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

Last one of the day, from AMH:

I’m trying to track down a historical I had read years ago. I’m pitifully forgetful about just about everything about this book except that it was either an Avon or Zebra in the 90s around the same time Pamela Morsi released ‘Simple Jess’ and it was written by a big name at the time in romance.

It involved the discovery of a man raised by wolves. Here’s where I worry I’m mixing it up with Disney’s Tarzan. If memory serves me the heroine’s father took the feral man under his wing, as did the
daughter, while she fell in love with him. I remember some scene on the beach, the hero turning out to be a nobleman, and a jerk rival who thought pseudo-Mowgli should keep his hands off of the young miss. I’m pretty sure the cover was yellowish with a sunset scene.

This will be keeping me up at nights soon, so if any of your readers has any idea what this novel is will make me very, very happy.

Candy, who maintains a crush on Mowgli, would probably love this book. Especially if it’s horridtastic. 

Raina writes:

The story is about a young woman (I think she was a kindergarten teacher?). She’s claustrophobic, and while trying to visit her rich friends, she get’s stuck in an elevator in their building with a man.Freaking out, the man helps her get through the situation, and he takes her back to his apartment to calm her down. One thing leads to another and they end up sleeping together.

She leaves while he’s still asleep, and they both never find out each other’s names. He finally tracks her down somehow and learns she’s pregnant.

He’s a really successful lawyer. I think she’d moved to a new town, and told all her neighbours and coworkers that she had been married, and her husband had died...but then he shows up surprising everyone.

Please help! this has been bugging me forever!

Ok, Secret baby conceived in an elevator? That would make an AWESOME Aerosmith song, right? Right...!?

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.