in this story—have hypersensitive olfactory capabilities and spend a fair amount of time sniffing, describing various scents and explaining how that relays valuable information to them about enemies, threats and love interests. Many of the non-human cast want to get their hands on the mystery book, which has vanished as inexplicably as it appeared.

I read the whole novel. It wasn’t bad. I would rather have been reading a thriller with a good historical subplot that was less a hodge-podge of vampire-witchy heavy breathing salted with historical factoids. But, if you like romances that exist for their own sake and enjoy an encyclopedic knowledge of history as a bonus, go for it. If you’re a witch, you’d probably prefer Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader—funny, wacky, creepy, full of contemporary Salem witches and not a vampire in sight.

A Discovery of Witches: A Novel   Deborah Harkness | Viking 2011