TresSugar

Amish Romance Novels Find Niche on Bestseller Lists

TresSugar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:00:00 -0700

Vampires are no longer the only ones who can't have sex in romance novels, now the Amish can - or can't - too. Dubbed "bonnet books," Amish romances are a new subgenre in the ever-multiplying species of romance novels.

The G-rated love stories always contain the most essential ingredient of any romantic page-turner - forbidden love. Usually between a young Amish woman and an outsider, the romances are set against Pennsylvania's idyllic countryside. Mix in the allure of an insulated community, a la Big Love, and you've got a bestseller. Barnes & Noble book buyer Jane Love said Amish novels account for 15 of its top 100 religious fiction titles. She said, "It's almost like you put a person with a bonnet or an Amish field in the background and it automatically starts to sell well."

So who's reading these "bonnet books"? To find out, read more.

Fiction is viewed as "distracting and deceitful" by the church, yet the Amish are reading. Though they say the books dramatize life on the farm, complaining that buggy accidents, young romances with outsiders, and Rumspringa (the period when Amish teenagers experiment with the outside world) sound more like soap operas than reality. One woman told an author, "All the women in our church district are reading your books under the covers, literally."

But outsiders like us are still the main audience - would you read one?

Source: Flickr User Kat . . .

Uncovered: Good Books Can Have Bad Covers

TresSugar — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0700

And, bad books can have bad covers, as Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, the authors of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart B*tches' Guide to Romance Novels know too well. After years of rating romance novels on their blog Smart B*tches, Trashy Books, they understand all the embossing in the world can't make up for a bad romance.

Today's the last installment of our five-part series with Candy and Sarah. We asked them if there is any correlation between cover cheesiness and book quality, and got book recommendations for the Summer.

I was looking through books you rated Fs, and found the Gold Plated Garbage Truck. Looking at the cover, what were you expecting?

Sarah: One thing I've learned about romances is that the authors are not ever in control of their covers. Often they get no say and the cover is miles away from the content - bringing new meaning to, "No, really, we mean it - don't ever judge a book by its cover." Especially a romance novel.

One of the most evocative and powerful romances is Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale, and the original cover has Fabio standing in a windstorm, holding out a handful of wildflowers with a truly bizarre expression on his face. Another book I enjoyed featured the biggest mullet I've ever seen coupled with a woman whose hair was so impossibly curly, I thought electroshock therapy was part of the plot.

With Gold Plated Garbage Truck, I figured there might be a crazy cover hiding a funny or silly plot, but, unfortunately, I was wrong.

Candy: You know, I've learned not to rely on romance covers to provide any kind of rubric of quality. At all. You know how you can surf the web, reading content, and somebody comments on something they see on the page you're on, and you're all "Whut?" and then you realize they're talking about the sidebar ads, which you have completely tuned out? Yeah. It's that way for me. I buy romance novels despite their covers, and I generally tune out the specifics of the covers. That said, the Gold-Plated Garbage Truck was a bit harder to ignore, because the self-identification and self-typing are too aggressive (another example would be Indian romances of a certain sort - usually ones involving savage brown men finding ever-loving bliss and fulfillment in some white chick's magic hoo-hoo). Seeing that book, I would've expected a book about a buncha losers, and going by Sarah's review, that's pretty much what it was.

For someone who wants to read a romance novel but is overwhelmed by the untamable options, where should she begin? To see their suggestions, read more.

If you like historical fiction, Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels is incredible and has been held responsible for allowing even the most determined romance snob to rethink her position.

If you like funny contemporary books with incredible dialogue, Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me features a brave and authentic heroine and total hilarity.

If you like stories with paranormal elements, mythology and fierce intelligent women, look to the Norse mythology at work in Kresley Cole's Immortals After Dark series, especially No Rest For the Wicked. Or, Kelley Armstrong's Bitten, which is about a lone female werewolf living in hiding in Toronto.

Talking Trash: Smart B*tches Tell Us How to Buy Romances

TresSugar — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0700

What's up today? Candy and Sarah tell use how they assign grades (they're harsh) to novels on Smart B*tches, Trashy Books and how to navigate book shelves packed with romance novels.

You grade books on Smart B*tches, Trashy Books, A-F; what makes an A? What loses points?

Sarah: A grade-A book for me is one that has a strong plot that takes familiar concepts and reinvents them into something new and different, with memorable and realistic characters, dialogue that is authentic and human, and a story that stays with you long after you've finished. I also find that books that reach A level with me are impossible not to read, so if I pick up the book to look at a page I end up rereading the whole thing.

Candy: An A book generally means that a) I loved it, and b) it's at the very least competently written. There's a certain floor to the craft for an A book. That's not to say I don't love schlock, because I do, but a schlocky book probably won't get an A, no matter how much I love it.

Generally speaking, books lose points if they don't engage me - if I'm able to step back from my immersion in the fictional world and I'm taking a hard look at the gears and bits that drive the machine, so to speak. When my internal editor has slowed my reading pace to a crawl, that's usually the kiss of death. Good books shut my internal editor up, and that's hard to do, honestly - hell, it's hard to get me to shut up, period, much less the pedant who lives in my head and gripes about how people just don't use the subjunctive properly nowadays.

Beyond Throbbing Bosoms was originally titled The Top Ten Signs You’re Reading a Very Bad Romance Novel. Is there a way to know to recognize a bad romance before wasting $6.99?

To see their answers, read more.

Sarah: If a book, any book, doesn't grab you after the first 30 pages or so, it's probably not to your tastes. That rule has served me well in any genre.

But the original title of the book wasn't Signs You're Reading a Bad Romance Novel, though that was part of the book that didn't make it into the final edition. My favorite was the poor copyediting that made a horse change color three times in two pages. Magic chameleon horse in historical England? Not good.

Candy: I call it the 10-page test. It's kind of analogous to bad visitors. The really bad ones generally announce themselves early on and proceed to eat all the hors d'oeuvres you've set out, then belch in your face. Many others, however, survive the 10-page test and prove to be awful visitors when it's too late to get them out of your house. So flip through the first pages, see if there are egregious plot or grammar flaws, figure out if the characters and storyline are your cuppa. It won't catch the more sneakily awful romance novels, but you should be able to root out most of the worst ones.

Check out previous posts from Candy and Sarah, and stay tuned tomorrow for recommendations for romance-novel virgins.

What Are the Best/Worst Euphemisms in Romance Novels?

TresSugar — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:00:00 -0700

The other day a friend who works in book publishing put this up as his Facebook status: "'Blistering sexuality' - This is a quote on the back cover of a book I'm working on, and one of the many reasons I want to work in children's books." Ha! Yes, "blistering" and "sexuality" side by side would send me running to Dora's G-rated explorations. But his status update sums up probably the best part of romance novels - how well-endowed they are with wordplay.

Romance novels are mainly written for women. So it's only a given that words as unbecoming as vagina would be hidden under mounds euphemisms. And who better to know the best and worst of them than the authors of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. To see what they had to say, read more.

Romance novels are known to throb with euphemisms. What are some of the best/worst?

Candy: My favorites are the ones that make body parts sound like kitchen disasters (quivering mounds, glistening orbs) or that make me want to protect my vagina with steel plating (throbbing spear of flesh, glistening sword).

Sarah: Fortunately, romances have moved past some of the more flowery and technicolor bizarre euphemisms - which were used at a time of political change and sexual ambivalence for women - and on one hand, I like the language currently employed. On the other, the humor value is epic. My favorite: "He burst like a ripe melon within her." I've never looked at honeydew the same way since.

Neither will we! Stay tuned tomorrow for more from Sarah and Candy.

Smart B*tches, Trashy Books Defend the Romance Novel

TresSugar — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:00:00 -0700

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have helped romance readers discern the good smut from the bad for years with their blog Smart B*tches, Trashy Books. And now with their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, they offer a guide through the heady world of the $5.99 novel and defend it with wit and intelligence. First they told us who really reads these things, and today we ask why romance novels deserve respect and what they tell us about society, and Candy and Sarah make the genre sound like the college course we all missed out on!

What do romance novels tell us about women, relationships, and society? Why do they deserve more respect?

Sarah: Romances are a billion dollar industry of women writers working to produce narrative fiction for an audience largely comprised of women. No, nothing feminist or subversive about that at all. The industry and the genre are long overdue for critical attention, especially because the whole of the genre's history parallel major shifts in the social and political status of women in the US. Romance novels represent an anthropological history of women through fictional narrative, exploring professional status, sexual agency, self-empowerment, self-actualization, and achievement of autonomy. I think that's the part that surprises new readers the most - the heroine always wins. To see Candy's answer, read more.

Candy: I think more than any other genre, romance novels are about finding emotional stability at the family level and nurturing hope. It's part of why they're so appealing, and why they've been selling like gangbusters in this economic downturn. But I really hesitate to make any kind of generalization about the overall message of romance, because the authors are every bit as diverse as the readers, and consequently, the books run the cultural gamut, from espousing fundamental Christianity to displaying a deep suspicion of religion, from endorsing authority to urging the readers to question it, from displaying a deep-seated (and oftentimes largely unconscious) homophobia to centering around gay love stories.

Romance novels deserve more respect because they're the whipping boys for no goddamn reason that I can see other than a societal fear of and disdain for squishy emotions. They're no better and no worse than any other genre out there, but there's this incredibly strong stigma attached. In many ways, I think my desire to see romance stop being the Rodney Dangerfield of publishing has more to do with my desire for the deeply-buried societal disdain for femininity to go away and stop wrecking our sh*t already. Romance authors are still, by and large, seen as a "damn mob of scribbling women," though they're a much bigger mob now than poor Hawthorne could've dreamt of in his philosophy.

I don't necessarily agree with Sarah - that romances as a billion-dollar industry written by and for women are feminist and subversive - because a lot of what's out there is conservative. I hesitate to say that a lot of them reinforce or are supportive of the dominant paradigm and of patriarchy, because honestly, that's the cultural medium we inhabit, and it's difficult, if not outright impossible, to step out of it completely while we're still in it. Patriarchy stll informs the fabric of our experiences, and that includes the fiction we read and write.
Ultimately, market forces are shaped by society at large, which means that the romance market as a whole tends only to be as feminist or subversive as the society as a whole. That's not to say that there aren't many wonderfully subversive feminist romances, because there are. I'm just not convinced the genre as a whole is. Romance authors are still, by and large, seen as a "damn mob of scribbling women," though they're a much bigger mob now than poor Hawthorne could've dreamt of in his philosophy.

Smart B*tches, Trashy Books Unravel Romance Novels

TresSugar — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:00:00 -0700

So we asked these two smart readers about romance novels, and oh how they talked. So much, that we're breaking all their thoughtful answers into a five-part series. What's up first? Who reads these glossy books?

One out of five people read romance novels - who are these people?

Sarah: The truth is, behind the stereotypes, smart, savvy women read romance. It's a 60+-year-old industry of women operating independent businesses writing books consumed by an audience of women who spend $1.7 billion dollars a year. Two romance readers may have absolutely nothing in common except for the books they read, because romance readers are an incredibly diverse audience - no group of readers that supports a billion-dollar industry can be homogeneous. We're found across all ages, education levels, income levels, geographic locations and reading habits - and we all love romance novels.

Candy: The demographics for romance novel readers are all over the place, though there are strong trends. They overwhelmingly tend to be women, for example. They also tend to be voracious readers, period, and to be more highly-educated than the population at large. Other than that, it's hard to generalize.

You say, actually five out of five people read romance novels, what are some romances in disguise we've probably read? To see their answers, read more.

Sarah: Every fictional narrative contains a romance element. Where would Bond be without the sexual tension? What horror thriller in general doesn't contain the romantic suspense to support the plot? Romance is one of the oldest narrative traditions, so it's everywhere.

There are few readers more diverse in their tastes than the women and men who read my site, so I asked them. From the readers of Smart B*tches, here are romances you might not have recognized:

Lois McMaster Bujold's books, like the Miles Vorkosigan series, especially A Civil Campaign; Patricia Gaffney's Mad Dash; Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series; William Brinkley's The Last Ship; Jean Auel's Earth's Children series; many of Philippa Gregory's historical novels; Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series; and many of the novels you read in English class, including, and especially, Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice is one of the best romances ever written.

Candy: Sarah's right about romance being an element to a lot of fiction and storytelling, but the modern romance genre is its own beast with a long, tangled past. If you've read Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, you've read books that would qualify as romances if published today. A lot of the sturm und drang (storm and stress) of certain romance subgenres owe a debt to books like Wuthering Heights, for example.

Here's the thing: the plot set-up and conflict dictates the genre the book's most likely to be slapped with. Speculation involving science and technology? Sci-fi. Mystery or conundrum that needs to be solved? Mystery. Mystical other worlds involving magic? Fantasy., etc. And there's considerable bleed-through among the different genres: it's perfectly possible for a book to be both a science-fiction novel and a murder mystery. But what drives the emotional conflict? If it's romantic love, odds are high you're reading a romance novel. Sharon Shinn and Catherine Asaro have written plenty of novels in which the central driving emotional conflict was a romantic entanglement, even though the plot setting was science fiction.

Stay tuned tomorrow to read about what romance novels tell us about women, relationships, society.

Would You Write Yourself Into a Romance Novel?

DearSugar — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:30:52 -0800

Think of it as the literary equivalent of making a sex tape: A company called UStarNovels lets you customize your own erotic stories with the names of you and your partner, the setting, and details of your choice. I know some of you count romance novels among your guilty pleasures, and they can certainly be entertaining. Plus, if reading erotic fiction is something you like to do with your partner, why not have it be about you?

The way it works is, you choose the character names (it could even be a celebrity crush) and offer details like favorite food and music. You can even say how racy you want the love scenes to be. The result is a 160-page-plus novel written to your specs; it costs about $38 and arrives within a week, depending on shipping. I think this is a pretty funny idea and, depending on the writing, it could be really fun and definitely an attention-getting gift. What do you think?

Guess What This Romance Novel's Really Called?

GiggleSugar — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:30:33 -0800

Valentine's Day is right around the bend, and Harlequin romance novels and their ilk have played a large role in feeding us corny fantasies about how the most important moment in our lives is when He falls in love with us. So I decided to round up some of the corniest books I could find and ask you to guess what this romance novel is really called?

Question 1 of 11

Guess what this romance novel is really called?

Vote for Your Favorite Worst Opening Line in a Romance Novel

GiggleSugar — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0700

I've never been a romance novel reader, but I see plenty of ladies reading this stuff on my commute. (I'd love to see a dude whip out a Harlequin Romance now and then.) Is the writing really this bad? I can't tell if these are real first lines or parodies of first lines. Either way, choose your "favorite." It's gonna be hard. Click here for more stinkers.

Dear Poll: Do You Read Romance Novels?

DearSugar — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0700

We all have our preferred guilty pleasures. As you know, I love The Bachelor, and funny enough, many of my girlfriends profess a weakness for romance novels. Though I'm not a big reader of bodice rippers, I definitely understand how the stolen glances, melodramatic plot lines, and steamy love scenes could be entertaining, as either a guilty pleasure or just a pleasure. What about you? Are you into reading romance novels?

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