Is anyone actually surprised I enjoyed this book? Probably not. I have a reputation on here for curating some of the best/worst vintage books out there. I have a pretty high bar for not getting squicked out by books, but FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC really tested me because, well, if you know you know. It's gross as fuck. And SO UNCOMFORTABLE.
I was late to the V.C. Andrews game. My mother didn't keep books like this in the house, so I missed out on being traumatized by The Flame and the Flower and Flowers in the Attic at thirteen or fourteen-years-old like some of my peers. The first V.C. Andrews book I read was actually written by her ghostwriter, and if you're asking, "Well, what's the difference?" think about New Coke versus Coca-Cola Classic. One kinda sorta follows the formula, but it's clearly Pepsi in a red can, and nobody wants that. V.C. Andrews-written-as-Andrew-Neiderman has bubbles and is brown and comes in a can, but it's missing that je ne sais quoi that makes it a Classic.
The first time I read Flowers, I was in my twenties. And I liked it then, too. Sort of? I think you need to know going in that this is basically a bodice-ripper with preteens/teenagers as the characters. Child abuse is a predominant theme. Who can forget the story of the cute little nuclear family that's disrupted when the father is grotesquely burned beyond recognition in a car accident? With no one else to pay the bills (women working? Ha, this is the FIFTIES), the mother writes pleading letters to her parents, begging them for money. Which is something that many college students and college graduates still do to this day. The only difference? Your parents probably didn't disinherit you for your incest marriage and whip you for your sins. That's right, it turns out mother and father were actually niece and uncle. WHOOPS.
I'm not tagging that as a spoiler because you find it out pretty early on. But some major spoilers are coming, so hold on to your hats and get your pearl clutchers ready, because shit is about to get real.
Chris, Cathy, Carrie, and Cory (who are they? the Cardashians???) are all locked up in an attic until the mother can convince the grandfather to love her again and put her back in this will. He's on death's door, she assures them, so it shouldn't take long. In the meantime, they're at the mercy of the abusive grandmother, who seems strangely preoccupied with what kinds of sins they might get up to in the attic space she's locked them in. At first, things are basically Diet Suck. They aren't happy but they still think their mother loves them and guilt propels her to make their stay as comfortable as possible. This is what is known as the honeymoon period and don't worry, it won't last long.
It doesn't take long for things to get gross. Cathy and Chris end up wrist deep in shit and piss, cleaning up soiled sheets and backed-up toilets. When the grandmother catches Cathy studying herself naked in a mirror while Chris watches (and yes, they're both still underage at this point), Cathy gets whipped and then the grandmother drugs her and paints her hair with tar, forcing her brother to cut off all her hair for their vanity (after starving them). They get starved again at some point and Chris actually cuts his wrist and forces them to drink his blood for nourishment. Cathy gets raped by her brother after he thinks she's fantasizing about someone else, and then he's like, "Didn't mean to rape you, sorry," and she's like, "I could have stopped you if I wanted to, and also I asked for it by wearing slutty clothes." Also, pretty sure that since their parents are already related, that makes this incest-plus. Somebody gets poisoned by arsenic. There are an uncomfortable amount of passages describing young kids wearing lingerie or underwear (the youngest kid, I guess, likes to show off her fancy panties, which she also shits multiple times, forcing her older sister to wash them-- ew, ew, ew). Oh, and Cathy goes out to the roof, determined to throw herself off of it, but backs down at the last second. Yay.
Basically, anything that's there to be triggered by is in this book. I can say with certainty that there is no way something like this could get written today. Someone would 100% take the author by the hand and say, "Maybe don't do that." As they should, because there are some things that should just be hinted at in a puberty book and not used as fodder for the world's best worst soap opera, you know? The only way you can get through this book is by saying, "Oh, it was the seventies. Of COURSE it was the seventies. That was the decade that came out with Love's Baby Soft, anything written by Bertrice Small, and Brooke Shields's Calvin Klein jeans ad (okay, technically that was 1980, but that's still basically the seventies and also she was FIFTEEN, wtf).
The best parts of the book are the intense psychology of the characters. Cathy is a sympathetic and believable gothic heroine, which is drilled into us by the books she reads (Wuthering Heights, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre). Through her eyes, we witness the disintegration of her belief that the world is just and loving and good, first with the death of her father, then with their inability to sway the grandmother's affections through obedience, and finally, in the gradual crumbling of their mother's morality and compassion; she has been corrupted by the house and in the end, she has become as cold and callous as the grandmother. The transformation-- and the lesson-- is a brutal one.
So yeah, hopefully this arms you with what you need before going in-- if you decide to read this book at all (and if you don't, I seriously don't blame you). I for one am excited to read the sequel, which follows Cathy's life as an older teen/adult, once she manages to escape the house and get her revenge. YAAASS.
Disclaimer: I was the beta reader for this work and Heather is a good friend of mine, but I paid real live monies for this book and was not in any way biased (HAHA... no, really) in the writing of this review.
So when I was reading this book in the raw, I was originally conflicted because Dante, the hero, normally isn't the type of hero I like in fiction. The author really brings him down to a level of vulnerability that most heroes in romance never face. But I ended up really liking that, and liking the book also, which ended up being the atmospheric haunted-house-maybe-but-not-really story that I didn't realize I needed.
This is another one of those books where the less you know going in is better, but it examines rape culture, bullying, and obsessive love through a very fine lens, with two flawed and realistic leads. It took me a while to read it, though, because it was so high stakes and high stress, and I found myself needing to take frequent breaks because of the subject matter. It is just so well done, and ended up being possibly my new favorite work from this author, and I am honestly just so blessed to have the privilege of being friends with someone who has such talent (I mean, OMG).
Seriously, people in Peach Creek suck. I don't think I've ever had such a long list of People Who Need to Be Punched in the Face while reading since, like, IDK. Game of Thrones, maybe. Maybe Peach Creek is the Texas version of King's Landing. (And we all know what happened to King's Landing.)
Also, June is officially my new favorite heroine and I will attack anyone who comes for her or her sexuality (because girl, you get some-- just ease back on the wine, please, ILY).
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.
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.
Normally, I don't make it this far in books I decide not to finish, but LEGACY OF HONOR tricked me! It had an amazing begin and then preceded to undulate in terms of quality; every time I thought about putting the book down, it got exciting. But I realized once I got to the 50% mark that I was doing more skimming than I probably should, and I've decided that I'm not going to read this book to the end.
My first book by this author was FIREFLY, and it is one of the best romances I've ever read: a Western romance with a heroine trapped under her cruel and manipulative family's thumb and a drunken doctor haunted by the past who wants to be redeemed. It is a romance in every sense of the word and, more than that, it's a tale of redemption, and of two wounded people taking solace in each other. I was moved to tears at points, heart in my throat. I was fully invested in the characters, and their pains and their victories felt like my own. I'd gladly recommend that book to anyone.
LEGACY OF HONOR, on the other hand, is a true bodice-ripper, replete with OTT wtfery and a cruel, morally grey hero who could easily double as the villain. Alexandra is an ingenue in Post-Revolutionary France. Her father was murdered by the guillotine. Now living with her aunt and step-uncle, she aspires to the trappings of the noble class, which is where she meets Mikhail.
Mikhail is a Russian count and a spy who wants to bring about the end of Napoleon's tyranny. He's taken with Alexandra and once he realizes how useful she is, he wants to use her as a spy. In some ways, LEGACY OF HONOR is like RED SPARROW, if RED SPARROW took place in the past and was written from the female gaze. Mikhail whores her out to people for information, resulting in a very strange and disturbing naked sex scene. He doesn't realize that she's a virgin until he has sex with her not-so-nicely, although that doesn't stop him from raping her later, in anger.
The scenes in this book are brutal but expected in a book about war. The hero is nearly whipped to death by the French. The heroine is held captive in a barn and subjected to sexual abuse. War is depicted as the zero-sum game that it is, and we see exactly what people do when they have either too much power or not enough of it. I know the disturbing content in this book will likely be too much for some. The whipping scene was definitely hard for me to read (and so was the rape). But what really put a nail in this book's coffin was that it felt WAY too long. It looks like the paperback is almost 600 pages, but it just felt like-- to me-- that there were too many scenes that were focused on wandering around or on side characters whose stories weren't all that focal to the plot.
I will say that I respect this author keeping her book intact. She has a foreword about how she considered making her book more palatable to modern audiences but decided to keep it in its original form. I like how vintage romance novels act as a snapshot of societal attitudes back in the day, and show the "tone" of how such knowledge of history was delivered. I've read books where the authors edited and rewrote their bodice-rippers and some of them, like Fern Michaels' end up being awful.
Even though this book wasn't for me, I think it will be a four or five star read for others. It has some very memorable scenes and I thought both leads were interesting. It was just too, well, boring.
💙 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.
You might know me as Nenia Campbell, but my full title is Queen of Literary Trash, Protector of Out-of-Print Gems, Khaleesi of Bodice Rippers, Mother of Smut, the Unrepentant, Breaker of Convention, Lady of Take Your Misogyny and F*ck It. So obviously when the Goodreads blurb for this book advertises VALLEY OF THE DOLLS as an "
addictively entertaining trash classic," you know I just have to read it.
For several days, the adventures of Neely, Anne, and Jennifer held me in thrall. I figuratively clutched at my pearls. I felt my insides figuratively curdle in disgust. I cringed, I laughed, I teared up. These women sometimes made me want to slap a witch, but they were nuanced and interesting and fascinating. The writing fell somewhere in between Susanna Kaysen's GIRL, INTERRUPTED and Jackie Collins's ROCK STAR.
Which is it, you wonder: social commentary or trash?
Now that I've finished the book, I'm wondering, though, if the people who are calling this book "trash" read the same book as me. It's written in the vein of a lot of other books about superficiality, like Bret Easton Ellis's LESS THAN ZERO (or anything written by Bret Easton Ellis, really), or anything by J.D. Sallinger, but in particular, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED, or anything by... oh, who the hell else out there plays the siren song for the disaffected and overly ambitious? But those books have received critical acclaim and are praised as literature. This...isn't.
Here's the thing, though - VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is a book about women. Specifically, about women during the Civil Rights Era, at a time when women were suddenly allowed to pursue their own dreams while also being held to the outmoded conventions and expectations of the previous decade. Sure, you can have your career, but only while your looks last, and people are still going to judge you by the men you're roping in and whether or not you've managed to keep them. And all the while, you have men standing on the sidelines, gaslighting you: "Why are you complaining? You've won! Look how successful you are, you dumb broad. We've achieved equality for you ungrateful bitches - now shut up and be grateful." Let me tell you, some of the nastiest comments I've gotten from people on this site were from the angry dudes who were mad at me for writing negative reviews about their beloved man-lits. And let me tell you something else - that those men who bawl the hardest over criticism of said man-lits are often also the first - and the loudest - to condemn and marginalize typically female-dominated genres, like romance novels or women's lit.
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS seems like trash because on the surface it's about several young women who become raging successes but can't deal with Hollywood and New York's respective brands of sleaze and pressure, so they turn to drugs to ease the burden and let them sleep at night. They booze, they pop pills, they sleep around. Everyone's beautiful - at first - and charming - at first. It's a bit like a soap opera. But this is different than the usual brand of "pretty people f*cking"-type books, because if you read between the lines, there's some very cutting social commentary on marriage, on success, on double standards, on beauty, on happiness, on equality - on virtually any subject you can think of. And it's interesting that while books like Bret Easton Ellis are lauded as classics and their odious male antiheroes are, if not beloved than at least regarded with fascination or interest, books starring flawed and odious female characters are far less apt to be forgiven and much more likely to be panned by critics as trashy or morally suspect.
I think one of the crowning examples of this mindset are the Judd Apatow style bro comedies about unattractive slackers who end up inexplicably getting a beautiful woman who finds their man-child mentality quirky and refreshing. It's like an inverse of the manic pixie dream girl trope - except that the woman is still the medium through which the man's narrative journey is developed and carried, even when this trope is turned on its head. The woman is either the prize of his narrative arc, or the vehicle
through which he is carried through the arc. There is little to no agency. She has no hopes, no dreams, no ambitions... because that would eclipse the journey of the hero. The women in VALLEY OF THE DOLLS are in full control of the wheel - they might be driving their vehicles off the road or in some cases, crashing them in headon collisions, but they are in full control of their vehicles; they are the ones piloting their own destinies, even if society is limiting the roads. That's what made this book so compelling for me. It's utterly brilliant. And utterly heartbreaking.
This is one of those older bodice-rippers that came out in the 1970s and man, it shows. It has all the fire and verve of goodies like SWEET SAVAGE LOVE, replete with non-con, offensive racial stereotypes, and hirsute machismo love interests who act like rape is a viable means of courtship. Truly, something like this would never get published today, but as I was explaining to someone the other day, these books provide valuable insight into changing standards within the romance industry, as well as timestamped views on women's sexuality and agency, and perceptions of people of color.
I think if you read books like these with the understanding that they are a product of their times and something to learn from and not emulate (obviously), as well as a guilty pleasure that might not be representative of your own mindset and ideology, it's possible to read books like these with a liberal twenty-first century mindset and still indulge in them. I totally understand why people aren't down with bodice-rippers, though, and the FLASH OF the FIREFLY is certainly not a book to read if you are sensitive to triggers.
**WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND**
The heroine, Anne, grew up in Barbados where she was raised more liberally than she was in Scotland. Her parents, despairing of the influence of the natives, are greatly relieved when a German minister marries her and then travels to Texas, promising to send for her later. Now that time is come and Anne is on her way, but the hubster doesn't bother to meet her at the dock, and she must have an escort in the name of Brant, a brutal, alpha caveman of a mercenary, who resents her presence fiercely. He's attracted to her, too, obviously, and she to him, even if she won't admit it.
Once she meets up with the group of Germans who have settled the Texas town, it seems like that should be the end. It isn't. She isn't attracted to her husband, Otto, at all and that doesn't stop him from taking his marital rights. Then her husband, adoptive daughter, and maid, as well as several townsfolk, are all slaughtered and Anne is taken captive by Native Americans, and becomes the second wife of the chief's son. Brant comes to rescue her, claiming that they're married, and marries her in a blood ceremony before fighting the chief's son to the death.
Then she's taken to a bawdhouse with Brant, where there are more jealous OWs. Brant rapes her a couple times, she decides she might be in love with him. But oh no, Otto returns to take her back and she's pregnant with Brant's baby. One day, filled with rage, and the paranoia of a cholera epidemic, Otto beats her until she runs away to miscarry in a field, before pulling herself up by her bootstraps and basically crawling back to Brant. Also, this whole time she's in love with a man named Colin who she met as a child and has put up on a pedestal all this time, but it isn't until she insults Brant yet again and gets delivered back to Colin that she realizes he isn't exactly the man of her dreams...
This book is CRAZY. The heroine tomcats around with every male character in this book, sometimes willingly and sometimes not. She also gets a whole heap of rape and abuse, which can be hard to stomach. On the other hand, the heroes all remain chaste to the heroine, caught in the thrall of her magical vagina to the point of obsession lol. It was kind of refreshing to see a heroine be the one with all the partners instead of a man for a change, although unfortunately most of them weren't consensual. That said, I really enjoyed the action and the scenery descriptions are so vivid. I haven't liked some of Parris Afton Bonds's books, but this one is almost as good as LAVENDER BLUE.
I was going to read more of this author's books but it looks like many of the ones I've planned to read were pulled off Kindle Unlimited today. If anyone wants to do another BR of her work when they go back up, hit me up and let me know. I love bodice-rippers!
💙 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...)
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. :)
This took me over a month to read. By contrast, if I really like a book that's under 300 pages, I can finish it in just a few hours, and I managed to finish my friends' much-anticipated 450-page tome in under a day. Normally, if a book takes me this long to finish, I call it quits, but with SATAN'S MISTRESS, I felt compelled to finish because I had already clocked in so much time and the beginning is so crazy that I needed to find out how the book would end.
***WARNING: SPOILERS AND DISCUSSION OF TRIGGERS AND SAFETY***
SATAN'S MISTRESS is a bodice-ripper and features a medley of triggers. The ones that come immediately to mind are: gang-rape, rape, orgies, substance abuse, black masses, gaslighting, and child sexual abuse. I may be forgetting some more but those are the ones I distinctly recall. The heroine, Fiona, works as a milliner and suffers from a common historical problem: Being Hot While Poor. Since she has basically no rights, she's foisted like chattel from family to abuser to family to abuser like vicious cycle clockwork. She thinks life is pretty sweet when a duchess takes her on as a maid, only to have her husband attempt to rape her and then be drugged and recruited for a gang rape for a black mass at the Hellfire Club (which was a real thing, by the way). It's implied that this happened because the duchess was jealous that Viscount Huxley, #1 babe, had an eye for Fiona.
After that, she gets taken on as the mistress of this total asshole named Werington, who, I KID YOU NOT, gets his hands on some erotic literature with pictures and is like "here's what you're going to do to with me" which results in (what is implied to be) anal rape. And then lots more forced sex in exchange for being his kept mistress. Fiona develops a taste for the good life and a hatred and disdain for all men, especially those in the Hellfire Club. Even though she's abused throughout the novel, she gets some good licks in. Two of my favorite "GO FIONA" moments were when she sends the same erotic book Werington gave her as a wedding gift to his new bride with her compliments via courier and then when she saves Huxley from raping his own sister when she is drugged (without his knowledge) and trussed up as the Hellfire Club's new ceremonial gang rape victim.
Despite all this craziness, the book was incredibly boring. There were some dude, WTF moments and then there were just long endless passages of waiting for more WTF things to happen. The book is heavy on the purple prose but not badly written and it seemed relatively well-researched. This is one of those romance novels that doesn't feel like a romance novel, though, because there is just so little connection between Fiona and Huxley (or any of the men), and she just reads as kind of emotionally disconnected and damaged (which makes sense). I just didn't see things working out between Fiona and Huxley because he treats her like a total whore after her rape, assuming she must have wanted it, and when he finds out she was drugged (after she saves his sister-- and first, she has to convince him that she isn't lying because he assumes she's made the whole thing up to fuck with him) he's just like "oh whoops, I thought you were just some greedy slut" almost in those exact terms (except, you know, more Georgian-y in tone). Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here, like, ARE YOU KIDDING ME, MY DUDE.
If ever there were a man who should have, could have groveled, this is him.
I'm giving this 2.5 stars because it was balls-deep in bat-shit insanity but I would not reread or recommend.
How do I even review this? God, I loved it so much-- from the very beginning of the book, I knew this was probably going to be a five star read. Prince Kuzan is a Russian playboy prince whose exploits are as inexhaustible as they are notorious. He's such a womanizer that he's grown jaded and when his friends decide to place a bet on whether he can seduce the unseduceable woman, he unthinkingly takes the challenge.
Alisa Forseus was married at sixteen to a man old enough to be her grandfather. As if that weren't enough to end the romance of a young woman's dreams, he's also abusive and keeps her a prisoner in her own home. Her backstory was incredibly sad, and when she meets the hero, she's off on one of the rare exploits permitted to her: painting watercolors by the river.
Since this is a romance, you can obviously guess what happens with the bet. Hilariously, though, Prince Kuzan ends up enamored with Alisa, and ends up becoming my favorite kind of hero: an unapologetic jerk of the first order, traversing the line between alpha and gamma, because even though he's controlling AF, he's also incredibly conniving and sneaky, and has a lot of polish and charm that makes it easy to see why women flock to him, even though he can be crass.
Considering this came out in the 1970s, I was surprised at how explicit parts of this were. The steamy scenes are all on-page and very detailed and the OW in this book has some, um, very icky taboos. Not only that, but she's been with father and son. Yuck. It doesn't appear to have been rewritten for the sensibilities of the 21st century audience and I'm actually very happy about that because SEIZED BY LOVE ended up being everything I love in these old-timey romance novels: beautiful writing, rich history, passionate and flawed characters, love-hate relationships, and an incredible story.
I've never read anything by Susan Johnson before but now I want to read everything she's ever written!
OH MY GOD. I don't throw the phrase "best romance novel ever" around a lot, and I honestly can't remember the last time I read a romance novel that literally made me let out a huge gust of a sigh by the time I got to the last page. SAVAGE SURRENDER starts off at 99 on a scale of 100, and proceeds to repeatedly break the metrics as the plot zooms off at breakneck speed. How do I even begin to summarize everything that happens in this book? I can't. So this is going to be a bullet review.
⚜️ I love this heroine. Elise starts out seventeen or so and definitely acts her age. I honestly loved this about her. She's so dramatic and hilarious, even when she's being a twit. And her character development was just amazing. This is a woman who refuses to bow to anyone. When she is abused at the hands of her tormentors, she tricks some pirates into teaching her how to fire pistols and duel so she can handle any further attacks on her person PERSONALLY. Girl, yes. ⚜️ Villain love interest. Her first encounter with the hero is non-con, which sets the stage for their relationship. He's a user and a taker. But he's also not without charm, and if you like that old skool style of alpha hero who doesn't take no for an answer, well, he's that guy. He tomcats around and is crude and manipulative and kind of awful. But he's also funny, and it's hilarious how out of touch with his feelings he is. I don't know how Natasha Peters did it, but she wrote a likable jerk. ⚜️ Enemies to lovers romance. The whole time I was reading this, I kept picturing the couple as Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher as Han Solo and Leia. He's an immoral mercenary, she's nobility and a firebrand. AND ALL THEY DO IS FIGHT. I ate that up on a silver spoon. The back-and-forths they had were profoundly epic. Was that romance toxic AF? Yes. Did I care? No. ⚜️ So much action. Whether it's treachery on a slave ship, gallivanting around and partying with pirates, or accidentally entangling oneself with the Southern Old Money equivalent of the Lannister family, there's so much going on. It's brutal and it's un-PC but it's never boring. I liked how characters kept popping up again when you least expected it, sometimes scarily, sometimes awesomely. For example, a slave that that Elise saves in the beginning of the book ends up being able to return the favor later, and he has a pretty cool trajectory character-wise that didn't feel stereotypical at all. ⚜️ That ending though. It was perf.
SAVAGE SURRENDER has been on my wishlist for years and I finally decided I was going to treat myself and buy some of the books I've been waiting for. I liked this so much that I immediately went out and bought several other titles from her backlist. It's such a shame that she didn't write more books because I think I'd gladly read everything she wrote. LOVE.
I got into the bodice-ripper game pretty late. I was born when they were starting to phase them out of the romance literary canon, and since my mom didn't read them (and, in fact, actually abhors the romance genre as a whole), there weren't any lying around the house for me to "happen" upon and traumatize myself with, the way some of you did with Rosemary Rogers and Christine Monson. I actually discovered my passion for bodice-rippers through Goodreads, where there is an active subgroup of women (and men) who devote their time and efforts to mining these gems from the dusty racks of their local thrift shops, or in mildewed bags at garage sales. Their reviews were so convincing that I began looking for these books too, to see if they were really as wild and crazy as everyone was saying they were.
Jennifer Blake has become one of my go-to authors in the genre because she not only delivers on the WTFuqery Experience
™, her writing is downright pornographic at times in terms of how luscious her descriptions are and how broad her vocabulary is. I'm always learning new words from her that I'd never heard before, and I would happily listen to this woman describe food and furniture to me for hours; she makes everything sound so pretty. It should be illegal to be so eloquent.
My review for GOLDEN FANCY is going to have lots of spoilers because this is the type of book that you can't fully appreciate unless you know how disturbing and over-the-top it is. The heroine is a girl named Serena, and she's beautiful, innocent, virginal, et al. Her parents are dead, so she lives with a bunch of FLDS Mormons, and they judge her gentile ass but mostly just ignore her - except for their leader, Elder Greer, AKA Captain Crazypants, AKA General Unconsensual, who decides to take her as his fourth wife whether she wants it or not, and what better to do that than a bit of sexual assault? But Serena hears him coming and stabs him with a fork, and when she escapes her wagon to find all the other Mormons awake, they brand her as a hussy and kick her out of the group.
Alone, with only a trunk of belongings to her name and her dearly-bought innocence, she wanders the fields, only to happen upon a gambler named Ward. He sort of saves her, after nearly sexually assaulting her, too, but some bad weather interrupts him and instead he dumps her off at a boarding house. When he returns, he takes her to the bordello that he jointly owns with Pearly, AKA Catty Got Claws, the jealous AF OW, and puts her in his own bedroom where he - you guessed it - rapes her. Eventually, Serena decides Ward is OK, but there's lots of shenanigans conducted by Pearlie and her evol rapey henchman, Otto, to sully Serena's innocence and put her in her place, including starving her out of her bedroom to perform on stage, threatening her with assault, and drugging her and delivering her into the hands of a man who also wants her (but is too "gentlemanly" to take advantage of her while unconscious, thanks bro).
Nathan is the OM in this story and at first I liked him a lot, way more than Ward, because he's the guy who steps in when Ward goes off to do who-knows-what. He's a millionaire and friends with Ward, and he's the fairweather protector of one of the classier dames in the bordello establishment, a Spanish woman named Consuelo. Consuelo actually loves Nathan, but he has eyes only for Serena (because of course he does). Rather than going batsquat inside over it like Pearlie, though, Consuelo just executes a couple of sneaky but non-violent coups in the hopes of winning Nathan. Nathan, however, will not be denied, and manages to swoop in to marry Serena when Ward has an accident and is presumed dead by drugging Serena and then marrying her while unconscious. Such a gentleman. Also, it's worth noting that while this fuquery is going on, Serena is nine months pregnant with Ward's child, so I assume that she gave birth to the child while in this comatose state.
While all this is going on, there's a Jack the Ripper-like murderer going around and killing prostitutes. Elder Greer makes a reappearance, saying he'll have his revenge on Serena, and if he can't have the delights of her flesh he's going to whip it all off in the name of mortification. He's a special kind of crazysauce, is Elder Greer. But he doesn't have anything on Pearlie, who goes from being the madam of a bordello, to an opium addict, to basically a born-again-christian who is definitely very much pro-whip. Serena finds out that Ward isn't actually dead and cheats with him, and Nathan cheats with Consuelo while hating himself a little and despairing that Serena won't put out. At some point he threatens her with an ultimatum, and tells her that he's going to take her against her will or else die training (and then he falls to his death, so oops, maybe don't make such promises).
In other words, GOLDEN FANCY was glorious.
A lot happens in this book, and yet at times it still felt very slow. There are vast swaths in the middle where nothing of import really happens and this book ends up being much longer than it needed to be. I found myself skimming a lot during these sections. The parts that are good are seriously good. Can a book be "fire"? (Asking because I'm not exactly hip with the slang.) If so, I would say that the good parts of this book are definitely fire. Blake knows exactly how much crazysauce to pour on her bodice-ripper sundae. If this book had just been a little more concise, it would have been great.
Edit/09/01/17: Does anyone know why these books were removed from the Kindle store? All the Coltrane titles used to be up there for sale, as well as some of her older bodice rippers, and I just checked back recently and it appears that even more of her titles were removed. What gives? Is there a publishing rights issue? A delicate sensibilities issue? I must know. I wanted to buy all her books in ebook format...
One of the greatest things about the Goodreads community is that it has introduced me to books I never would have picked up on my own. I got interested in bodice rippers two years ago, and there's been no turning back.
LOVE AND WAR is a brutal read. It takes place during the Civil War and doesn't try to romanticize or sugar coat it at all. There's blood and gore and corruption and violence and rape and treachery and greed...entire family members are split down the middle of their ideologies with terrible consequences...relationships are destroyed...
Kitty Wright is the daughter of a Federalist sympathizer. Since he lives in the South, this has made her father the object of suspicion among the other men in town, with some of them even speculating that he has ties to the Underground Railroad. Kitty's mother is a spoiled, selfish woman who aspires to be a wealthy plantation owner's wife, and is resentful of her husband for freeing their slaves & having a simple living.
Kitty is a really cool protagonist. She can shoot a gun, ride a horse, and sticks to her principles. The town doctor trained her in medicine when she was young, so she treats the slaves and the poor, and she's damned good at what she does. The author doesn't tell us that Kitty is amazing - she shows us, time and time again, replete with many gory and unpleasant passages involving sutures, amputations, and even sucking out snake venom (which you are apparently not supposed to do).
The love interest, Travis Coltrane, doesn't show up until about halfway through the book. Her first romantic liaison is with one of the wealthy Southern gentlemen's sons, Nathan, although he doesn't understand Kitty at all, and wants to mold her into something he can enjoy. Kitty, however, doesn't want to settle for someone who can't love her for who she is and resorts to sneaking around with her because he's too cowardly to stand up to his own father and declare their relationship publicly.
Then something terrible happens, and Kitty's father gets beaten and lynched. Kitty is kidnapped by an overseer named Luke Tate, who rapes her repeatedly. Kitty's reaction to this is pretty realistic and horrifying. Travis Coltrane and his regiment of Union soldiers eventually rescue Kitty, but it's out of the frying pan and into the fire, because once he finds out that she's not only smoking hot, but also a) part of the Confederacy and b) a skilled doctor, he holds her hostage to fulfill various needs.
LOVE AND WAR is five hundred-plus pages of fucked up adventures, with Kitty somehow managing to stand strong and survive in spite of the carnage and the battles going on around her, being kidnapped and raped multiple times by multiple men, and being treated like dirt by the men who allegedly love her. Nathan and Travis are both horrible love interests who do terrible things to the heroine. I really admired her as a character; she was tenacious and intelligent and resourceful. Even though she did stomp her foot on occasion, she was also quick to pick up a gun and shoot someone in the chest, if it meant defending herself or someone she loved.
I wouldn't recommend this book to the faint of heart, because it is very violent and gory. It's also very dense. Hagan weighs down the narrative with lengthy descriptions of the battles and the horrors of war. At one point, she actually sits down and has a conversation with Robert E. Lee. Kitty experiences lice and mange and body odor. She sees gangrene, advanced syphilis, and amputations. Some soldiers are frozen solid or forced to eat rotten mule carcasses. At one point, she is kidnapped by Native Americans and treated as their medicine woman. It might be a train wreck, but I spent the better part of today reading this in a fever, desperate to see what craziness would happen next.
GONE WITH THE WIND doesn't have anything on this! I'm giving LOVE AND WAR an extra half-star just because Kitty was so awesome.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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