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!
So I have an Instagram where I showcase books from my collection of vintage romance novels, and people are always leaving me comments asking me if I've read this or that, and to my shame, the answer is usually NO. Which made me sad. So I've decided to rectify that by picking out books in my collection that have intrigued me and working my way through them. DESERT CAPTIVE, I decided, would be the first, since it's probably in my top ten favorite clinch covers of all time.
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.
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.
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.
The only thing more fun than reading a retro romance novel is scamming one of your friends into reading said retro romance novel with you (thanks, Heather). Jennifer Blake has long been one of my favorite vintage romance novelists because of her interesting, epic plots and settings; her penchant for dangerous, villainous, and/or rakish heroes; and the luscious architecture, fashion, and food porn that really add a lot of texture and context to the story.
Warning: Spoilers abound because it is necessary to have spoilers to appreciate all the WTF in books like these. (Plus, they often have a lot of problematic content and I think it's important that people go in knowing about the content warnings with books like these.)
MIDNIGHT WALTZ is set during the time of slavery in Louisiana. Amalie is the wife of a rich plantation owner named Julien, who, despite his manly physique and prowess with the sword, has been unable to consummate their marriage. The fact that she has remained a virgin all these years remains a shameful secret between the two of them (and, presumably, the mother-in-law and servants).
One day, Julien's equally attractive and manly cousin, Robert, arrives, and the two of them have a moment involving wet t-shirts (I think she saved a child from drowning or there was a flood, I don't really remember-- too much heaving, bosomy action :D). Shortly afterwards, Amalie's husband finally starts paying her nightly visits to do the dirty and OH BOY IS IT FUN.
Only... whoops, it turns out that Julien is actually gay and her frustrated mother-in-law basically hired Robert to act as a stud to get her pregnant with Julien's heir with his miserably tacit knowledge. It's only when Amalie actually starts to fall for him and lower that "everything's 100% all right" facade that Julien calls out Robert, who challenges him to a duel at dawn. OH NOES.
But Julien never shows up at dawn, and it turns out that... whoops, the mother-in-law hired someone to get rid of him, and when he proved too difficult, took it upon themselves to PERMANENTLY get rid of him, if you know what I mean. And the knowledge of what she's done makes the MIL super sick with guilt, literally and figuratively, and she essentially ends up dying from it at the end.
And then there's a flood and MIL gets pushed off the door or whatever that they're floating on, Jack-from-Titanic style (I think it's actually a "whirligig" and not a door), and no, I am not kidding, but it's okay, because the heroine sneaks into the hero's bedroom and does naughty stuff until he wakes up and then is like, "Oh there's a priest in the other room, let's get married."
The end.
So, content warnings:
❌️ Multiple attempted rapes
❌️ Actual rape (in that heroine consents to sex with one person thinking said person is someone else)
❌️ Slavery, and no, given when this was published, it's not handled in the most PC way
❌️ Use of the N-word (1-2 times by the villain only)
❌️ Negative stereotypes of gay men + pedophilia (heroine's husband is gay and has sex with teens ...more
Sometimes the GR book recommendation algorithm is suspect, but this time it was totally on point. Because I'm reading a vintage book about pirates, itSometimes the GR book recommendation algorithm is suspect, but this time it was totally on point. Because I'm reading a vintage book about pirates, it thought I might enjoy another vintage book about pirates.
Also, look at that cover. I'm sCREAMING. Yes, please! ...more
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.
WILD HEARTS is one of those crazy bodice-rippers that doesn't know the meaning of politically correct. The heroine, Camilla, lives with her mother and young siblings on their Louisiana plantation. One day, a business partner of their father's drops by and announces smugly that her father is presumed to be dead and unless they can prove that he's alive in six months, all their property goes to him. Although -wink-, he'd be willing not to kick them off their land if Camilla decided to marry his greasy, money-grubbing ass.
Tossing off a quick "hell no" to that, Camilla decides to dress up in drag and journey out to Texas to look for her dad and drag him back home. Her secret is spoiled when a gunslinger-type named Abel accidentally-on-purpose spies on her as she bathes. She wants him to be her guide, but he refuses, and gives her a kiss instead before saying that she should be on her way. Unfortunately, she gets kidnapped by a man named Lopez, cousin to General Santa Ana.
Lopez threatens her with rape, does some nonconsensual petting, mocks her for wanting him, and then waltzes out with a "girl, you wish I'd let you have the D." Then Abel busts in and rescues her, only to discover her sans clothes and feel manly insult that the damsel he just rescued is not a virgin. Since she happens to be on a bed, he decides to take advantage of her, and for some reason she decides that this is awesomesauce. They end up having sex several more times, although of course Abel tells her he doesn't want to get married.
It turns out that Camilla's father is a soldier in the Alamo. (Remember the Alamo?) Convenient, since Abel needs to deliver a message for Bowie, and Camilla knows what he looks like since he's a friend of her father's. They run into a fake impostor Bowie, Abel gets wounded, Camilla gets him drunk by feeding him 3/4 of a bottle of whiskey before heading out to the Alamo herself to deliver the message. She hears fake news that he's dead and is sad, but marries a man old enough to be her father named Ben Archer. Meanwhile, Abel feels betrayed by Camilla, because she reminded him of his late Mexican wife, Carlotta, who was raped and murdered by three cutthroat criminals.
Those same three cutthroat criminals are also at the Alamo, and eventually Abel realizes through the gossip grapevine that he has the chance for both revenge and sexings, all in the same venue. He races over and runs into Lopez, who grants him mercy and will let him get revenge, mostly because Lopez also lusts after Camilla as well. More stuff happens, Santa Anna turns out to be a pedophile, an opium addict, and a coward, and his unsuccessful attempt to flee after the battle of San Jacinto ends up making Texas a state. Camilla and Abel end up with an HEA and the farm is saved, woo-hoo.
Honestly, WILD HEARTS kind of reads like a racier WILD TEXAS FLAME or a much milder SWEET SAVAGE LOVE. Abel McCord definitely comes from the "I chew on cigars and shit scorpions" school of manliness, like he spent his adolescence watching one too many Clint Eastwood movies. The only other review for this book complains about the sexual nature of this book and I do get that. For a bodice-ripper, this had an outrageous amount of sex scenes (most of them aren't this smutty), and a good portion of those were consensual in only the most imaginative sense. I almost got a LOVE'S TENDER FURY vibe from this book, which was written by Jennifer Wilde (pen name for a male romance author), and I definitely wondered if maybe DeWitt was a male romance author, too. The heroine's very strange reaction to rape and the male gaze-focused sex scenes (boobz!!) were a bit eyebrow-raising. Also, not a single mention of the hero's washboard abs. What? I feel cheated!
I got bored of the sex scenes after a while, but the fight scenes and battle scenes were excellent and there was a surprising amount of action packed into this rather short book. I have a couple more of DeWitt's books on my Kindle and I'll definitely be checking those out. If you're into bodice rippers and like authors like Jennifer Wilde or Rosemary Rogers, you'll probably enjoy DeWitt's works, too.
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 got my friend Minerva to buddy-read this with me, because the only thing better than bodice-rippers are bodice-rippers with friends. Also, the covers. Can we all take a moment to appreciate that cover? The original artwork, the banner font, the colors - I'm not sure who started the bizarre trend of replacing the original artwork with badly photoshopped covers for the Kindle edition, but they suck.
I originally tried reading SILVER STORM a couple years ago but ended up shelving it due to boredom. During this reread, I felt the same urge once more. For about 70% of this book, the story is dull as dirt. Maybe duller than dirt, because at least dirt has some action (worms, woodlice, interesting rocks). This book did not have that.
The heroine, Devon, is one of those spunky Catherine Coulter rejects who says "Ooooh!" when she's angry and probably stomps her foot. When the British attack her town and kill'n'rape her family, she ends up at the mercy of French privateer, Ravneau, who also happens to be the man she's had a crush on since she was a kid - not that he looked her way, then. Now, though? Now, she isn't just HOT. She is bodice ripper HOT, which is like being Helen of Troy HOT.
The plot is difficult to explain but it's basically Devon and Raveneau arguing constantly, with her thwarted ex, Morgan, occasionally popping in to remind everyone that he exists and Was There First. Much to Devon's dismay, she's much more attracted to Raveneau and even though they were engaged, she let Raveneau pop her cherry and the thought of Morgan physically repulses her. Raveneau knows that he's the one she wants, so he's generous enough to officiate her marriage to Morgan himself - only to reveal later that it was a fake wedding(!), before spiriting her away.
Around 68%, Raveneau remembers that he's in a bodice ripper and starts to act less charming and more jerk. And around 75% in, Raveneau remembers that mere caddery doesn't really cut it in a bodice-ripper and starts to be abusive and rapey. Because I'm twisted, I actually liked that part better - BECAUSE I WAS SO BORED, it was nice to have some action finally happening. Ditto when he dumps her off at an island with a resentful servant and the aura of death (his father allegedly killed his money-grubbing mistress there and they screw mere feet away from where the corpse was buried). There's some OW drama that peters out to nothing (not even a cat fight? come on), and Devon becomes pregnant and immediately transforms into a rosy Madonna, because gag.
In many ways, SILVER STORM reminded me of a less WTF version of THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER, another book I didn't really like all that much, although I could appreciate the sheer scale of OTT nobody-gives-a-damn infused into the plot. They were published just a few years apart, so this isn't really surprising. Honestly, of the early bodice ripper canon, so far my favorite is SWEET SAVAGE LOVE which balances OTT with interesting characters and good story-telling.
If you're interested in this book, it is free, although it is my understanding that like many republished bodice-rippers, SILVER STORM has been edited (read: censored) to be more compatible with the sensibilities of modern audiences. Which, okay, I get. But also, at the same time this makes me sad because part of what I love about bodice-rippers is that unapologetic grittiness. I wish that publishers and authors made both editions available on Kindle - then at least the reader could choose whether they wanted that kidskin gloves to stay on.
💙 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.
In my review of THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER, I said that Woodiwiss is often credited with writing the first bodice ripper. While she was certainly one of the first mainstream authors to publish a widely read romance with an open bedroom door *wink*, THE SHEIK has a shockingly similar formula to the "modern" bodice ripper, and it was published in 1919. The only difference is a deliberate omission of sex scenes, but it's clear that they're happening (and it's equally clear that they're nonconsensual).
***WARNING: SPOILERS***
Diana Mayo (that last name kills me, by the way - I kept picturing her as a pasty white jar of mayonnaise rolling through the desert) is a tomboyish, independent woman of noble birth who enjoys gallivanting through exotic locales with her rather unwilling and prissy brother, who thinks that she ought to be more submissive and demure. She turns down a marriage proposal from a desperate admirer (perhaps the first recorded incident of someone being placed in the "friend zone" - and like most guys in the "friend zone", he doesn't get the rules), so you know she's independent, and then rejects her brother's suggestion that she perhaps oughtn't to ride through the desert alone, except for a caravan escort of "natives," because, again, independent.
Unfortunately for Diana, her escort has sold her out and she's ridden down and then captured by the eponymous sheik himself, Ahmed Ben Hassan. Who then rapes her. Many times.
While reading this book, I kept thinking to myself that this probably would have not just been banned but probably also set on fire if it had been published in the late 70s, when all those absolutely insane bodice rippers were being published and everyone was trying to out-WTF each other. This book desperately wants to be dirty, and since sex is off the table, it compensates with violence and racism. Horses are beaten bloody, a servant is whipped, Ahmed shoots Diana's horse to punish her - twice (once to wound, once to kill), a woman is killed by having a knife driven through her heart, and a man's hand is shattered when his rifle explodes while he was holding it. It was as if the author was like, "By God! If they won't let me write about the one bodily fluid, I'll just write about the other!" More disturbing still is that all that horse-breaking serves as an allegory for the hero and the heroine's unconventional relationship: by the end of the book she is utterly broken, a shell of her former self. She admits that she no longer has any pride where he is concerned, that she would die for him... and when she finds out that he intends to send her away (out of love for her), she decides to do just that by taking his revolver and attempting to shoot herself in the head. He misdirects the bullet just in time by whacking her hand. (That must be the slowest-moving bullet ever.)
But as disturbing as the violence is, it was the racism that I found most shocking. Granted, this was written in the 1910s, so it's not going to be imbued with the PC-friendly content we expect from the romances of today, but it was still quite a shock to see just how acceptable it was to write such casual racism in mainstream publications. The n-word is used several times (both kinds); the Algerians are repeatedly referred to as Arabs; phrases like "Oriental beast" and "primitive" and "uncivilized" and "savage" are casually thrown around every other page; and the biggest kicker was this - it turns out that Ahmed isn't actually Algerian at all! He's half Spanish, half English, and was adopted by a sheik who fell in love with his mother, and out of love for her, bequeathed to him his name and title.
One of the "conflicts" of the book is Ahmed's blistering hatred of English people, and his refusal to speak in anything but French or Arabic. It turns out that his father was abusive to his mother, and that's why he hates English people. When he found out about his English heritage, he threw a major temper tantrum, refused his title, ran off to the desert, and never spoke English again (even though apparently he can speak it and understand it). Part of the reason he was so cruel to Diana is because it made him feel like he was getting back at his father and his father's people, which is all kinds of messed up. Seriously, dude?
Also, Diana is kidnapped by a rival sheik named Ibraheim and of course he's ugly and dirty and fat and has blackened teeth and really dark skin (although not so dark, the book says, that you can't see the dirt all over him). I've never seen an author use so many adjectives to make a character as unappealing as possible. He even "speaks French villainously" and I'm not sure how one speaks a language villainously, but there you go. At this point, I was giving the book the stink-eye, and when I found out Ahmed wasn't even Algerian, I got even angrier, because it felt like the message was, "Oh, he's white after all, so it's not bad, and that's why he's better." This is why I tend to avoid reading bodice rippers about sheiks and Native Americans - they always do this. The alleged hero of color is always a "half-breed" (and yes, they do describe them that way in the blurbs sometimes), and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with being biracial or multiracial, there is something wrong with making a character part white for the purpose of suggesting that this "whiteness" makes them better.
This book was popular enough that a movie was created by the same name, starring Rudolph Valentino. The movie is supposed to be a lot better (no rape, I believe), and Rudolph Valentino is a babe and a half, so if you're interested in this story that seems to be the way to go (although if you're feeling masochistic, you can grab it for free on Kindle). I noticed that there is a sequel available called THE SONS OF THE SHEIK. It isn't available for Kindle in English, but I did find a Spanish version, so if I ever feel like I want to work for my masochism, I'll buy that and let loose.
Interestingly, the plot of this story is very similar to Johanna Lindsey's CAPTIVE BRIDE, from the escape attempts, to the rival sheik, to the fact that the sheik is half-white. I'm sure Lindsey was probably inspired by THE SHEIK, but wanted to write a modern, sexier version (now with 80% less racial stereotypes!). She succeeded - I vastly preferred CAPTIVE BRIDE to this. I'm giving THE SHEIK two stars instead of the one it probably deserved because the constant melodrama could sometimes lead to unintentional hilarity, rather like Louisa May Alcott's rather bodice-rippery and decidedly lesser-known book, A LONG FATAL LOVE CHASE. Yes, the Louisa May Alcott of LITTLE WOMEN fame. Talk about another book that also desperately wanted to be dirty...
P.S. Another way you can really feel the 1910s is the fact that everybody in this book chain-smokes, often at hilariously inopportune times. When Diana escapes the sheik, she stops under a palm tree and lights up. #SmokingBreak
Books like this are why I read bodice rippers. Okay, some of them are bad, and reading them is a meta-experience tantamount to MST3K, where the bulk of the enjoyment is making fun of what a festering pile of fail they are. But on the other hand, some of these vintage delights are genuinely good, on their own merit, and while cheesy and oftentimes un-PC, they tell a damn good story.
THIS OTHER EDEN was recently rereleased for Kindle via Endeavour Press, and so was its sequel, THE PRINCE OF EDEN. THE EDEN PASSION is to be released shortly after - and I know this, because I was lucky enough to receive a FREE copy of the third book in this series for review. You know what that means - a reread of the first book, and a gleeful binge of the second, before dive-bombing into the third. Romance novels are like potato chips: you don't consume just one. YOU EAT THEM ALL. ...Or, failing that, you eat as many as you can before someone rips the bag from you.
THIS OTHER EDEN is set in Georgian England. It opens with the public whipping of a sixteen-year-old girl named Marianne Locke. She's being punished for disobedience to Lord Eden - there are many reasons behind this "disobedience": she witnessed the illegal operations he's holding in his cellar, was too proud for her station, and most bitterly, she dared to refuse his advances. Marianne waits for her fate in a charnel pit, which is where people throw the corpses of dead animals and dead human beings post-slaughter, before being hauled out of that stinking cesspit for public flagellation.
Obviously, this punishment traumatizes her on a mental and physical level, so she's sent to live with her half-sister, Jane. Jane resents her younger sister because she was always the favorite, and sees this as the perfect chance for revenge. She has her sister live in the pantry (and then later a servant's bedroom) and has her perform all the duties of a servant for her and her common law husband. Unfortunately the husband quickly falls for Marianne, and this creates tension. And yet - it's a weird tension, because even though things between Jane and Marianne are tense, they never really seem to overtly hate one another and resort to things like murder, the way characters do in Bertrice Small novels. That's a subtlety that really makes THIS OTHER EDEN stand out: all the characters are complex and none of them are purely good or purely bad.
For example, even though Jane softens towards her sister, she's still quick to sell her out to Lord Eden multiple times whenever she needs the money. And Eden is only too happy to take this blood money. He spends about 80% of the book, plotting and scheming to find ways to get Marianne into bed. (And not just any bed, at one point he attempts the use of a Celestial Bed, which is a very real and ridiculous thing.) At first it's a matter of domination and pride, but then he actually starts to love her - but unfortunately, he realizes he loves her only after he screws up, and at that point he is literally willing to give her anything, even the literal skin off his own back, to have her.
This is a gloomy Gothic behemoth that is the perfect example of the evolving romance genre, when the Gothics of the 60s and 70s began to yield to the infamous bodice rippers of the early 80s. It pulls off both roles with finesse: gloomy castles, smuggling operations, scammy sexologists, muddling and sinister relatives, rape, murder attempts, dens of iniquity, superstitious townsfolk, the French revolution, and so much more. But THIS OTHER EDEN goes one step further, with a hero who is truly selfish and childish, and a heroine who is opportunistic and self-absorbed. This is less a romance than an intricate (and intimate) character study of two truly terrible people who gradually overcome their flaws, as well as a realistic portrayal of class and the entitlement of divine right, and how a character might realistically go about overcoming that for the sake of love.
On my first reading of this book, I gave it 3 stars. I'm not sure what 2013 me was thinking, because this book is really, really good. The lush and vibrant writing alone is worth an extra star. Seriously, I could just swim in the prose of this novel as if it were a warm, dark sea. The atmosphere, story, and wide cast of characters are all unique and compelling. This is definitely one of the better bodice rippers I've read, and probably the best-written one to boot. If you're a fan of epic, atmospheric stories like OUTLANDER, where half the fun is the journey and the delay of gratification when it comes to unresolved sexual tension, you should pick up THIS OTHER EDEN. I don't think it will disappoint.
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.
Five years ago I probably would have grimly read this to the end but that Nenia was younger and more naive; she still had high hopes and big dreams that books with bad beginnings could have good endings. Let's all take a moment of silence to reminisce fondly on Young Nenia, sweet summer child that she was. Bitter Nenia, who is writing this review over a glass of rose wine, is not so easily fooled.
FORBIDDEN LOVE is my first book by Karen Robards and this is the ebook, so I'm wondering if Robards is one of those authors who rewrites her backlist books to make them more PC because the hero was SUCH a sleaze bag but it kind of felt like the author was also trying to make him a Nice Guy, never mind the fact that he is MARRIED and chasing after his ward who is 17. I actually own an original paperback copy of this bodice ripper so I may check it out and compare it against the ebook, because the ebook is really gross and made me feel all the uncomfortables.
I'm not really sure what else to say about this book except that if you like Bertrice Small at her worst, you'll probably enjoy this. It has the same vibe of breathless purple prose, and it's about fifty flavors of ridiculous. The sex scenes are ~le cringe~. At first I thought it was really funny but then I got bored and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Life is too short to read boring bad books.
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!
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!
This book was written by the same lady who wrote SATAN'S MISTRESS, a book that I enjoyed (sort of??? check out my review for that shit, because it manThis book was written by the same lady who wrote SATAN'S MISTRESS, a book that I enjoyed (sort of??? check out my review for that shit, because it managed to be both boring and insane). Also I bought this for the cover and the title. And also it's published by Playboy Press who ACTUALLY used to print books that weren't just pictures of naked ladies. Wat....more
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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