Beauty Queen - Julia London

Beauty Queen is the abortive offspring of an ill-considered union between chick lit and the traditional romance novel. The basic premise of the story involves a recently divorced beauty queen deciding to go back to work to find meaning for her life, meeting a man, and living happily ever after. Retrograde sensibilities aside, the main issue is that the conventions of romance novels and the conventions of chick lit just don't mix, resulting in an irritatingly described series of events that I hesitate to dignify with the term story.

Warning: Arcane and potentially scary discussion of the difference between romance novels and chick lit below the fold.

At its core, chick lit's emotional heft relies on a basic identification between the reader and protagonist. The heroine of chick lit is an ordinary woman, belly fat and insecurities included, who achieves some manner of (usually provisional) success through her native wit and often a generous helping of luck. Chick lit validates emotional weight it assumes women attach to the everyday trials of life by making them the main subject of the plot. Chick lit takes the archetypical character of the common trickster, makes her female, and allows her to marry the prince.

By contrast, romance novels feature an idealized heroine who captures her prince because she deserves him. The romance novel heroine's struggles are of a more traditionally epic scale--against, for example, a scheming villain, or the limiting strictures of society. Though there is an element of identification between the reader and the heroine, the heroine is more a projection of the reader's best self, rather than a realistic portrait. Romance novels are, at their core, about escaping from the mundane, rather than elevating the mundane.

Though Beauty Queen sounds like chick lit, with its slangy language and focus on the main character's everyday insecurities, the fact that the heroine is rich enough not to need to work, beautiful enough to stop men dead in their tracks, connected enough to throw parties attended by famous country singers, and lucky enough to be able to subsist almost entirely on ice cream without gainng a pound reveals that it is, in fact, a romance novel. However, rather than coming across as a born princess, the heroine seems instead like a whiny, immature trust fund baby, complaining that all of her wealth is just such a burden. If the author wanted readers to identify with the heroine, she should have made her less socially remote, if she wanted reader to admire her heroine, she should have made her intelligent enough to recognize her natural advantages.

Moral of the story: If it's hanging out with the romance novels, but dressed up like chick lit, avoid it at all costs.

Friends and loved ones sometimes think that I have some perverse resistance to book recommendations. It is not that I don't start them, just that my promiscuous reading habits mean that I rarely finish them (just as I rarely finish any book). But this morning, per Heidi Bond's recommendation, I finished Lois Bujold's The Curse of Chalion. I agree with Raffi; she has good taste in books.

Old men, scars, curses, young love, galley slaves, marriages, black magic, demon-tumors... what more could one want?

Apparently, this person was not at all pleased:

It really chaps my hide that a woman writing in the 21st century, who, after all, is supposedly inventing a fantasy and could theoretically think up a world in which women are portrayed as something other than willowy young receptacles and subordinate producers of male heirs, wins awards for merely regurgitating the same old superannuated patriarchal crapulence that has plagued popular fiction since Clarissa and beyond

Russia and China Bullying Central Asia, U.S. Says

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: "It looks to me like two very large counteries were trying to bully some smaller countries," speaking of Russia and China's geopolitical moves at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit this month with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.