This was exactly what I was in the mood to read. THE WARLORD'S WIFE is such a delight. It kind of feels like a throwback to the more "gentle" Zebra bodice-rippers of the late 80s and 90s. Magnus is a rather terrifying hero, who doesn't really have any soft edges and is good at holding his throne in the North and commanding battles and not much else (even though at heart, he is, in fact, a cinnamon roll). Lida, on the other hand, is a strong heroine who feels the crush of the times, and does her best to overcome the setbacks of womanhood with wit and a light hand.
The book opens with Lida being accused of adultery by her shitty in-laws. She's pregnant and her beloved husband is barely cold in the grave, but her bitch-in-law is claiming that she must have had sex with another guy to be so big. What actually happened was that her husband was so horny for her that he banged her before they were married, but when she says this, her father in law gets even angrier and banishes her back to her previous family in shame.
Now she tends her parents' and brothers' farm and lives in relative peace with her beloved eight-year-old daughter. Which is when the viking warlord comes a-calling, looking for brides. His first wife died in childbirth and was of a weak constitution, so when he sees beautiful Lida working in the field, he is like I MUST HAVE HER. But being an arrogant Man(TM), he makes it sound like he's doing her a huuuuuge favor, which makes Lida angry and refuse him, despite much squawking from her greedy relatives, who are all blinded by the dollar signs (kronor signs?) in their eyes.
Anyway, she obviously ends up marrying him because this is a romance novel, which results in hot, slightly dubious-consent sex scenes (it was the middle ages, right? there weren't any tea videos explaining consent), loads of misunderstandings, jealousy, manly arrogance, and Lida's daughter, Katia, being super fucking adorable and precious. There's also political machinations and scheming, and all of the side characters are so great. Somehow, despite this book being just over 200 pages, the author manages to squeeze in a bit about the oppression of the Sami people, the homelife of vikings in the North and the way their communities work, and so many show-not-tell scenes that explain how both Lida and Magnus are motivated, and how who they are allows them to fall in love with one another.
I'm giving this four stars instead of the original five because the pacing did feel a little off and sometimes it felt like the book was moving a little too fast. Given the length, the author did an amazing job conveying the flow of time and making the book go by pretty quickly without being too rushed, but I do think they fell in love a little too quickly. The ending also dragged a little. After pages and pages of scheming, I was hoping for more of an explosive climax (although technically, I guess I did get the explosion I craved, hehe). It reminded me of a shorter, tamer version of Nadine Crenshaw's EDIN'S EMBRACE, which is one of my favorite viking romances of all time. The villains are scary and the marriage of convenience plot is done well. I didn't even mind the pregnancy trope too much, even though that's usually a trope that can put me off entirely.
I bought all three books in this series when they went on sale and I'm so glad I did because apparently the next book in the series is about Katia, all grown up.
P.S. The author's note at the end is worth a read. It made me tear up a little. It just goes to show that writing isn't easy for everyone, but ease has nothing on skill.
UPDATE: There's a hilarious ad in this book that I couldn't stop thinking about (yes, for the Zebra Big Mouth Box), and I just got confirmation on Reddit THAT IT EXISTS. You can apparently buy them on eBay.
I've been slowly working my way through my bodice-ripper collection. EDIN'S EMBRACE has been on my radar for years, but I haven't really liked most of the viking romances I've read (90% of which were written by Johanna Lindsey), so I was a little leery about picking it up. Finally, though, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try... and I am so glad I did.
Edin is an English lady who is engaged to her childhood best friend, Cedric. She's feeling ambivalent about the nuptials, however, since she isn't really attracted to him and she's also a virgin. Unfortunately for them, they never have a chance to work it out. Vikings come and murder Cedric and a whole bunch of other people, and Edin and a lot of the people who used to be her servants are all taken as slaves.
The hero in this book is Thoryn and he is a bad-ass motherfucker. I am a sucker for icy heroes who give zero fucks, and he fits that bill to a T. He murders the heroine's fiance right in front of her-- while he's in the middle of molesting her, in fact. He attacks his own men if they defy him, and rules with an iron fist and a massive blade. The only person who actually really dares to defy him is the last person who should: Edin herself.
This book was so amazing for a variety of reasons. First, Thoryn actually walks the walk of badassery, so when he humbles himself for the heroine, it usually happens in a subtle way. He doesn't kill her for running away, even though that's the punishment for runaway slaves. He pretends to give her the illusion of consent when he finally beds her (it's forced seduction, but both of them know he could have forced himself on her violently). And Edin has a valid reason for acting the way she does. She's a sheltered noblewoman who is used to being obeyed, so she has a lot of pride, and when she's subjugated in front of the people who used to be her servants and now revel in bullying her, it hits different.
EDIN'S EMBRACE is not without the usual litany of 1980s purple prose. Her pubic reason is described as "gently mossed" and I lost it when the hero compares her blonde pubes to "yellow parsley." But the book also feels exquisitely well researched, and when there are raids or descriptions of the viking homelife, it really felt transportive. ALSO, one of the villains-- a freeman who ends up as a "cripple" and therefore shamed-- kind of ends up with a pretty sweet redemption arc, and the other villain, the hero's mother, Inga, is 100% pure grade A batshit crazy. We're talking Mommie Dearest/Flowers in the Attic levels of crazy. And the way the author foreshadows her madness and drags it out-- GOLD.
Sadly, this book, like all of her others, appear to be out of print. I hope it gets rereleased, though, because it's really fun and the romance is so meaningful and emotional and fraught, and I actually loved the heroine just as much as I loved the hero. I can't wait to read more of her books!
SEA OF RUIN has been on my radar since it came out because I kind of have a soft spot for old school pirate romances and the cover design had a decidedly retro bent to it, like the author (and the artist, obvi) was trying to pay homage to the bodice-rippers of yore. As someone who loves the bodice-rippers of yore, I was super into that. And the only thing better than reading a modern day throwback is conning several of your friends to read it with you, so thanks to Rebecca, Aaliyah, and Koistyfishy for joining me on this "sea of ruin."
The book is written in first person and has a very melodramatic, breathless style to the narration that reminded me a lot of Natasha Peters's works, a bodice-ripper author from the '70s and '80s who wrote books in the first person that followed a heroine over the years as she grew up and was shaped by the chaotic elements in her life. Specifically, this reminded me of SAVAGE SURRENDER, which also had a bratty heroine who was kind of kick-butt and a toxic romance with a dangerous, obsessive hero who was not to be crossed.
Was this a perfect book? No, but there was a lot to like about it. It seemed really well-researched and I loved the scenery, the fight scenes, the descriptions of the taverns and the ships. All of it was quite nicely done and added a lot to the story. I also liked Bennett, even though she was a bit of a Mary Sue. She suffered as most authors don't let their precious Sues suffer, and I think this kept her from feeling too two-dimensional. There were several scenes in this book that were very hard to read, involving death, torture, tragedy, and rape, which definitely gave this book more of an old skool flavor.
I'm not usually into M/F/M books but I liked that element in this book, too. The idea of a love triangle between a female pirate captain and her pirate husband and a pirate hunter was intriguing to me. They also all had chemistry, which is, I imagine, hard to do. I also liked that the men had distinctly different personalities, even though they were both incredibly dangerous. Priest is fire and impulsivity and filled with animal passions, whereas Ashley is more of a cold and icy type with a frozen maelstrom underneath. They also cracked me up. Priest's orange allergy leads to not one but TWO rather convenient exercises to further the plot, and can we not forget Ashley's midnight self-pleasuring sessions on the balcony of his ship? SO. DRAMATIC. How did the author come up with this stuff?
If you're not into dark romances or the politically incorrect bodice-rippers of olde, I would not recommend SEA OF RUIN. Actually, I would not recommend SEA OF RUIN for a lot of reasons, because I feel like it embodies a lot of the tropes that romance novels of the present day are trying frantically to distance themselves from. But that's kind of messy, because for a lot of people, Kathleen Woodiwiss and Christine Monson and Johanna Lindsey were the authors people cut their teeth on for the first time, so I like the idea of a bodice-ripper Renaissance written for a modern audience, but with all of the chaotic, crazy tropes that created a booming industry with some of the best cover artists around.
You be the judge, though.
P.S. Docking a half star because, like the bodice-ripper predecessors, the sex scenes in this book were too purple and went on for waaaaaay too long. Sex scenes are like red pepper flakes: I love a liberal sprinkling but please, for the love of God, don't serve me an entire PLATE of them.
Hooray, I actually remember who inspired me to read this vintage bodice-ripper. Thanks to Naksed for her glorious review of WOMAN OF IRON because without it, I'm not sure this book would have come to my attention, even though Sheila Holland is apparently one of the pennames of THE Charlotte Lamb, of Harlequin fame. IKR. Her Harlequins are often pretty spicy for Harlequins, but the bodice-rippers she wrote for other publishers apparently like to get down and dirty.
WOMAN OF IRON is such an intense read. Any book that starts out with the hero whipping the heroine is automatically suspect (I see you, THIS OTHER EDEN). It's kind of a cross between THIS OTHER EDEN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and LEMONADE, although it's not really as "romantic" as any of those books, as most of this love-hate relationship is spent with the dial resting firmly on "hate" and the hero and heroine don't even sleep together until twenty pages from the end (although the hero sleeps with plenty of other women, and the heroine has, like, two other dudes who want to get with her).
The plot is a little to complex to summarize, but basically the heroine is the illegitimate child of an ironworks owner and is raised by her uncle when he dies. The uncle's wife HATES her and everything she represents because when the dad died, uncle stepped in to be the mistress of wifey, and real wifey resents that on a deeply personal level, so she just spends a ton of time whipping the heroine. (Don't worry, she later dies of small pox lmao.) Then the hero whips the heroine because she won't call him sir and apparently defiance is his love language because the fact that she won't give in just makes him smile like a fool, even as he plans to break her. What a psycho.
I would love to get into the litany of misdeeds that happen in this book but I want to at least try to cross-post this book to Amazon. I will say that it has a lot of triggers, and there is violent assault and rape, and also small pox, and unpleasant deaths, and also murders. Midsomer would never. Part of me is in awe at what Charlotte Lamb was capable of under this imprint, and part of me is like, "Okay, but maybe also at least try to make some romance?" I wish there had been just a little more obsession of the passionate kind and some more scenes between the H and h beyond the one dub-con scene they had. The ending was SO abrupt also and didn't really provide any closure.
Brilliant characterization and a true bodice-ripper but not really a romance.
WOW. It's been a while since I read an old school bodice-ripper. I love them but they can be so exhausting and emotionally draining to read that I often space them out. This one had especially hardcore themes, being published in the early 80s (dig that electric font!). It's a story about a young Christian missionary named Carey who is taken to Tahiti by her brother since she's too wild in England (imagine the anemic brother's shock when he finds out that in Tahiti, clothes and chastity are both optional-- big whoops).
On the way there, she and the captain, Adam Falconer, end up not getting along. He doesn't like women on his ship and can't abide prudes. Carey is both. When he catches her flirting with one of his crew, he forces a kiss on her and gives her a stern warning and a bit of assault on the side, because he's a gentleman like that, before sending her on her way. On Tahiti, Carey ends up coming into her own and befriending the native people. But then evil Spaniards come and one of them tries to take Carey for his own. But what does she do? She smashes a mirror in his face.
Carey's friend catches the eye of the chief who admires her for her looks and bargaining but Carey is an inconvenient roommate he doesn't want hanging around. But friend decides a little brownface will fix everything: she'll just dye Carey's skin and hair and send her BACK on an English ship of traders, claiming that it's taboo to touch her and that she's half-French and half-Polynesian. But forbidden fruit happens to be exactly Adam's favorite flavor of fruit (ironic, since his name is Adam), and pretty soon he and "Teura" (Carey's name) are doing it all day every day and he's fancying himself in LURVE.
Up to this point, there's already tons of un-PC content and dub-con that would probably send most modern day readers scrambling to hit the "cancel" button. But things get worse. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone but the portions of this book that are set in Macao and Yerba Buena are BRUTAL. The heroine ends up in a brothel, and bad things happen to her. Somebody gets pieces of their skin peeled off, which are then used as makeshift parchment paper for missives. Araby Scott seems to take a gleeful pleasure in torturing her characters as much as possible in the last third of the book, putting them through all kinds of emotional and physical turmoil, to the point where I began to wonder if there was going to even be a happily-ever-after for these two (there was, but man, it came at a steep cost).
The story was good and I loved the exotic locales-- Tahiti, Macao, Hawaii. It's unusual to find bodice-rippers that aren't set in the U.S. or Western Europe, and I always treasure those finds. And even though this book definitely can feel like a microaggression flipbook at times, I don't think the author was going out of her way to be offensive. The book felt pretty well-researched, actually. She used tonal marks on some of the Chinese names (something I've never seen an older book written by a Western person do before), and all of the characters of color were accorded agency and not used as props. I also liked how characters would reappear throughout the plot, giving the reader closure about what happened to them. The ends of these little miniature threads were always so satisfying, too. Did I love Adam as a hero? No, not really. Some of his scenes with the heroine were hot, but he was way crueler than I like my heroes to be. The heroine was awesome, though. I love seeing a heroine who is allowed to be selfish and miserable and flawed, and she was all of that and more. Carey was the GOAT.
I really have to stop writing my reviews over wine or they're going to make you all think I'm even more ridiculous than I actually am. First, major thanks to my book bestie, Heather, for reading this book with me. She recently read and loved LIONS AND LACE by this author on my recommendation and I thought it would be totes mcgoats fun if we decided to read another McKinney Original because she's just SO GOOD at writing really intense heroes who are kind of domineering (in a hot way) and innocent heroines who still have a lot of personality. Case in point: WHEN ANGELS FALL, which is probably one of my favorite romances of all time because of its hero, Ivan Tramore, who is my king.
Initially, I really loved TILL DAWN TAMES THE NIGHT. It has this fun Indiana Jones on the high seas vibe to it and the hero locks eyes with the heroine in chapter two and it is... INTENSE. Like, with eye contact like that, you don't need explicit content in books if you get me. So I was like YAAAAAAASS. Especially since the hero is actually a hot pirate who is obsessed with finding this rare jewel that ONLY the heroine knows about and also he has long hair, an earring, and a dragon tattoo on his back that is the coolest tattoo I've ever seen described in a book.
So obviously, I was like YES.
The problem is that... um??? When the hero and heroine get together, he makes her feel bad about herself? It's like you have all this delicious tension that seems to be building towards a meaningful connection and then it just ends up becoming super cyclical with the heroine and the hero getting into the same petty arguments over and over without any sort of development. LIONS AND LACE was a complex story of revenge becoming attraction and WHEN ANGELS FALL is a tale of dark, passionate obsession that has the potential to blossom into destruction. TILL DAWN TAMES THE NIGHT had elements of both, but it felt hopelessly unfinished, almost like a rough draft composite of both stories.
I was mildly interested until about 65% or so where I just lost all interest. The villain had the potential to be grim and horrible but I don't think his character was done all that well, either. I'm wickedly disappointed at how quickly this went from simmering to stultifying and if I didn't know McKinney had written this, I would have called you a liar and slapped you in the face for telling me that my ultimate fave penned this sad, disappointing mess. I still love this woman and she can come to my birthday party whenever, but she's going to have to check this book at the door before she comes into my house.
The summary of this book tells you exactly what you're getting into. I've talked before about how I don't really gravitate towards Native American romances because they tend to be inherently problematic in a way that's hard to stomach. Especially the ones that have "Savage" in the title.
SAVAGE FLAME starts off with a bang as Rebecca and this one guy are casing out their ranch, and then there's a raid and the guy gets scalped and Rebecca gets abducted and almost raped. She's saved from her rape by Black Bear by Lone Wolf, who is about to take her home, until Rebecca opens her Karen-ass mouth and starts talking about how she's going to sic the U.S. Navy on him and all his people. Obviously, being a sane dude, he's like, better not take her home then. Cut to him making her his wife in every sense of the word, with the incentive of some oral sex.
I did not like the writing in this book at all. Sometimes I love purple prose but this is an ultraviolet too intense for me. I also feel like the book was pretty heavily implying that Lone Wolf was biracial (with his gray eyes and English language skills), which is something else I've talked about in other Native American romances and sheik romances, because the implication in these books is always that their whiteness somehow makes them better, smarter, and more attractive than their non-White peers. And that's just a really tough message to swallow, even within the context of historical fiction. I've seen maybe one book that went with that and pulled it off because it was a deconstruction of racism and colonialism as a whole (JADE by Pat Barr), but this book was a no.
I am a woman of refined and exquisite taste - except when it comes to my taste in books, where I read whatever trash I can get my hands on. THIS GOLDEN RAPTURE is the perfect example of smutty pulp that has been all but forgotten with the passage of time. I happened upon this author randomly while checking out books shelved under the "bodice ripper" tag on Amazon, and was delighted to find that, unlike the vast majority of pulpy bodice rippers, Fancy DeWitt's books were still available in ebook format, presumably in the original edition and without the PC-rewrites authors like Catherine Coulter like to do to make their books more palatable to modern audiences.
This is my second Fancy DeWitt book. The first book, WILD HEARTS, was a rapey Western reminiscent of SWEET SAVAGE LOVE. I enjoyed it, despite some slow portions and OTT scenes. THIS GOLDEN RAPTURE could not be more different. Instead of being set in the 19th century "old west," THIS GOLDEN RAPTURE is set in Tudor England, right around the time that the Catholics and the Protestants were really going to town on one another.
Diane is a busty noblewoman whose father is about to betroth her to a dude whose pockets are probably inversely proportional to the size of his peen, this being the Renaissance when women were chattel and forced to marry old men who could have been their fathers or even their grandfathers in terms of age discrepancy. She is kidnapped by a pirate named Guy Ramsey, previously a nobleman whose house has fallen into disgrace after his father was charged for consorting with the Spanish and loving Catholics and trying to help both get their fingers into some forbidden English pies. Now his father is executed - falsely, Guy claims - and with no recourse, he decides to kidnap an English lady.
Diane is kept on the ship for a while, watching in horror as Guy is made to walk the plank and an evil Spanish grandee terrorizes her with threats of rape while the Basque captain turns his eye the other way and the jealous Basque OW Aimee dreams of petty revenge to make Diane's life miserable. Also on the ship is a South American indiginous woman named Amute, who is there with her father to lead the Spanish sailors aboard the ship to El Dor-fucking-ado.
I thought there was no way this would pan out to anything - until I read the summary of the book on Goodreads. They make it to El Dorado, the Spanish people betray Amute and her father when their greed gets the better of them, and decide to go after their people with guns and cannons. Meanwhile, Diane becomes a goddess who is about to get married to the Native prince, only Guy is there to beat the prince to the wedding night, which involves pre-gaming it with an underage girl, for some reason.
The book ends with an exploding ship and Guy and Diane sailing off to their happy ending, and of course his honor is restored when it's revealed that the man Diane's father would have married her off to was actually the traitor who was helping the Spanish this whole time. This book was even crazier than WILD HEARTS, with Guy being psychic (he learned from Indian - that's Indian as in actually from India - wise men); ridiculous scenes that make this feel like an X-rated version of The Road to El Dorado, and woman-on-woman erotic oil massages because, as my Goodreads friends put it when I posted this as a status update, what else are you going to do aboard a pirate ship? Point taken.
I would recommend reading this book for the lolz alone, but it doesn't really hold up plot-wise the way WILD HEARTS did. WILD HEARTS had an OK plot and told a story I was interested in, whereas I found myself increasingly bored with THIS GOLDEN RAPTURE, reading only for the WTF scenes to see just what crazy shit the author would deliver to give me my money's worth.
Honestly, I'd rather just watch The Road to El Dorado and then write my own erotic fanfic for it.
It's been way too long since I've picked up an old skool bodice ripper. I've been on a fantasy binge lately, and it's been absolutely swell, but the desire for bodice rippers was eating away at me like an itch that I couldn't resist. GYPSY LADY has been sitting on my bookshelf for two years, ever since my mom bought it for me as a birthday present. I'm one of those people who hoards books they're really looking forward to reading in order to build up the anticipation until the time is right, and when I spied that bright cover, I thought, "It's time."
As you might have guessed from the title, GYPSY LADY is not a book for the PC-set. It's about a girl named Catherine Tremayne who, along with her brother Adam, was kidnapped by gypsies when she was young and then returned to her family as an adolescent. She has been raised as a young lady but still enjoys frolicking in the nearby gypsy camps under the name they gave her, "Tamara."
The hero is named Jason Savage, although you could argue about whether or not he's actually a "hero." The book opens with him as a young man in an Aztec tomb, marveling at the treasure with his three friends, Nolan, Davalos, and Blood Drinker. Blood Drinker and Nolan are skeeved out, but Jason and Davalos decide to take a small piece of treasure, vowing that they'll come back some day for the rest.
Flash forward to the early 1800s, and Jason is now a man of wealth and privilege in his own right, running errands for President Jefferson to facilitate the Louisiana Purchase. He tomcats around and sleeps with Catherine's slutty and stereotypically evol cousin, Elizabeth, but when he sees Catherine at the gypsy camp, he decides that he must have her, and being a noble man, she can't say no. She tricks him by sending a decrepit old gypsy woman to his bed, who he almost has sex with by accident, and the horror and humiliation of this is so great that he decides a bit of rape is in order.
At first, he keeps Catherine as his mistress and rapes her a few more times (which she decides she likes, traitorous bodies and all), but when he finds out that she's actually a lady, he is forced to marry her; an insult to his manly pride, which he uses as an excuse to ill-treat her some more. She runs away to her brother's property in Louisiana, and when Jason chases her there, he assumes that her brother, Adam, is her new lover, and the baby she's carrying is a bastard she's had to taunt him.
When he finds out the baby is actually his, he gets angry all over again (I sense a pattern here) and uses that as yet another excuse to get angry at Catherine and treat her like garbage. At this point, she basically rolls with all the punches and moans about her broken heart and the fact that Jason will never love her. Ew. Since they're both experts at not fucking telling each other critical information, Jason fails to tell Catherine that Davalos, that guy who was his treasure hunting buddy from the beginning, now has it in for him because he thinks that Jason has the key to the treasure cave.
Davalos kidnaps Catherine after she flounces -yet again - from Jason Savage, rapes her a bit, and indirectly causes her to miscarry her child when, beaten and abused, she flees his camp on horseback. Jason finds her in the depths of agony and sends Blood Drinker to find, capture, mutilate, torture, and castrate Davalos, before leaving him in the desert to die. Once the deed is done, Jason informs Catherine, who is still suffering from PTSD, that the best cure for rape is marital rape, and forces himself on her to help rid her of those traumatic memories. She likes it, and the book ends "happily."
Man, what do I even say about this book? It kind of reads like an off-brand SWEET SAVAGE LOVE. That book also had a POS hero who liked to slut his way around the globe, but the heroine gave as good as she got and didn't spend the whole book crying and whining and basically embracing victimhood like it was the most romantic gesture she'd ever seen (cringe). The surprisingly graphic torture scene at the end was also unwelcome, because most of the story was pretty dull (apart from the rapes, which are basically a given in romances written during this time period). I think the last time I saw something so graphic in a romance novel, it was in Parris Afton Bonds's DUST DEVIL.
I did not really enjoy GYPSY LADY that much and I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore readers of the old skool bodice ripper experience. I didn't feel the connection between the hero and heroine and he never groveled or suffered for his actions at all. Torturing one of his fellow rapists as a grand gesture didn't really do it for me. And the heroine lost all of her spirit and pluck as soon as the hero walked onto the scene and started making her body feel traitorous. Nope.
💙 I read this for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' New Years 2018 Reading Challenge, for the category of: Bodice Ripper. For more info on this challenge, click here. 💙
After doing the first book, SWEET SAVAGE LOVE, as a buddy read extravaganza, with Heather and Korey, Korey joined me for a read of the sequel, DARK FIRES. And can I just say that Rosemary Rogers is swiftly becoming one of my favorite bodice ripper authors? Every subgenre has its own reigning queen, and RR is Queen of the Bodice Rippers the way V.C. Andrews was queen of smutty teen fiction.
That said, this is my least favorite book of hers so far.
SWEET SAVAGE LOVE was almost a five star read for me. I loved the nonstop action, the love-hate relationship between the hero and heroine, the lush descriptions of the American West, and of course, Steve Morgan, who could so, so easily be the cover model for one of those pulpy men's adventure magazines that were popular in the mid 20th century. With his cheating, murderous, rapey ways, he is basically the absolute opposite of what I like in romance heroes, but he just oozes raw masculinity. He may be Satan incarnate but I was picturing him as Scott Eastwood.
(Dear Hollywood: if you ever make this series into a TV show/movie, please cast Scott Eastwood.)
The sequel starts out with nauseating marital bliss, but since this is Steve and Ginny we're talking about, it goes from Good Housekeeping to Apocalypse Now pretty quickly, and it starts to feel like Rosemary Rogers is trying to out-WTF herself in the prequel with a plot that involves the following incidents: rape, duels to the death, opium addiction, blackmail, whipping, torture, carpetbagging, typhus-induced amnesia, cheating, more cheating, still more cheating, wtf still more cheating, public affairs, sadists, secret pregnancies, and scalping. Because Rosemary Rogers has a big vocabulary, but "overkill" doesn't appear to be one of them.
My favorite scene was probably the sword fight duel, because I am trash, and occasionally raw displays of masculine douchery work for me. (Especially in puffy shirts whilst aboard pirate ships.) However, I felt pretty frustrated for most of the book because the hero and heroine are separated for huge portions of it and Steve spends it with like 5+ women who aren't Ginny (and I really, really don't like infidelity in romances, especially not wanton infidelity where the hero has no "off" button). Ginny also lost a lot of her spitfire nature that made her so easy to root for in the first book. I guess maybe it was PTSD after all the horrors she endured in the last act, but still: it made me really sad.
I'm kind of curious where the book is going to go from here. These two are pretty much the last people in the world who should be parents, so obviously, that means the sequels should be interesting.
STORMFIRE is a very difficult book to get in physical form. In terms of price, it's right up there with THE SILVER DEVIL. I despaired of ever getting a copy of either, and then my mom found a cheap copy of STORMFIRE at a thrift shop. Obviously, I started reading that shit immediately, because wouldn't you?
***WARNING: SPOILERS AND TWs***
It's easy to see why it's become such a cult classic. Not only does it have a beautiful cover, it's also got a unique story and setting. STORMFIRE is set during the Napoleonic Wars/Georgian England, but set in Ireland, during the British's violent colonization of the people. The hero, Sean Culhane, is out to get English viscount, John Enderly, for leading the genecide that wiped out most of his town and resulted in the violent death of his mother, as well as other people he knows. He does this by kidnapping Catherine on her way to school and raping her, before sending her blood- and semen-stained underwear to her father by courier.
After that, the story becomes a chaotic maelstrom of ups and downs. Catherine is brutalized and treated as a servant and a whore. She's beaten and starved. At one point, the hero makes her nose bleed by hitting her in the face. Even when he starts to fall for her, he's still impossibly cruel. One minute they might be having sex in a lightning storm or he's buying her sexy lingerie; the next, he's slathering makeup on her face and ordering his men to gang-rape her, or letting one of his mistresses starve her to the point that her baby dies in the womb and gives her sepsis(!). Both the hero and the heroine sleep around gratuitously, and sometimes it feels like they spent more time with other people than they did with each other.
What ultimately sort of ended up making this book a win for me was the passionate, beautiful writing, and the emotion clotting the pages. Sean also has some pretty terrible things happen to him, as a sort of poetic justice for his mistreatment of the heroine: he's partially castrated, whipped with iron spikes, and shot and stabbed several times, at least one of those times with poison. Other people have said that the book was about one hundred pages too long and I agree. The gratuitous smutty intrigues with Napoleon and Josephine, I could have passed on. I was ready to wrap up after Sean's torture, when Catherine helped rescue him. It really felt like both characters suffered way more than they had to.
The ending also kind of felt abrupt. When I finish a romance story, I like to imagine that the couple will last. I didn't really get that feeling with these two. It felt like they'd be off-again and on-again for the rest of their lives, which wasn't all that satisfying. Still an incredibly memorable story, though.
I blame Heather for making me want to read this book. She told me that there was a hawt villain in it, and I'm a sucker for those. I didn't even read the summary; I went to Netgalley and applied for the book on that premise alone. I read it cold.
#HOTVILLAINSFOREVER
Now that I've finished, I'm not quite sure how I feel about DISCIPLINED BY THE DUKE. For the first sixty pages, there was a decent build-up of sexual tension, a sinister and compelling villain, and a hero who was pretty hot what with his talk of forbidden play (although what's up with the Victorian edition of the Red Room of Pain on the cover?).
BUT - unfortunately for this book, it's a mishmash of two books that took its concept (sister protecting her other sister and allowing herself to be blackmailed because of it vs. erotic BDSM historical) and did it one better.
Elizabeth's sister is in jail for murdering her father (it's suggested he abused the sister, possibly sexually). Elizabeth says, many times, that she will do anything to save her, and this means putting herself under the employ of the nefarious and devilishly good-looking Earl of Westmore, who wants her to seduce the Duke of Montague in order to steal a letter that he desperately wants.
The Earl of Westmore is a great villain. I thought at first that he was the love interest (I have issues, I think), and then when I found out he wasn't, I thought he was going to be one of those villainous characters who ends up getting his own book later on (YAY :D). But no.
The author kills him off.
Boo.
Anyway, Elizabeth arrives at the Duke's house and is determined to achieve the letter without seduction, but she's so attractive and of course she catches his eye immediately. And of course the Duke has a policy about not tupping the help but of course he makes an exception for her.
I mean, it's a romance novel, so I think we expected that, right?
Well, what I didn't expect were the silliness of the sex scenes. Milking, tunneling (c*ck gophers, anyone?), desire (used as a noun, to refer to various fluids), and mewl are used in abundance.
Here are some quotes that I found particularly jarring:
His thumb swiped around her clitoris...(130) Because her vag is a dating app? #SwipeRight
His cock was hard enough to pound a horseshoe into shape... (129)
Marcus was so hard he could pound nails with his cock (69).
I love that one of these quotes is on p. 69, btw. But also, was the author reading a book about blacksmiths while writing this book and thinking oh yeah, dip that ingot, pound that flesh anvil, wield the mighty c*ck hammer of sexual glory? I mean, maybe I shouldn't talk, since I once wrote an erotica novel comparing a c*ck to a Christmas tree (the veins were described as the lights, or something equally horrible - "garlanded by veins" may have been the phrase), but wow. Smithing level: 69.
I was willing to forgive the bad sex scenes though, since those are part of what make erotica so fun. Bertrice Small was famous for her "coral-tipped cones" and "honey ovens" and "coral-red flowers of womanhood wet and pouting with desire", and I love Small because she truly gave no f*cks. But what I could not forgive was the dumb.
Someone tries to kill Liz and she's just like, meh, oh well. She faints for no reason. She falls down in a field and then proceeds to lie there and freeze to death. Montague finds her, and then immediately after warming her up, has sex with her half-thawed self even though she says no. What. Liz betrays Westmore and knows she must act quickly to save her sister before he takes his revenge out on her, but of course there's time for one last round of hide the hammer in the tool-shed. Surprise, surprise, when she FINALLY gets her butt to the jail, her sister's been sent off to be hung.
I think the heroine herself sums this book up best:
Damn, she was stupid (200).
Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy!
It's difficult to explain my love of bodice rippers to people who don't already enjoy them. The distortion of reality that they reflect is not one that I find desirable at all: They are often brutal, politically incorrect (to the point of being offensive), with spoiled immature heroines and heroes who could just as easily double as villains. Oh, and the writing - the over-the-top, adjective-laden writing, with flowery euphemisms for primary sex characteristics and prose so purple that it makes violets look red.
This is bodice-ripper land. Go big, or go home.
At 700 pages (in my edition), SURRENDER TO LOVE is definitely a big book. It was originally published in 1982 and my reprint by Mira was released in 2003. Often when bodice ripper authors rerelease their older works, they will "clean them up" and remove some of the more un-PC references and rewrite blatant acts of rape into more "acceptable" forced seduction scenes. I was curious to see if Rosemary Rogers, who is fairly well known for her unapologetically OTT plots, would do the same. I haven't read the original version, but if this version is anything to go by, I would guess no.
(If you do know for sure, please tell me. I'm very curious.)
I was reading her author bio on Goodreads and part of what makes SURRENDER TO LOVE so fun is that the beginning part of it seems semi-autobiographical. Rogers, like our heroine Alexa, was raised in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in a rich family, and under constant supervision. The descriptions of Ceylon are amazing, not just of the land but of the climate and the people as well. Rogers's exotic setting is part of what makes this book so fun and is reminiscent of titles like Christine Monson's RANGOON (which is set in Burma/Myanmar) and Lane Harris's THE DEVIL'S LOVE (set in the Caribbean). I enjoyed both of these books, but the setting in SURRENDER feels so much more pervasive, and I'm sure that's because Rogers was actually there, and she knew its beauties as well as its disadvantages, and she had seen a lot of the local politics and tensions firsthand.
Alexa is a fairly likable heroine, as far as bodice ripper heroines go. She's feisty and headstrong and sometimes this can make her annoying, but for the most part she is a decent character and I was always (at least halfheartedly) championing her. Nicholas, the hero, is where the fun is really at, though. He's one of those villainish heroes. One who thinks nothing about dub-con (or non-con), who treats women like garbage and goes around whoring and slut-shaming in equal measures. He cheats, multiple times, on multiple people, supposedly murdered his last wife, and appears to think nothing of threatening the lives of the people around him even if they are people he allegedly cares for.
SURRENDER TO LOVE is more of a psychodrama than a romance in the traditional sense, since the characters spend most of the novel - about 680 pages out of 700, in fact - tormenting one another with physical violence, rape, whoring, manipulation, lies, and revenge. For reasons I won't reveal (come on, guys, you have to read it), Alexa wants revenge on Nicholas's family, and her attraction to him becomes just another weapon in her arsenal as she embarks on her vicious quest.
What had she ever done to injure him? Except - the dark demon side of him answered too promptly - except by marrying a very rich man who was too old to please her and finding her pleasure in playing the whore, bitch that she was. Not for the money - that at least would have been halfway excusable - but to satisfy her degraded appetites (380).
"If you had any realization of all the different kinds of pain and degradation and abuse that can be and are inflicted on some human beings by others in the name of 'pleasure,' I do not think you'd have dared indulge your whining, hypocritical little complaints to me of cruelty and the infliction of pain - unless you meant it as a challenge?" (443)
"You can keep your eyes closed or open - it's all the same to me. And you can take off that ugly purple dress you're wearing, and all your damned petticoats and your corset as well - or if you prefer it, I'll rip the clothes off your body myself! But either way, my mermaid, I'll have you naked the way I first saw you; and I meant to use you, my virgin slut, as I should have done then and later. In every way and every fashion I see fit" (474).
Nicholas - such a charmer.
The best way of describing SURRENDER is saying that it's two parts V.C. Andrews and two parts Bertrice Small. It's like V.C. Andrews in the sense of Alexa's father figures have incestuous feelings for her (one of whom has an almost sexual fixation with his own mother), and there's a wicked matriarch type character who runs the scenes and will stop at nothing to have her way no matter how much manipulation it takes. There's also a narrative style that I can only describe as "breathless" - peppered with numerous italics, so you know how important every word is, and how it's emphasized when the characters talk, and many exclamation points so you know it is a dramatic exclamation! It's like Bertrice Small in the sense that Rogers is very cruel to her characters, and has them be very cruel to each other. Someone is raped in a Turkish prison, and decides to inflict that torment on others. The hero is flogged towards the end of the book, and tortured in front of the heroine (something that Rogers apparently does in another one of her books, SWEET SAVAGE LOVE). There's lots of cheating and sexual abuse. The heroine is ambitious and incredibly good at sex, despite her inexperience. Parts of the book take place in a brothel, with some kinky scenes ensuing. This is all classic Small, but Rogers is a much better writer than Small, which makes it even more amusing.
Are these books for everyone? No. But unlike certain romance novels cycling around the popularsphere, SURRENDER TO LOVE doesn't pretend to literary accomplishment. It strives to entertain, instead - and entertain it did. I think this is actually my favorite bodice ripper that I have ever read to date because of the broadness in scope, and the epic journey the characters take across those neverending pages, from hatred to hate-sex to sex-sex to something that's sort of love but probably isn't because relationships like that aren't healthy at all. If you think you're up to tackling the mess, I definitely recommend this book. It will shock, it will disgust, but dammit, it will entertain!
💙 I read this for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' New Years 2018 Reading Challenge, for the category of: Antebellum/Civil War/Reconstruction Romance. For more info on this challenge, click here. 💙
Every time someone says romances are too light, and that they don't have enough action, I want to throw a bodice ripper at them. SWEET SAVAGE LOVE is one of the early bodice rippers, when the authors were still working out the formula, and was published just two years after THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER.
SWEET SAVAGE LOVE is a Western romance set amid the backdrop of the Franco-Mexican War and the American Civil War. Ginny Brandon is the daughter of a Southern senator who has a vested interest in the Confederates beating the Union. After spending her childhood in France, growing up in the lap of luxury, she is now joining her father on his trip to petition the sympathetic French.
Steve Morgan is a Yankee spy, as well as a Juarista (the people who supported Benito Juarez and were very much against Emperor Maximillian's presence in Mexico). He has signed up with Brandon's men under false pretenses, intending to lure them to bandits who will make off with the gold they're planning on using to bribe the French.
If you think these two romantic leads are at odds, oh boy, you have no idea. SWEET SAVAGE LOVE was a 600+ page psychodrama that was less about love than it was about Stockholm syndrome, hate sex, and physical and psychological torture. I thought reading one of her later books, SURRENDER TO LOVE (published in 1982), had adequately prepared me for SWEET SAVAGE LOVE, but I was woefully mistaken. As dark as SURRENDER was, it couldn't hold a candle to SAVAGE.
SWEET SAVAGE LOVE has a bitingly realistic portrayal of war, in the sense that it doesn't shy away from the squalor of living life on the run, in the field, or in prison; the desperation of men in tough situations, and the cruelty they'll inflict when they're either cornered or on a power trip; and the violence (physical and sexual) that occurs in all of the former situations. Steve is party to all of these, and his sexual encounters with the heroine are often unconsensual (in fact, when they first meet, he mistakes her for the prostitute he thought he ordered). He kills without mercy and sleeps with every female character who appears in this book, including the heroine's stepmother(!), his grandfather's servants, and his own godmother. The heroine also has a number of partners who aren't Steve, but, again, a lot of these are unconsensual, and she doesn't really enjoy herself even when they are.
The western setting is truly glorious. I love the detail. The sensory descriptions. This was what won me over in SURRENDER TO LOVE, when Rogers lovingly details what it was like to be in Victorian-era Ceylon. She brought the setting to life, as she does her (albeit to a slightly less vivid and sympathetic extent). SWEET SAVAGE LOVE is very un-PC and if the sex scenes aren't enough to get you, the racist stereotypes and incredibly poor Spanish translations will. Seriously, the Spanish in this book was awful. It's only my second language and I don't speak it too well, but I know enough to know that "mi casa esta su casa" is not correct, that La Caseta does not mean "The Little House" (she meant "La Casita"; La Caseta means "The Booth"), and that it's "abuelo" and not "abielo." How hard would it have been to get someone who speaks Spanish to look this over?
Still, despite everything, until about 75% in, this was going to be a 5-star book. Ginny was a spitfire. Steve was fascinating - in addition to being involved in two wars, he was also affiliated with the Comanche people (and married one at 15), half-Mexican and fluent in Spanish, fluent in French, and the grandson of an incredibly rich and influential plantation owner. The problem comes when Ginny is captured by the French and Steve bursts in to save her and both characters (but especially Steve) are subjected to some of the worst horrors imaginable, and due to a series of incredibly long misunderstandings, each blame the other for their predicaments. For the next 15% of the book or so, the hero and heroine remain apart, wallowing in misery and being tortured emotionally, sexually, and psychologically. It was agonizing, and I could hardly stand it. The last time a romance book brought me to my knees (figuratively) was probably in Patricia Hagan's Coltrane saga, particularly in LOVE AND WAR, where she seemed to delight in torturing her heroine. Rosemary Rogers does the same with Steve and Ginny, in a gigantic misery-fest that finally blows out around the 90% mark.
This book is not for everyone, and it's hardly a traditional love story, but if you're into bodice rippers and edgy reads, SWEET SAVAGE LOVE is a fantastic book. There really is nothing like it and the story is so epic, and Rosemary Rogers makes you suffer and sweat for that HEA. I'm really glad that my friends Korey and Heather joined me in this buddy read; it forced me to endure and keep going!
(Speaking of "keeping going," I happen to have book 2 if anyone wants to join...)
I was a little less excited about reading ACROSS A STARLIT SEA because of how melodramatic and campy its prequel, UPON A MOON-DARK MOOR was. ACROSS takes place with the next generation of the last set of characters. Laura, the narrator of ACROSS, is the daughter of Wellesley, Maggie's half-brother.
The convoluted family tree can be a bit difficult to follow, but by the end of the story (and with the help of the family tree in the beginning of the book), I'm fairly sure that I have everyone straight.
**Warning: Spoilers**
Laura is engaged to her first cousin, Jarrett, Maggie and Draco's eldest son. But she's in love with Nicholas, their younger son. This results in dalliances that happen right under her fiances nose, although Laura starts to have second thoughts when said dalliances start to become, well, rapey. But surely, she thinks, he does it because he loves her so much he just can't control himself? Surely. Oh, boy. You must be new here.
The melodrama in this book is more complicated than the last book because there are more characters to play with, although like UPON A MOON-DARK MOOR, the story spans from the characters' childhoods to their adulthood. The parallels between the story are numerous and interesting - both are narrating as teary old women lamenting the tragedies of their past; both make very cheesy foreshadowing statements like, "If only I had known..." or "perhaps the tragedy could have been averted if I..."; both feature love triangles/quadrangles, with female heroines who flit from one love interest to the other, gravitating to the "wrong" love interest first; both have very flowery descriptions of the moors that are caught in that uncomfortable limbo between poetic and purple.
Nicholas is actually a pretty insidious character, and about what you would expect of a bodice ripper "hero" from the 70s - he's rapey, without morals, and can't keep it in his pants. The only difference is that, in this book, he's kind of a villain. There's also Thorne, who is a villain as well, and homosexual, which is portrayed as being "wrong" in this book (the heroine keeps saying that there's "something wrong" about Thorne she can't put her finger on, and it turns out his sexuality is that thing). A lot of fallen women also feature in this book, and they all meet unpleasant ends, without fail.
I actually liked Jarrett. He was pretty sexy for a bodice ripper hero. (I'm not actually sure that this book qualifies as a bodice ripper, although bodices were ripped...) And unlike the previous book, the hero in this book does not rape the heroine, although at one point she speculates that he would probably try to rape her if she provoked him "lustily". I'm not sure what that means, or what I'm supposed to do with that information, but there you go. Rapeyness quotient aside, Jarrett was a good, solid Byronic hero, and it made the romance in ACROSS A STARLIT SEA much more palatable.
If you read and were put off by the rape in UPON A MOON-DARK MOOR, I think ACROSS A STARLIT SEA will be much easier to swallow. The writing is better, and the story is tighter (even if it is basically a mirror image of book one, right down to a mystery at the mines that's straight out of Scooby Doo). Brandewyne is like a toned-down bodice ripper, or a smutted-up Victoria Holt gothic. If that appeals to you, I say, go for it.
LOVE AND WAR was a dense, horrific "romance" novel set during the Civil War. THE RAGING HEARTS was the gleefully sadistic sequel, where both characters are again separated and the heroine is manipulated and emotionally abused by pretty much everyone she comes into contact with. In LOVE AND GLORY, the conclusion to the trilogy about Travis & Kitty, the characters are again separated, except this time, there was so much craziness that I literally could not even. To convey the sheer insanity this plot had to offer, I'm going to have to resort to spoilers.
P.S. Speaking of spoilers, do NOT - I repeat, do NOT - read the Goodreads summary for this book. It has a huge spoiler in it. I read the spoiler by mistake (thinking in my innocence that a summary would be spoiler-free); do not make my mistake, for I was once like you, living in ignorant bliss.
**WARNING: Huge, Huge Spoilers!**
Kitty and Travis are living on a farm with their young son, but Travis doesn't like farming and doesn't hide it well. When Kitty finds out that Travis was offered a position to be a U.S. Marshal for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, she pulls the "I'm going to push you away for your own good" stunt with the help of his BFF, Sam. She does this by forcing him to go to a party he doesn't want to go to. There, she receives honors for her medical work (which annoys Travis, because how dare she have a part of her life that doesn't involve him or his child). She nags him the whole time about being more "gentlemanly" and this infuriates him even more, because he doesn't like being told what to do. The plan works: Travis gets angry that Kitty has changed into a nag, and leaves in a huff.
Sulking Kitty sulks, and everyone who hates her (or wants to bone her) takes pleasure that Travis dumped her so publicly. When she's marooned in a sudden and convenient storm, Jerome Danton (the KKK dude from the previous book) decides it's the perfect opportunity to try and rape her, but his wife (and Kitty's arch-nemesis), Nancy Warren, bursts in with a shotgun right as he's getting to it. Jerome panics and tries to claim that Kitty forced herself on him (uh-huh), but Nancy has none of it and kicks him out of the cabin. She then reveals that she's paid Luke Tate (the man who held Kitty hostage and raped her constantly in book one) to take her far, far away. To Nevada, in fact, where Tate plans to become rich by staking out silver mines. After much rape and abuse, Kitty has a mental breakdown and vows that she is going to die...
Meanwhile, in Haiti, Travis is sleeping with one of the local women - an underage girl named Molina and fuming about Kitty. When Molina finds out that Travis is not only married, but has no intent of entering into a common-law marriage with her, she goes to the island voodoo priest to invoke the gods to get revenge on Travis. One of his fellow U.S. expatriates freaks and explains to Travis that he's in huge trouble, but Travis laughs it off as "BS" and it isn't until he's drugged and wakes up in the middle of a voodoo ceremony where everyone starts fornicating and said friend is nearly killed that he even starts to take it seriously. Then he does the "I'm leaving because I want to not because you told me to" schtick as he stomps back to the U.S. in disgrace for infuriating all the locals.
When he comes back, he finds out that Kitty is missing. Does this stop him from sleeping with Nancy, though? Nope. Jerome catches them in the act, and reveals to Travis exactly what Nancy did. Travis dumps his son off with Mattie Glass (the woman from book two that Kitty saved), and storms off to Nevada to find Luke Tate, who shows Travis Kitty's grave. Travis kills Luke the same way he killed Nathan in book one - by stomping on his throat. Also, he gets a silver mine by saving a guy from being tortured. Then he goes on another U.S. Marshal mission - to investigate a KKK uprising in another state.
Here we meet Alaina and Marilee Barbeau, daughters of the local bigwig. Travis immediately sleeps with Alaina, infuriating her informal fiance, Stewart. The two of them get into a pissing contest that alternately amused and annoyed me. Marilee, on the other hand, is pretty cool. I liked Marilee. She spies on the local KKK chapter with the intent on finding out which black men they intend on harming or killing, and then warning them ahead of time in order to escape. She suspects that her father is involved, but doesn't want to report this to the authorities for fear of implicating them, so she settles for treating the symptoms and not the cause. One day, after coming back from one of these spying missions, she sees Alaina and Travis going at it in a field. She comes back to that field one day and starts touching herself, and Travis sees her, and then they start having sex, too.
Keep in mind that the hero sleeps with five women over the course of this book. If you liked Travis at all in books one and two, you will hate him by the end of this one, because LOVE AND GLORY is where he really lets his d-bag flag fly. He cannot keep it in his pants. At all. Also, he turns into an even bigger jerk. But more on that in a moment.
The KKK plot spins itself out, and Marilee is almost raped in an Indiana Jones-style snake pit by one of the clan members and is saved just in time by our hero. Then they have a series of close calls that ends with the appropriate people being punished. The villains in this book have very inconsequential deaths - one of them is a "blink and you'll miss it" death that occurs because of a misfire. How lame. Travis is so impressed by Marilee's bravery that he decides that she is worthy enough to marry, because she's almost (but not quite) as good as Kitty.
Marilee and Travis end up living together, but Travis is nasty to Marilee. He makes it clear that he doesn't love her and that she doesn't hold a candle to his first wife, who he refuses to talk about and snaps at her the one and only time she dares to ask any question. He drinks a lot, and snaps at her when he drinks, much to Sam's disapproval. Then he decides that he wants to move to California and gets angry at Marilee because she doesn't want to leave the Mormon school she works at, because she's grown so close to the Native American children she teaches. Travis gets into a huge huff, and talks about how he's the man, and blah, blah, blah. Marilee feels bad and says, of course I'll do what you want, sorry for being selfish and by the way I'm pregnant. Because poor Marilee can't catch a break, it's a rough pregnancy that requires her to be hospitalized. And imagine Travis's surprise when the doctor treating Marilee looks just like Kitty...only she doesn't recognize him at all, and calls herself Stella Musgrave.
Well, it turns out that Kitty developed dissociative amnesia from all the rape and abuse she suffered at Luke Tate's hands, and since he's a coward he decided to lie about her death rather than implicate himself. Travis's wife is in the hospital (and since he's already married to Kitty, technically that makes this bigamy. In fact, there is no technically. He is a bigamist - although this is never mentioned in the book, oddly) but could he give a fiddle about that when "the most beautiful woman that God ever created" is in the room? No. There's hemming and hawing about whether it's good for Kitty to remember who she is, and even though it's clear that she's better off now, Travis can't leave her alone. Kitty remembers Travis, and Marilee dies conveniently, telling Travis with her last breath that it's okay if he and Kitty are together before releasing a gush of blood from her womanly parts. Kitty was going to get a full scholarship to a medical school in Europe at the recommendation of the doctor she works for, but Travis is a man, and his happiness must come first, so to heck with that!
This book was absolutely over the top madness. It was like the author was cackling gleefully to herself and saying, "How many tropes can I possibly incorporate into this book?" While talking about LOVE AND GLORY to some of my friends, I joked that I was waiting for some amnesia to pop up. Little did I know that was waiting to spring itself on me in act three...
I debated about what to give this book, and I think I'm going to give it three stars. It's somewhere between three and three-point-five stars, but I'm rounding down because Travis's behavior really upset me in this book. Don't get me wrong - he's a terrible man, and not what I look for in a love interest at all. No, I had come to terms with the fact that he was a prat, but he never learns from his mistakes or his behavior, and while that's probably more realistic it isn't exactly fun to read. How can you root for a man who says that "he doesn't have to rape women" and claims that he can't be without the sex, and who forgets about his own son whenever it isn't convenient, and ignores his own wife when she's in the freaking hospital because sex trumps obligations every single time? Plus, Hagan writes these amazingly strong female characters who fall to pieces and forget their interests as soon as they meet Travis. Kitty was the best dang doctor in the whole Civil War, and Marilee ran a mini-version of the underground railroad right under the noses of the KKK, but when Travis walks into the picture they become sniveling messes who always put his needs above their own.
LOVE AND GLORY concludes the first part of the trilogy. The next set is about Travis's son, Colt, and I read the spoilers for it and it looks like it might be even crazier than this book. I'm not sure I'm ready for that. Even though I gobbled up books 1-3 like candy, I think I need a break from the series, because LOVE AND GLORY left a really bad taste in my mouth.
P.S. There are a lot of typos in these books, too! I'm not sure if they are left over from the originals or errors from the conversion process, but the last book had all kinds of mistakes and this book even got one of the characters' names wrong - Nathan Wright instead of Nathan Collins. Which I have to admit, made me laugh, because Nathan did sleep with Kitty, so accidental typocest for the win.
P.P.S. This book also uses three variations of the N-word. I actually didn't know what one of them meant and had to look it up. Apparently it's a more "polite" version of the really offensive N-word. Because it's always important to remember your manners, I guess... If seeing any variation of the N-word is a trigger for you, I'd suggest avoiding this book because it's very free with it.
When I started reading LOVE AND WAR, I wasn't sure what I was going to get. Sometimes bodice rippers are epic tales of melodrama doused in history...and sometimes they're just awful. LOVE AND WAR was great - it had history, it had a compelling female protagonist, and it had heroes who were virtually indistinguishable from the villains. My only qualm was that the pacing was uneven, but that's a common issue with 550+ page tomes of that nature.
Despite said qualm, I immediately raced out to buy the sequel, THE RAGING HEARTS, to see what happened to my new favorite romance heroine, Kitty Wright, next. Kitty managed to survive the Civil War and so did her lover, Travis Coltrane. But now Travis wants to finish up all his loose ends and retire to the Bayou, and Kitty doesn't want to do that - she wants to stay on her father's land.
The two have a falling out, and Kitty tries to make her living in the town that not only hates her father but also hates her lover. Things get pretty ugly, fast. The jealous OW is determined to see Kitty humiliated, if not hung. The KKK is gaining momentum - headed by one of the other "love" interests, no less! - and Yankee carpetbaggers are buying up all the Southern land at cheap, cheap prices...and God help those who get in their way.
If you really liked Travis, you might be a little miffed at RAGING HEARTS, because except for the beginning and the end of the book, Travis isn't really in here. And once he does finally drag his ass through the door, he behaves like a total jerk. I wanted to slap him for being such a horrible person. I mean, he was always a horrible person...but this was particularly bad.
In his place, we're left with two replacement love interests. There's Jerome Danton, who is a member of the local KKK chapter, and then there's Corey McRae, the Yankee carpetbagger, who is Creepy with a capital C. He uses unorthodox methods to get people to sell their land, manipulates Kitty over and over again with all sorts of schemes in an effort to get her into his bed, and upstairs on the third floor of his house, he's got a box of BDSM gear locked in a closet that he likes to use with the ladies.
THE RAGING HEARTS doesn't have the history or the depth of the first book, but it compensates with drama. I actually thought the middle section - the one with all the scheming and the manipulation - was incredibly well done and for a while, I thought this would be a five star book. TRH gets dinged because Kitty becomes a doormat in Act II (as she always seems to whenever Travis walks in), and she gets especially annoying once she has her baby. Plus, there's Travis and his annoyingness, and I had a lot of trouble buying that HEA at the end. She had to do that to gain your trust again? I said it before, but I'll say it again "what a jerk!" (Also, this book is waaaay repetitive.)
Overall, I enjoyed THE RAGING HEARTS. It was good and it kept me engaged, and didn't suffer from middle book syndrome the way so many books these days do. In some ways, it was even a better book than the first. I think I can safely call myself a fan of Patricia Hagan now. As soon as I finish some of the other books moldering in my to-read pile, I'm going to go out and get book #3. :)
Highbrow this is not, but that didn't stop me from buying it and enjoying it. A PIRATE'S LOVE is a 1970s bodice ripper, which you can usually take to mean that it contains a whopping dash of WTF and a hero who quaffs misogyny like he's trying to get drunk on woman-hating. I don't know why I like these books so much but I'm not going to apologize for it, and I'll be the first to admit that they're problematic, but something about them just calls to me. Maybe because they seem fearless of causing offense in a way that many modern-day romances don't, and I admire their ballsiness.
Bettina Verlaine is a hot babe who's about to be married off to a French nobleman she doesn't know and has never met. However, the ship carrying her to her destination is hijacked by pirates and she becomes the unwilling sex doll of Pirate Lord, Tristan Matisse, who thinks her foot-stomping and flashing eyes are as erotic as a plate of oysters on the half-shell served with a goblet of red wine and a box of unopened condoms. Spoiler alert: it is not consensual.
One thing I liked about this book, though, is that for 80% of the book, Bettina gives it to the hero, hard. Her escape attempts were actually pretty effective and she wasn't afraid to maul the hero, even going so far as to knock him unconscious with a wine cask. All of that changes of course when she decides that she loves him and then it's nonstop angst, but for most of the book, I really appreciated her spitfire nature as she has 50% more spine than other heroines in comparable books.
Tristan also has an Inigo Montoya thing going on where he's seeking out the man who scarred his face and killed his father (and his mother). This book actually came out before Princess Bride, but the similarity amused me, and Tristan's ruthless pursuit of Bastida amused me, particularly when the search yields two more plot twists that I didn't see coming - one about Bettina's would-be fiance, and another about her father. I like it when a romance novel surprises me and does more than just set up the main couple, but A PIRATE'S LOVE actually has a pretty wide cast of characters, whether it's Madeline the nursemaid, Jossel the oddly permissive mother, Casey the twinkling-eyed captain, or Jules the ruthless BFF who might hug you just as soon as he might whip you (true story).
I haven't been impressed with most of Johanna Lindsey's books, but I quite liked this one - I liked it even more than I liked CAPTIVE BRIDE. This book has a better hero and heroine and came damn close to 4 stars. I just really didn't like the ending; why does the heroine always need to be tamed?
I needed a romance about witches for a Halloween reading challenge, and I figured a historical romance novel about the Salem witch trials was close enough. Because we all know that the whole point of these challenges is to skirt the rules as closely as possible, right?
Right.
The premise of this book sounded fantastic. And at first, it was. Brianna's aunt, Pegeen, is burned as a witch in King James's Scotland by a fanatical witchfinder named Matthews who is so twisted up about his sexual urges that he's decided attractive woman = witch.
When Brianna comes running up in horror, only to catch the tail-end of her aunt's murder, Matthews is struck by her beauty. And naturally, anything that makes his naughty bits feel funny must be using the foulest magics indeed, so Brianna is also declared a witch, and he and his men chase her all the way to the docks. Brianna ducks into an inn, where she encounters Sloan, our hero. He figures she's the prostitute he ordered and Brianna, fearing for her life, rolls with it. When Sloan later figures out the truth, he feels responsible for her, and decides to protect her. The two of them flee, with Matthew in pursuit, and Sloan declared witch-by-association. The chase is on.
There's definitely a Frollo/Esmeralda dynamic between Matthews and Brianna that feels super creepy. Matthews was a great villain, and I think it was a huuuuuge mistake to kill him off in the first quarter of the book, because everything after that feels like filler - especially since the h and the H have sex pretty early on in the book, and the will they/won't they? tension that keeps most romance readers (aka, "me") turning the pages is absent, since it's clear they are both super into each other. That's when Graham whips out her trump card: the hero is married to another woman and has been this whole time, which is why the h and the H can't get married. But it's not really cheating because she's a madwoman in an attic. Brianna just got JANE EYRE'D!
Brianna, meanwhile, leaves Scotland for New England - because it's totally safe there. No witch-related executions in Salem or anything. *rolls eyes* So she and her kid live with her cousin, Robert (or Rupert?) (who she married after she found out about the OW). The kid is Sloan's. Witch fever hits Massachusetts. The people featured in The Crucible are mentioned, which was a nice little Easter Egg, but the Puritan witchfinders are super lame compared to the sinister figure that was Matthews. Rupert/Robert gets accused of being a witch and kindly dies off in the last act, freeing Brianna to be with Sloan. They rediscover their carnal passions and the book ends with a happily ever after.
I wanted to like this book so badly but it was so boring that I ended up skimming the last 100 pages because I could feel time draining away with each page. The ingredients for a good story were here, but they were never fulfilled. Matthews was such an excellent villain, and he really was not permitted to go full-on crazypants by the author the way a 1970s bodice ripper-type novel would have. I also couldn't stand Brianna, who is not only TSTL, she's also foot-stompy and averse to following even the most simplest instructions (especially if they are for her own good/will save her life). It's hard to like a heroine who has two emotional settings: horny and outraged. JUST TWO. Sloan wasn't much better. He was kind of a jerk. Not really an alphahole. Just a bland, unlikable "dear john" type.
I kept hoping Matthews would return as a zombie in the third act, but that didn't happen.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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bodices-were-actually-ripped
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