Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Bitchery reader “Smelly Feet” writes:

I found it in my highschool library in the early 2000s and I think it was published in the early to mid nineties. I remember a lot about the storyline but no names, though I’m reasonably certain the word Red is in the title. It’s a modern day young adult novel about a young teenage girl who lives in a farmhouse but whose family aren’t farmers. She has many brothers and sisters and they all look rather alike so she gets annoyed that people keep asking which sibling she is.

She meets a slightly older teenage boy who’s moved to town to live with a relative and is working in the general store. He gives her a bag of cookies, saying it’s a special. She thinks he likes her older sister but he’s obviously desperately trying to get her attention, usually by borrowing without permission things he thinks would impress her.

The main plot is that she finds a very old paved trail out the back of her family’s property that might have been an old road and she decides to clear it. It goes very far and she eventually starts camping out when it gets too far to go back each night. She finds a field with a horse that once belonged to a friend of hers who moved away, and later while camping she’s confronted by a bear? Or a wolf? I think she doesn’t check in so the boy comes looking for her, getting himself horribly lost. And I forget why but for some reason she springs the horse from it’s field.
Eventually she finishes the trail and she agrees to date the boy if he stops being so crazy.

That’s a lot of detail- I’d be surprised if someone didn’t come up with this one. But how come this girl didn’t have sixteen bodrillion mosquito bites sleeping out on a partially cleared road by herself?

Bitchery reader Elizabeth writes:

I’m a literature major about to graduate.  In my third year of college I A) discovered your website, and B) discovered I loved Italian history.  I wanted to go to Italy after I got out of school, but with the economy gone to crap I don’t think I’ll be going for a while, so I was hoping the Bitchery could help me visit the country vicariously with some historical romance set in my favorite boot-shaped country--or to be more precise, a book that’s set in one of the many regions of Italy before unification. 

I only managed to find one historical set in Italy (it was in Florence, I don’t remember the title) but it was disappointing, and everything else on the shelf was set in England or Scotland with a couple of France thrown in.  Searching Amazon was daunting since I’m so new the the genre and don’t know how to pick the good stuff from the bad without the book right in front of me.  I’m hoping for something well written and well researched.  I don’t have a specific era in mind (just not modern) so any recommendations would be great!

Bitchery reader Marie asks for a book that she didn’t read more than a few pages of, because it wasn’t a book. It was gift wrap of the subterfuge variety:

When I was a kid, we got my mother one of those “motherhood rings,” with birthstones from every member of our family.  But since we have a long-standing tradition of wrapping presents in a fashion that makes them utterly unidentifiable (t-shirt in a light bulb box, necklace in a rolled-up sheed of newspaper, etc), we decided to get the trashiest romance novel we could find and cut a hole in the middle of it to hide the ring in.  (My mother: not a romance reader.)

Of course, being twelve or whatever I was, the romance novel got me curious.  So I read some, maybe all of it—minus the hole in the middle of some of the pages, of course—and that’s where this request comes from. 

You see, from what little I remember, the scenario involved a white woman among Native Americans.  It also had the most horribly cliched clinch cover we could get our hands on.  And though I have utterly forgotten the plot, I do recall some woman in the tribe pointing out to the heroine at one point that she “used no bloody rushes” lately, i.e. hadn’t had her period, i.e. was pregnant.  The phrase “bloody rushes” is all that stuck in my mind.

So on the basis of an extremely common scenario, an utterly forgettable cover (I seem to remember the dominant color being blue, but I could be wrong), and a two-word phrase—can anybody identify this?  It would have been published no later than the early ‘90s.... I figure the odds of anybody knowing which book it is drop from “unlikely” to “I have a better chance of being struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket.”

So many clinch covers to choose from, so little time. Anyone remember “bloody rushes” or something similar? This is a longshot so if anyone guesses this, I’ll be so impressed. 

Bitchery reader Donna writes in with enough details that someone will pull the title and author out of thin air within moments, I bet:

It is (more than likely) a Zebra book from 1988 to 1993.  Took place in the South on (I think) a cotton plantation.  Hero is bastard son of the rich plantation owner.  Rich plantation owner let him live in the slave area and be raised.  Once old enough, the Hero became the overseer of the plantation.  But rich plantation owner has another “legal” son who is a few years younger than the Hero.  Of course, he is the villian.

Okay, rich plantation owner dies, leaving legitimate son the owner.  Of course, both the bastard hero and the legitimate son hate each other (as it always goes in these stories).  Okay, legitimate son is about to marry and they are having a party at the main house - celebrating engagement.  I do remember the heroine was being given away by her older sister and older sister’s husband because parents were dead.

Bitchery reader Kathryn

I could use some Smart Bitch help trying to find a YA romance I read back when I was a teenager.  It was most likely published in the 1990’s or maybe late 1980’s.  The story involves cousins or a half-sisters (I can’t remember which) and for some reason one goes to live with the other’s family.  The one who is moving in is blonde and hawt and lets her boyfriend feel under her shirt, Sweet Valley-style.  The other cousin/sister is a shy brunette and fantasizes about some mysterious guy at her her school whom she secretly calls Johnny Blue or something like that.  Meanwhile, this sensitive football player named Greg secretly has a crush on Shy Girl, so blonde sister pretends to date him so he can get closer to Shy Girl. Why this is supposed to work, I have no idea. The story ends up with her going on a date with Greg, who turns out to be a dynamo kisser.  She also goes on a date with Johnny Blue, whom she ultimately rejects because he kisses like a cold fish.

I’m hoping the SB’s can help me with this one, because I’m drawing a complete blank!

Johnny Blue? BWAAHAHAHAH.