(no subject)

My review for The Dollhouse Murders is up on Reviewing The Evidence. The title is misleading - it's actually a popularization of the textbook used for the U. of MD Criminalistics 101 class... wherein the students are set to solve "six little crimes."

There's also someone else's review of The Dante Club up, and frankly, it's a relief, because I could not get through that book!

Question for female writers & readers

I seem to be spending this morning in the world of Not Getting The Point. Part of this is CAP Alert's ever-entertaining ability to condemn movies for realism. (Ladder 49 is given a red light, in part for the "wanton violence" of showing "firefighting and rescue perils," "death by fire," burns, and "life/death decision." One assumes that in CAP Alert's world, movies about firefighters would only show them polishing the engine and walking the dalmation.)

The other, major, part of this is dealing with authorial expectations about a female readership. I've just read The Butler Did It (a pretty amusing historical romance) and am now starting a cozy mystery (which shall remain nameless because I'll be reviewing it.) In the former, every time a woman dressed up, I was informed exactly what colors, materials, and accessories she wore. In the latter, although I am only six pages in, I already know that a protagonist drives a BMW, wears rose petal lip gloss, has a mauve mohair throw, and a bunch of other personal details. It's my understanding that conventional wisdom says that women readers really dig that kind of detail.

I guess one of my X chromosomes is broken, because I don't give a shit.

To me, this is like flipping through Vanity Fair, trying to find the articles among the page after page of advertisements. Like a bloody pop-up ad in the text. It's one thing if these details add to the character ("She hated wearing the pale colors required of a debutante; they made her look sickly and insipid. She could hardly wait to get married so she could wear the bold blues and shocking reds she preferred.") Or if they add to the plot. ("You know, Kathy was wearing a jacket just like that the night she disappeared.") But throwing in gratuitious details just annoy me. I was irritated enough that the heroine had to put on makeup before "answering the doorbell before it drove her crazy." Knowing the shade of her lip gloss was just too... distracting.

My question is twofold - Authors, is it really conventional wisdom that women like this kind of minute detail? Readers, do you like it?

I want to know if I can legitimately complain that the opening of this book is waffling around with gratuitous nonsense, or if I have to preface it with "unlike most women readers, I don't like..."