Agnes And The Hitman — Crusie and Mayer (fiction)

Agnes And The Hitman
a romantic fiction book by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer
Authors’ site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 8/10

Agnes And the Hitman took a long time to review since I thoroughly enjoyed it. Immediately upon finishing it, I mentioned it as a “you should buy this” book to a specific friend. (This is NOT a general endorsement, the friend has really enjoyed similar books previously.) Yet, I don’t see a lot of objective difference between this book and the previous Crusie+Mayer collaboration that I panned (before this blog.)

In the previous book, Don’t Look Down, (they’re not a series at all) we had a film director who was dealing with a mystery and violence on the job while trying to help her sister and niece. I didn’t like it. In Agnes, we have a woman who cooks a lot and has bought her dream home from childhood. In both books the hero is a guy who knows his way around violence, but is a good guy, rock solid, hero-with-issues kind of man. In both books, the hero falls for the heroine for no Earthly reason (Agnes was a little better in that regard; there was some hand waving toward that explanation, though it didn’t jive for me.)

One of the few things that bothered me about Agnes was that she didn’t appear to have much of a career. She writes a newspaper column. I don’t know much about syndication, but it doesn’t seem likely columns pay more than comic strips and Scott Adams who draws Dilbert worked his day job for years after getting major syndication. So it would not likely pay well enough to sustain a mortgage of $3000/month, even split with someone else (which had been the plan). Agnes also writes cookbooks. Even bestselling cookbooks are still non-fiction and sales of 10,000 copies is a large run. There just doesn’t seem to be a way for Agnes to afford even half of what she was expecting to pay on the house plus her handyman plus the repairs for the upcoming wedding that was the central focus of the story.

Agnes herself was quite interesting. She has real anger issues. Not like she shouts at people, like she kills a man in the first chapter and is worried that she’ll be in bigger trouble because she’s walloped men with frying pans before and been arrested for it. It makes Agnes’s interest in the hero much more explanatory, he’s actually strong enough to calm her down and deal with it. All the other men in Agnes’s life quail in the face of her anger.

I did not like the setting for the book. It’s in that part of the South where women are universally evil bitches sent by the devil to plague man- and womankind. If someone lies to you and cheats you and is a general scumwad, you tell everyone you know so no one ever talks to them again. You post about it on your blog. You call your lawyer. You don’t smile pretty and be a doormat. Being nice to people who are devoutly evil is wrong, but Southern women make a career out of it. It disgusts me. It appalls me.

I really liked the hero in this book. I liked how he stepped in and helped her in practical ways. I liked how Agnes feeds people and they become her family. I liked how family-like it really was. I even liked the kid they adopted. The flamingos were hilarious. There was a lot of humor in the book without the humor interfering with the story. None of us would like to star in a comedy, but all of us have humorous things which happen around us. This was that kind of funny.

I enjoyed the story, but the plot was ridiculously complicated for the book and the level of writing. The mystery plot and hidden characters and bizarre soap opera plot twists were authorial masturbation at its finest. One of the things I complained about in the previous collaboration between these authors is that they don’t appear to match up in terms of audience level. Romance readers tend to be lowest-common denominator— to unfairly stereotype: (but the genre sells with the kind of books that indicate it) romance readers want small words and easy answers to easily resolved (or imaginary) conflict. Suspense (+mystery or +adventure) books have more of the underlying motivations and the details. I have read books where the mystery was good and the “hook-up” was good, but those are not very common. Usually a book goes to one side or the other. This book had the plot of a suspense novel and the writing and attention to detail of a romance. So there is definitely a disconnect and the end of the book was extremely confusing and had several “Wait. What?” moments.

I think the writing could have been better. I liked the story and the characters better than I feel like the book deserved, but it was a book I really enjoyed reading. I might read it again before it goes back to the library. But if I had paid $17 for it, I would be mad.

Queen of Dragons — Shana Abe (fantasy / romance?)

Queen of Dragons
a book by Shana Abe
Author’s Site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4/10

Perhaps I have strange expectations, but I tend to think books in series should get better. With more familiarity to the world the author has set up, the reader is free to concentrate on the increased attention to characterization and plot. Frequently books in a series actually decline in readability. That was the case with Abe’s “Drakon” books.

I read The Smoke Thief and The Dream Thief and thought they were tolerable if you like those Victorian-set rape-romances where because women have no rights, the man insists and marries her in some pretty ceremony then he doesn’t need her consent anymore. The dragon and shapechanging aspects of this particular world were interesting and they seemed to give the women some inherent power they would otherwise lack. But power in and of itself seemed to cause their confinement because the strongest female Drakon would be mated to the strongest male Drakon. I have zero understanding of this kind of civilization. I have zero understanding as to why women would endure it. But I find it really repulsive that some woman would write about this as a form of erotica.

With that background, it doesn’t shock anyone that I did not particularly enjoy Queen of Dragons. In this book, a female who is the de facto head of the Slavic Drakon (though women can’t lead there either) decides to leave for some random reason and goes to the English Drakon, who proceed to strip her of her rights and powers and demand she mate with their leader who is merely a figurehead while the council does all the real decision-making. She keeps insisting that she’s a king just like he is. She keeps insisting that she’s better than a mere woman. But she lets herself be captured so the man can save her.

There is some unexplained funny business with sleep “flying” that never gets explained. There’s some plot with spies and evil humans, but we don’t see it and it’s never explained. It really seems like “These are some things with plot. I’m going to mention them so you know this could be a real book, but instead I concentrated on the romance angle.” But the sex scenes are also vague and I did not see any sort of romance. The Drakon figure-head likes her because she keeps trying to get away and he gains some minimal respect for her abilities but mostly he knows his life will go easier if he does what the council wants him to do. That didn’t seem very romantic to me.

If I lived in a world with Victorian expectations, I would be lifting weights, taking martial arts, practicing with weaponry, and conditioning my body so I could fight. If I could shapeshift into a dragon, I doubt I would put up with being stripped of my rights. I found that I had no respect for this supposedly powerful dragon-woman because she did nothing with her power to save herself and she did nothing to help anyone else who was being abused by the situation.

Americans seem to be rather appalled by Muslim women who wear veils, I hear people saying that women shouldn’t let themselves be degraded by society’s expectations that women are inferior. But we are not so far from that, though apparently far enough that books celebrating the English oppression of women are best-selling hardcovers.

I will not be reading another of these. The writing was tolerable, the story is typical “romance” quality, the “erotic” parts were about as well done as other popular books of the genre. The shapeshifting parts were okay. There is obviously a lot of research done into an historical era. The book isn’t bad per se, I just find its celebration of the oppression of women to be anathema.