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

that doesn’t look like Heather.

and yeah, what’s with the shoes?

*clutches original book with well-loved, tattered cover*

Very nice cover, but yeah...the shoes...and the bare legs…

Yeah, that seems more like the cover of a book about the forbidden love of a RenFaire actress and a shoe salesman at Nordstrom’s.  She totally looks like she’s sitting in the middle of the footwear department thinking, “Yes, the color is right, but do they make my ankles look fat?  And wherever am I going to get a handbag to match?”

My verification word is foot57.  That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

What is The Scene of Much Infamy?  I haven’t read the book, and there’s no review on the site to clue me in.  (hint, hint) :)

“Scene of Much Infamy”??

Do tell!!!

For real, I actually read this book back in 2000 or so and I shocked myself by how much I adored this book, even with the rape scenes. Perhaps a review to coincide with the reissue is in order, provided that I can find that danged book somewhere in my house.

Ah yes, the book that along with The Wolf and the Dove started it all.  I remember reading it when it was first released.  I was in high school and I wanted an ice blue wedding dress like Heather’s.

Those shoes do make me want to say “WTF?” but I’ll leave the screaming about fashion anachronisms to others.

I showed the cover picture to my close friend, who does not read romance, and asked her when does she thinks this book is set on. Her answer? Current times.

But this is good news nonetheless. I could never find the book anywhere here.

She looks cold.  If they’re gonna put her in modern clothes couldn’t they have done the chick a favor and made it Uggs?

I think I’m gonna have to pick up a copy.  If only to keep up everytime it’s referenced around here.

Twice, right at the start of the novel; the rest of the book is all about how they build the relationship after that, with heavy emphasis on how Heather’s inner innocence remains unaffected by her physical violation.  (She doesn’t have to “stay pure” in order to stay pure, morally, which is a big shift.)

The trajectory runs from those initial rape scenes up to a set of final scenes focused on her pleasure.

And I just went and read the review Sarah posted and so:  OMG *almost* 18?!?!?!  So not only does he rape her, he rapes a minor?  (Which yes, 1799, not such a distinction.  But still.  I’m now.)

Well, the whole outfit is pretty anachronistic - crushed velvet? Please! Sheer stockings or bare legs?

But when has a little anachronism bothered whoever thinks up the covers? As far as I can tell, blue eyeshadow has been with us since the dawn of time.

Tell us what you’re gonna do tonight mama
There must be someplace you can go
In the middle of the tall drinks and the drama
There must be someone you know

God knows you’re looking good enough
But you’re so smooth and the world’s so rough
You might have something to loose
Oh, no, pretty mama what you gonna
do in those shoes

Got those pretty little straps around your ankles
Got those shiny little chains around your heart
You got to have your independence
But you don’t know just where to start

Desperation in the singles bars
All those jerkoffs in their fancy cars
You can’t believe your reviews

Oh, no, you can’t do that
Once you started wearing those shoes

The Eagles - Those Shoes

The 70’s were a different time and this was revolutionary.

This is one of the first romances I read...the first [Rosemary Rogers ‘Sweet Savage Love’] we read as a group at the back of the bus.  But this new cover is so wrong!  I don’t like this one or any of the new covers they did for the Woodiwiss books.

Will still reread them and start purchasing them in eBook from Fictionwise though :-)

Huh. I’ll admit the clothes aren’t appropriate (particularly considering that clothes do in fact play a part in the book itself) but that doesn’t really bug me. What does is that model doesn’t strike me as ‘Heather’. For one, she seems to lack breasts.

I think it’s a little funny. Such a relatively classy and simply cover - then someone gets around to reading what is inside…

It makes me laugh. I got a copy for my birthday from my mother (when I turned 10, no less) and it was a hardcover with a completely silly cover. If I recall correctly it was the hero and heroine in some semi-amorous embrace on the bow(?) of a ship with waves rushing and roaring up to drag them down into the cold, unfeeling ocean that cares not for historical romances. (I would check, but I’m fairly sure I threw out the cover years ago.)

The hero rapes the heroine. I believe multiple times - he thinks she’s a dockside prostitute and rapes her, and then asks why she didn’t barter a higher price for her virginity.

:O

The hero rapes the heroine. I believe multiple times - he thinks she’s a dockside prostitute and rapes her, and then asks why she didn’t barter a higher price for her virginity.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.  Thanks for the tip, SB Sarah.  I will stay far, far, far away from this one.

>>The hero rapes the heroine. I believe multiple times - he thinks she’s a dockside prostitute and rapes her, and then asks why she didn’t barter a higher price for her virginity.<<

Here's a description of the movie The Wizard of Oz which ran in a California newspaper:

“Stranger comes to town and kills the first person she meets.  Teams up with three misfits and kills again.”

Accurate, but it hardly does the movie justice.[g]

I take it the heroine wears an orange dress of some importance. True?

The modest bosom is a pleasant contrast to the heaving, swollen mammaries on most covers, especially ones from the ‘80s. Or perhaps the cover is inaccurate in this, as the heroine’s specialty is her big in-your-face set?

Obviously I haven’t read the book.

Ya know, I didn’t want to say anything when Woodiwiss died, cause that would have been tacky, but I read one of her books back in the seventies. I think it was called “Shania” or something like that, the cover depicted a groping couple coming out of a big flower, and it scarred me for the next thirty years. 500 pages, 500 pages!! of the most irritating nonsense imaginable. The first 2 or 300 were the heroine saying, “No, No I hate you, I hate you”, then a hundred pages of her saying, “I love you but I can’t love you, it would be so wrong” or some such bullshit like that. By the time I got to the end I didn’t care what happened to either of them. I bagged all romance until the last couple of years.

And this one depicts rape? No thank you. If I had read that back in the seventies my head would have exploded.

Sorry, it’s kind of hard for me to appreciate her contribution. Give me a romance where everybody’s willing and of age even if they are thiry year old virgins with amnesia being stalked by a sheik.

Hey, I was alive in the 70’s and this was a major wallbanger for me.

Hey, I think I have those shoes.

Whether or not KW’s work is/was to your taste, or whether or not you believe that work holds up today, she sure as hell kicked the genre up to another level.

For that, KW, kudos and thanks.

*ahem*
opening can of worms here (which i can’t believe, feminist that i like to call myself)
but - when does rape become rape?

the hero (was his name Brandon?) didn’t simply leap upon an unsuspecting female and ‘deflower’ (heh) her for the sake of a power trip

my admittedly hazy memory recalls something about how the heroine (what does it say about me that I remember his name but not hers?) had just gone through a traumatic attack of a different sort and was in kind of a walking trance state - hence her willingness to go along with a stranger (hero’s underling) onto a strange ship and into a strage cabin containing another stranger (the alpha hero). she wakes up, as it were, midway through the act.

in the hero’s eyes, she was a willing participant.  the part where he could have behaved better was after realizing that she is a virgin. instead of letting her go, he continues - i can’t remember if it was ‘you’re so hot i can’t stop myself’ or ‘oh well, the worst is already done, may as well go on’.

this may be splitting hairs.  but having read other books where the ‘hero’ purposefully sets out to rape the heroine, it doesn’t seem fair to tar Brandon with the same brush.

(my personal favorite hero to despise is the guy from ‘Whitney My Love’)

~Give me a romance where everybody’s willing and of age even if they are thiry year old virgins with amnesia being stalked by a sheik.~

LOL Thanks desertwillow, the mental image will keep me giggling for a while yet. ;-)

The first rule of Secret Baby is, you do not talk about Secret Baby.

since when are the smileys alive?

i didn’t add an emoticon to my earlier post, but there it is, winking at me, daring me to do something about it…

You know, it’s not really the shoes that bother me, it’s the lack of stockings.  The shoes aren’t horribly historically inaccurate (the heel is too high for 1799, but otherwise they’re about the right shape for a fashionable lady’s slipper) but there is just no way in hell she would be traipsing around without stockings on.

I hate, hate, hate, contemporary covers on historical books.

I think KW was the very first author that I hovered and waited for new releases...dating myself much?  My tastes have changed, because I think now I would have a difficult time wading through one.

Am I the only one annoyed by the high heels in the snow thing?  As someone who lives in a place where winter lasts longer than one snowstorm, try almost 6 months, I can assure you heels in snow that deep is just flat-out stupid.  I got dressed up in February to go to a show and wore heeled boots.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  I stopped counting how many times I almost took a header.  The hero would have to wade out and scoop her up in his arms, and carry her where she needed to go, because she certainly wouldn’t be able to walk there herself.

Nitpicky point; she’s not a minor in England today, where the legal age of consent is sixteen.  I’m kind of tired of US readers insisting that English heroines should be over eighteen before they get busy (especially in historicals, for Pete’s sake!) because that’s the law in their particular American state and time.  Personally, I do like my romance heroines to be older, but I wouldn’t find a seventeen year old having sex to be utterly scandalous - simply because here, it’s not.

Tam, sixteen isn’t actually an unusually low age of consent in the U.S., either.  It varies by state.

I think the cover is supposed to appeal to fans of Danielle Steele and Barbara Taylor Bradford. ~.o

But I’ve never read a Woodiwess and have no interest in doing so.

LOL! Ah the “good old days”. Heh. I grew up reading that kind of shit and thinking it meant ‘real’ romance. [I worked in a used bookstore as a teen. Got free pick of the overstock! Heaven.] Silly me.  Harlequin Presents was full of just this kind of stuff.

18 year olds regularly marrying 40 year olds.  Obsessive behavior. Stalking. Domination/humiliation. Domestic abuse. Rape. Suicide attempts. All with a HEA mashed on the end. *shudder* Twu Wuvv defeats evil an’ all, yanno. *gags* (omigod… Violet Winspear! I read all her stuff! I’m scarred for life! LOL!)

Standard late 60’s early 70’s fare really. But man… heels in the snow? Stupid. *headshake*