Wulfric is ridiculous. Heroine is ridiculous. The style is passable at best.

I only kinda sorta managed to sit through it because the plot is very similar to one in GRRM’s “ASOIAF”. Except Martin isn’t crappy author.

Obviously you’ve never encountered Darsie Latimer in Redgauntlet. But the book is worth reading for Alan Fairford, the real hero to my mind, who is semi-autobiographical.

Though I was curious, I couldn’t force myself to buy this book. I hated the cover and the title. But if Bindle can write a feminist dissertation just by the blurb, hell I can certainly do mine solely by title.

Fiesty stops me dead in my tracks as a reader. I wish publishers would put a warning label on books with fiesty/fiery/sassy heroines. I’d also like labels for the innocent/pure heroines. Can’t stand them either.

For bringing the fiesty, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King goes to the very bottom of my 1000+ ebook TBR “stack”.

But there’s the thing: I can analyze a book I despise (did it for my dissertation!), because it’s not about personal taste, but about what I can say about the book’s _______ (construction, organization, historical context, images of gender/class/race, etc.). When I was a baby graduate student, one of my advisers said “It’s not about whether I like the book, but whether I can say anything interesting about it” and I was horrified! Shocked, I tell you! And I promised myself I’d never get to that point. But getting to that point was what learning how to be a literary critic was all about. And I actually ended up arguing in my dissertation that analyzing books we dislike is *important* to understanding the culture we’re trying to analyze. It’s just as important, in fact, as analyzing books we love. I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), which is so boring and horrible that its Wikipedia page is a completely inaccurate stub. But to me it was as important to analyze that book, precisely because it was the second-most best-selling book of 1809, as it was to analyze Jane Austen, who is absolutely a “better” writer.

As my husband just pointed out to me as I read this to him, you’ll notice that Laura and Eric and I never said in our posts whether we liked the book. That came up later in comments at our sites and yours. Because in reading the book in order to analyze it, liking it or not was not part of my thought process. In fact, I once read all of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, thoroughly enjoying it because I was reading it to analyze it and it was brilliantly rich ground, only to realize when I was done that I actually thoroughly *disliked* the book as entertainment. Talk about TSTL–Waverley was the worst!!

So, even though Allen’s book is by no means pure gold, I’m hoping that people are learning that even the worst books (and I will say that VSBK is certainly *not* the worst of anything) can yield interesting insights about the romance genre, its conventions and forms and readers.

All this is to say that I really love reading the reviews here and at SBTB. You do them so well, but it’s a completely different skill from literary criticism (which is not to say you guys don’t analyze–you do, but in totally different ways from what we do at TMT), and that fact boggles my mind every time I read a really good review, even (especially?) if the book is awful (or, more likely, just not brilliant).