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

From my inbox comes news that Laura Kinsale’s books are being rereleased through Sourcebooks Casablanca, a small independent publisher. Midsummer Moon, Seize the Fire, and Prince of Midnight are being promoted as spring reads, and two of the books are available now via Amazon and Powells.

I am guessing the rerelease will bring a lot more historical romance readers to Kinsale’s stories, as some have been out of print and have been hard for me to find when I go looking.

That said, I have to mourn the old style covers, because, damn. They were full of Fabio-esque goodness and oddly-lit visible buttsecks. And, I think, Scarlett Johansson.

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 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 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!

A two-book review from the “And Now For Something A Little Different” department.

You know those women who are friends with scads of men but not so many women? What if one of those women was in a historical romance? What if she were a widow, free of those pesky expectations of innocence and demureness? What if she were bawdy, outrageous, and friends with absolute piles of handsome, rakish men who adored her and considered her one of their own? Who would reign her in? Other women, gossip, scandal, and the expectations of society at the time? What if she didn’t give a rat’s ass about gossip, scandal, or the expectations of society? Who needs other women, anyway?

So, couple all that setup with a depth of historical knowledge that will literally make your corset spin around on top of your head, some sharp dialogue, and settings that are original, fascinating, and located in the same historical period with which you may be familiar, but at often unexplored locations within that period, and you have Hughes’ two books.

That trifecta of historical research, clever setting, and wholly memorable characters, held competently by Hughes’ writing, is some powerful juju.

Bitchery reader Noelle asks:

I really loved this book and even lent it to my grandmother because at the time the twist was so unique. She passed away before my 11yr old was born so I read it 92-94ish. It’s a historical and to me it had a Horatio Hornblower feel to it. I can’t remember any names though. The heroine is the Post Mistress of Bath who loves her job and uses it to give gainful employment to the youth of Bath that might not otherwise have had a chance at a decent future. (awww)

Her father hates that she works and wants to be independent so he blackmails a succession of losers to try and seduce her into marriage. She always seems to uncover what her father’s hold is over the men and quickly finds a way to dismiss them until the dashing Navy Captain arrives.

He’s very well connected, rich, attractive and she just can’t figure out what in the world her father could possibly have on this man that’s ten times the man of any of the others. From what she gathers, it’s something bad, very very bad. And the hero is relentless in his pursuit. No matter what she does he won’t back down. And slowly she’s starting to fall for him. Oh and they all play cards A LOT, like every night.

Eventually as they both realize they have feelings for each other she uncovers his deep dark secret. Dun...dun....DUN...He can’t read! He can navigate a ship sure, but he uses a secretary to write all his correspondence. It turns out that he’s dyslexic. She begins to try and teach him with flash cards of course cause they all love the card games. And of course, she teaches him while they’re in bed and the first word he learns is breast. But then her father decides he doesn’t want them together and comes to town and tries to expose his secret at, you guessed it, a card party by introducing a new card game that uses words instead of numbers. But apparently she manages to teach him a few more words besides, breast, lips and vulva because he makes it through the game and at some point they live HEA. That ring a bell with anyone?

Dirty card games to help with dyslexia? Oh yeah, baby. Learning disabilities were never so much fun. 

While doing research about heroines, romance novels, who identifies with whom, and what exactly is the attraction to some of these absolute dimwits who populate old skool romance (I still haven’t answered that question to my own satisfaction), I’ve had to go back at my old and dusty keeper shelf and look at some of my favorite heroines from romances in the past 20 years.

I started reading romance that wasn’t breast-grabbing Sweet Valley Highs in 1992, and my introduction was Midsummer Magic, a book that still occupies a very special, creamy place in my heart (ok, ew, sorry, I couldn’t resist). But since digging in the depths of my bookshelf, I’ve come up with a few other heroines in the Frances mold that I just love revisiting.

The Lion’s Lady by Julie Garwood features one of my very faves, “Princess” Christina, a white woman with blonde hair and striking blue eyes (of course) who is raised by the Dakota and brought to England to make her debut. Because what does any self-respecting white girl raised by Native Americans need? A marquess, duh. One who is just as dangerous and out of bounds of society as she could be, were her past made known to all the snobby, snooty ton. I love her dialogue with Lyon, I love the fact that she munches on shrubs, and I love that she hides who she is but never once thinks she’d be better off if she’d never been raised by her Dakota family. She thinks most of English social customs are nuts. She kicks ass and has no problems about her ability to do so, though she knows she has to hide her talents. I only wish the period of time when Lyon and Christina verbally sparred with one another lasted longer, because their relationship was resolved so quickly in the course of the story that the only obstacle to their happiness was an external villain, and as much as I was ready for him to have his ass handed to him on the sharper end of a spear, I loved the conflict between Lyon and Christina more.

And speaking of kicking ass in a complete different way, Honoria Anstruther-Weatherby from Stephanie Laurens’ Devil’s Bride, oh how I love you, despite the man-jawed nightgown-wearing weirdness that is allegedly you pictured on the back of my very old copy (also, worst hair for a hero, ever. Ev-er). I sat on the floor in front of my bookshelf and read the opening third of this book, and an hour disappeared before I knew I’d spent it re-reading. Honoria is upper class and almost snobby about it at times, and determined to embrace her independence in a way that’s historically possible but still shocking (she wants to go to Egypt in the shadow of Hester Stanhope) at the time, but despite all that I really, really love how Honoria shines in ways that are entirely, utterly appropriate, and yet fascinating. She’s good at running huge estates, managing guests, making people feel at home, and telling that giant autocrat Devil where to get off. She’s innocent and yet fearless, and, my favorite part, level headed. She’s capable and longs for adventure of some sort. She kicks ass within the assigned boundaries of her class and her gender, and yet stands out because she’s so strong willed and confident in herself.

I love me some completely impossible heroines in historically plausible settings, especially the ways in which these women shine in that setting. I often wonder if the alpha heroine of the current urban-fantasy, ghost-hunting, vampire-slaying, lycan-shaving, mummy-unwrapping novels has some distant fringe roots in these types of historical heroines, who were ass kicking within the boundaries historically ascribed to them. It’s not like Christina wanted to be a dentist, or Honoria wanted to open a printing press. Ok, well, Honoria did want to go sail into Egypt all by her onesies but even as she pays lip service to her demands for excitement, she demonstrates through the plot how competent she is at the not-insignificant responsibilities expected of women at that time. That part just fascinates me. I could easily be assigning too much significance to heroines I love like damn and luggage, but Christina, Honoria, and heroines like them are unique in ways that never manage to grate on my nerves overly much.

What about you - who are your favorite heroines from Days of Yore?

Well, I’ll be Sinful and Scandalous - y’all can has free books. Thanks to the wonderful random integer generator, which gives me random integers, I have five winners!

Cassie, Mary M, Wirdald, Shewhohashope, and StephB, your addresses, and I shall maketh sure that the sets of Lord Sin and Lord Scandal are sent to you asap.

Thanks for commenting and playing, folks. 

If you know about my introduction to the romance genre, you know it is based entirely on jealousy, and petty larceny. So it’s with some embarrassment that I post this HaBO from Jenn, who says the romance she’s looking for was swiped from her before she could finish it.

John Lennon once wrote a love letter to his first wife, Cynthia, in which he said, “I love you.... I love you like guitars.”

*sigh*

Gets me every time.

Elizabeth has a similarly musical love scene in her quest to find a lost book, and hopes you can help:

I was hoping the Bitchery could help me identify one of the first romance novels I ever read.  It involves a woman who is kidnapped by a pirate who mistakenly believes her to be wealthy.  When she first meets him, she nearly faints from hunger because he has a loaf of warm bread in his pocket and she’s overcome by the scent of it.  After she’s been kidnapped, one of the crewmen is injured or ill, and she sends another man to collect crewman A’s ration of grog.  Crewman B is about to be whipped (?) for trying to take more than his allotment.  She confesses her responsibility, and this (of course) gets the crew on her side.  There’s a subplot involving the first mate, who falls in love with a Scandinavian woman.  This Scandinavian woman looks down on the heroine because she’s the captain’s mistress by this point, and the crew all insist that the captain has to marry her so she can keep her head up.

The heroine’s meditations on sex are probably the most distinctive thing about the book (the plot is generic and the characterizations are thin).  Basically, she imagines a different instrument playing in her head every time - sometimes the sex makes her think of trumpets, sometimes drums, sometimes flutes...you get the idea.  I’m not sure if she winds up with the whole orchestra by the end of the book, or if it never gets better than a string quartet.

If anyone knows what book this is, I’d be incredibly grateful for the help.

Anyone got an idea which book this is? And really, is there a more lovely expression than, “I love you, I love you like guitars?” I’m all warm and fuzzy from the memorable dialogue discussion, and that just keeps the soft-focus glow going and going. 

Magazines are all flush with the summer reading lists, and I’ve been asked to compile a never-fail list of books for the perfect summer reading. Any time, any part of the romance genre, with the only caveat that they still be in print.

I’ve been doodling my faves in various genres, and have a pretty diverse list of old and newer books, but I wanted to query the Power of the Bitchery. Is there a book that without fail will give you hours of sunny, peaceful enjoyment, complete with perfect tan, that really great post-ocean-swim hair, and the warm bliss of a happy ending? What’s your personal never-lets-you-down book for happy summer vacation reading? 

I feel a need to go shopping with Elisa Rolle, who blogs at Rosa is for Romance, and who is blogging at the Wet Noodle Posse blog today about how difficult it is for her to shop for the romance in Italy. Key quote:

“We” are still embarrassed to admit that “we” read romance. There is still the fear to be labelled as Z-level reader, with a little brain and a head full of impossible dreams. Worse, like a pervert who likes to read about rapes and obscenity. When I go to buy a romance on the corner shops, I always try to go to a shop owned by a sweet lady who doesn’t comment on my choice. If I see a shop owned by a man, I hardly stop to buy my books, cause I already know that he will look down to me for my choice of reading.

I am so spoiled by my many choices of places at which to shop for my books. Thanks to Esri Rose for the link.