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

Chris writes:

I read it over twenty years ago. It’s a fantasy and I don’t remember much of the romance elements though I know there was one (that wasn’t my thing then). The heroine doesn’t have fingernails, but she does have retractable claws that come out of her fingertips. Her mother was called a soul dancer, someone who had the ability to pull the soul out of a person by dancing in front of him/her. The heroine has the same gift and the villain wants to use her. I don’t remember anything about the hero, other than she pushes him away, afraid she’ll take his soul. One of the secondary characters is carrying around the bones of a lost child in his backpack. Some ritual needs to be performed before a person can depart from earth so the shadow of this ghost child is accompanying him everywhere. This man’s best friend, a woman, dies during battle and I remember the scene where she looks at him during a lull in the battle and tells him she’s been dead three days but she didn’t want to leave his back unguarded.

I think the cover had a picture of the woman with claws and she was standing next to a panther-like creature.

I really want to re-read this book. I hope someone knows the name of it.

Katrina writes:

I read this YA book somewhere between 1981 to ‘83 when I was in fifth or sixth grade after the school librarian recommended it. I believe it was a recent publication at that time, so it would have been published circa ‘79 to ‘83. An adolescent Celtic girl during the heyday of the Druids romps around the ancient forest, climbing oak trees and partaking in mystical Druid rituals and such. The cover depicted her wearing a simple tunic and sitting high up in a tree. I swear the cover also featured a silver medal seal, meaning it would have been a Newberry Honor Book (which means it received an honorable mention rather than the golden Newberry Award seal) but none of the titles listed for Honor Books published during that time ring a bell.

The young heroine may have also been the Druid chieftain’s daughter or was in some way related to a Druid VIP. I think she was a bit of a tomboy and liked to go hunting but I may be confusing that element with another story. While hunting (?) in the mystical magical woods, she spends time with a boy from either her village or the neighboring one and falls in love with him. The relationship was not forbidden or anything, but there was some other type of conflict/controversy centered around her. I believe she ended up being blamed after the crops died or the rain didn’t come or the mistletoe shriveled up or some crap like that, though I can’t remember what she did that was deemed so bad.

At the end of the story, she marries the boy she loves, then at the end of the wedding she drinks mead or some other exotic Druid-sounding beverage from a ceremonial cup. The mead/whatever tastes of almonds or some other ominous substance, thus revealing that the young heroine has willingly drunk poison and sacrificed her own life to restore order and fix whatever it was that she screwed up. I believe the groom may have imbibed too but not sure—he might have voluntarily died with her, or he might have just stood by and watched his love valiantly die and then gone on to woo the next bored Celtic girl.

And people wonder why I read and write “dark romance”, when this was the morbid fare my school librarian recommended to impressionable young readers—not to mention that to this day, I can directly trace my interest in Pagan belief systems to this book. (Perhaps my fundamentalist mother was onto something with her fears of those evil, secular humanists invading the public school system...) Anyone else remember this book, or did I dream all this up?

Sounds like this book rocked someone’s world. Anyone remember this one?

It’s HABO Monday: all day, we challenge the memory of the Bitchery, which automatically has to be better than ours.

The first request comes from Lacinda:

I remember reading a book about 8 years ago, maybe more, featuring a woman who was essentially kicked out of her house when her husband served her divorce papers. She had a business with a friend restoring furniture (mainly wicker?), and she ends up getting together with his smokin’ hot self.

There may also have been a lighthouse, but I was young and there were lots of romance novels around, so it’s hard to say.

Wicker! Divorce! Possibly a lighthouse? Now that is romance.

Given the time difference this might have already happened, but Australia’s ABC will feature a program (Sorry - programme?) on 6 October at 10am with Ramona Koval looking at how romance novels have changed since the first world war:

We delve into the world of square jaws and ripped bodices and ask how romance writing has changed over the years. How different are romance titles of the 21st century from those published during the First World War for instance?

BZZZZT! Personal Foul! Five yard penalty for use of “ripped bodice!”

But I’ll be curious to hear it - so tune in Aussies, and let me know how it is? I mean, it’s not like WWI romances and 21st century romances are even nearly the same. It’s like saying New Zealand and Australia are the same.

[Thanks to Wendy Palmer for the link!]

CNN’s review via EW.com loved it. I’m so happy - and I so want to see it.

Best quote:

But one of “Nick & Norah’s” most radical accomplishments is to incorporate a population of interesting, creative, cute gay guys who lead fulfilled lives that have nothing to do with being any straight person’s colorful sidekick. (It’s a stunning feat, really, tossed off with ease by director Peter Sollett and screenwriter Lorene Scafaria, working from the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.)

Another achievement is granting Norah a Jewish identity that’s as much an unremarkable, unshticky part of who she is as the fact that she’s cool, she loves rock, and she doesn’t drink.

Commence fist pumping.