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

In a curious overlap of two audiences which, I am told, don’t often overlap to a large degree, Julia Quinn’s novel The Lost Duke of Wyndham is featured in the latest issue of Soap Opera Digest because the cover features Norwegian actress Ewa da Cruz from As the World Turns. Several SBTB readers pointed that out when we discussed the cover awhile back, which I never would have known, as I don’t watch soap operas. The article in the Digest is part interview with da Cruz, and part review.

Which brings me to my next question: how many of you who are romance fans also follow a soap? I never got into them, though I admit to being totally enthralled with possessed Marlena with those freakass creepy contact lenses on Days of Our Lives all those years ago. But I’ve never been a big soap fan. I went to college with a large core of viewers who would tape them and watch together at the end of the day, but I couldn’t stomach the fact that anyone who earned a happy ending wouldn’t stay blissful for more than 2 episodes. There would be a fireside lovemaking scene with the L-shaped sheet (covers her from clavicle to thigh, but barely covers his manly pelvis, ahem), and a really opulent wedding, then, commence angst, drama and unhappiness! I just couldn’t take it. Are you a soap fan? Which one?

And where can I get some of Marlene’s freakass creepy contact lenses? 

85 comments •
Categories: General Bitching • The Link-O-Lator
Tags: eva da cruz, julia quinn, wyndham

Bitchery Reader Elizabeth writes:

This was the first romance novel I read and enjoyed. I was in middle school, I think—maybe 6th grade. That would be the early 90’s, but the book might have been earlier. My mom volunteered at our local library, which had a wall of romance novels. I was just waking up to sex and would flip through different books to read the sex scenes (I know, naughty!). Most of them I hated—even at that age, I knew I didn’t want to read rape scenarios. So this book was the first one that I thought was hot AND not downright offensive in its portrayal of the heroine/hero relationship. I went back to it over and over when I needed a jolt of sexy. I can see where the spine was on the library shelf, but I can’t remember a thing about the author or title, and not much about the plot. I’d be interested to reread it now and see how it measures up to my memory.

Okay—the cover was definitely a bodice-ripper, and I want to say that the heroine was blonde. It takes place in a port city (San Francisco?) in the Old West, but not the too-Old West (turn of the century?). The heroine wakes up in a brothel—she has amnesia and has been sold to the brothel by somebody because she is (duh) super-hot. She escapes by tying the bedsheets together and going out the window. On her way down, she slips and falls on top of the hero, who catches her. He is a ship captain and he assumes, since she came out a brothel window, that she’s a prostitute. They go to his boat, he gives her wine, and they have steamy sex (On the first date! I know, right?).

Then it all gets fuzzy in my head. She is upset (?) that they had sex because she knows she isn’t a prostitute. She doesn’t know who she is, but she knows that. Maybe he agrees to take her on board his ship? Somehow, later in the book, she gets her memory back—she’s part of a ranching family or something because I remember her riding a horse around her land. She got conked on the head by someone trying to take over her family’s land (?)—a cousin? a brother?—something about the land deal meant she needed to be out of the way. Really, the only other thing I remember is that later in the book, after she regains her memory but before the HEA, she and the hero have sex again, in a big bed (her family house? a hotel?)—it’s a little risque because they aren’t married, but also because SHE’S ON TOP! She kneels over him and it drives him crazy.

Well, it was hot stuff to my 12-year-old self.

Any takers?

I love the nostalgic “OMG” of looking back on the sex that totally blew your mind when you were younger but seems so tame now (My ‘omg!’ was in Blaze Wyndham when Blaze and her first husband are getting it on in the stable in the tack room. *fans self* Oh my.)

Anyone know what book Elizabeth is looking for?

15 comments •
Categories: Help a Bitch Out
Tags: historical romance, sex, wyndham