You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
Bitchery reader Ioana wrote to me about a book that is just too damn weird to be true. Which means it must exist:
I was hoping you and your army of smart and bitchy readers could help me identify a romance novel I read when I was ten or so (in 98 or 99) and kept digging through my friends’ mothers’ romance novel collections during sleepovers.
The novel’s set in Regency England, I think. The heroine lives in Bath and spends her days lamenting the fact that all the men are foppish dandies and she can’t find one who won’t hide his mantitty with frills and lace. And then one day she puts on a dress in a shop and it magically transports her to Ancient Rome. There, she meets a fearsome guy named Magnus somethingorother who promptly makes her his slave. He does stuff like making her put on boobie-revealing tunics during his dinner parties and so on. Obviously she falls in love with him. But then one day she is magically transported back to Bath. She’s very confused about whether her months in Rome were real or just an opium-den-induced hallucination… But then she digs up some plaque or other that she and Magnus had buried together and she knows it was all real.
Thanks in advance!
Ok, I know this one. It’s by Virginia Henley and the title is Enslaved.
Blurb: “Immersing herself in the past, Lady Diana browses through an antique shop and finds the helmet of a Roman centurion. When she puts it on, she is transported into the world from which it came, and her first sight of the powerful man who takes Diana as his slave. It could be worse, Diana realizes, she could fall in love with him.”
Aw man! Beaten to the punch:) Curses on brunch out with the girlfriends…I late on checking the RSS feeds.
Sula WINS! By the nipple of mantitty even!
I have got to get some prizes for this thing.
While I like the Help A Bitch Out posts (damn, there are some simultaneously must-read and fucked-up books out there!) I do miss the Friday Personals. Not that I ever got one right, I just miss ‘em. Any chance of bringing those back, Bitches? I wants me a title, I does!
Amelia Lowly Common Scum Bitchipants Elias
Amelia FBP Elias:
You’re on. I’ll bring ‘em back, but that might require that I (a) remember what day it is and (b) remember a book plot in its entirety without conflating (2 pts!) it with another 2 or 3 novels. I’m embarrassed to say, every day is ‘Help a Bitch Out’ in my brain.
But I hear you!
Ioana’s description of this novel is sheer poetry. To prove it:
Haiku Version
Time travel to Rome
Unleashed boobies and passion
Was it just a dream?
Limerick
There once was a maiden in Britain
Who with brawny mantitty was smitten
She traveled back into time
Where the beefcake was prime
And said, “How those togas do fit ‘em!”
I’ve got a deadline or I’d include the sonnet.
I love reading this column, even though I will never guess the correct title (I can barely remember what I read when I was ten, but it wasn’t romance!) In this case I think that both sula and Marta Acosta deserve titles – those were some great poems!
Yeah, I remember that book. When in Rome she had to have one boobie hanging out.
And I always wondered why she couldn’t just have both and be done with it?
You guys have just made me buy this.
Shame on you!
Aw. That was the first one of these I ever knew.
So. Sad.
I’m just awed by the fact that every time one of these book descriptions is posted, someone knows the book.
Good work!
Sadly, I *purchased* this book! Anything Rome-centric, I pick up. It’s my way of letting publishers, et al know that there are fans of ancient Roman fiction. But, hoo-boy! not like this, please! It was a painful read and the cover! – the heroine looks like a 1960’s version of a Regency girl!
Even so, I’ll sit through a bad story if the history is good, but, sadly, even that was lacking. I received better history lessons from the cartoon antics of Asterix & Obelix.
Thanks so much, guys! 😀
Wow, I actually read this book.
For some reason I thought it was “Somewhere in Time,” that movie with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, except that then I remembered there was no Rome in it…and no boobies : (
I kiiiind of want to read this one. I am filled with shame.
Man, I’m ages late but I knew this one just from the title of the post. I do love me some Virginia Henley.