BEYOND HEAVING BOSOMS

Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. Aside from a few late-night group giggling sessions over the dirty parts of someone’s mom’s old collection of bodice-rippers when I was a teenager, I’ve never read anything shelved in the Romance section. Furthermore, I’ll admit I’ve tended to look down on the genre. But Wendell and Tan go a long way toward earning it my tolerance, if not my grudging respect. Even if you’re not a romance fan, their awesomely named website, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, is worth checking out for its mixture of humor (I recommend the Cover Snark category, as well as many of the book reviews with D and F grades, in particular the review of The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable Girl) and thoughtful writing on plagiarism (Wendell and Tan were the ones who broke the Cassie Edwards story, which you may have read about) and the joys and frustrations of being a reader (for instance, this piece). Similarly, their book is a hilarious celebration of romance-novel tropes (for instance, The Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin’ and the Magic Hoo Hoo) as well as a levelheaded defense of the genre and a critical examination of its development, trends, challenges, and shortcomings (including the themes of rape, racism, and homosexuality). Even if, as I was, you’re reading mostly for the humor, it’s their affection for the genre that places this several cuts above all the “Let’s make fun of X” (where X may be Lifetime movies, Babysitters Club books, ugly cakes, or one’s own childhood writings) phenomena spawned by the Internet. In other words, they snark because they love. As Wendell and Tan put it:

Romance novels, we thought, deserved the harsh eye simply because we loved them as much as we loved the literary canon at which we were encouraged to level the power of our sexy, sexy literary analysis abilities…And when a genre is as crapped upon and denigrated as much as romance is, the only people we think are qualified to criticize it are those who read it and love it. So we brought in the noise, the funk, the snark, and the “Oh, hell, no.”

I didn’t feel inspired to check out any romance novels after reading this, but I was consistently amused by the writers’ sharp wit, and at least I’ll stop rolling my eyes at readers of romance novels from now on.