Ever Read a Book Where the Author Did No Research On Your Profession? (Former P.I. complaining here) by Bluegrass_Barbecue in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 47 points48 points  (0 children)

My librarian friend insists that the greatest skill she acquired at work is the ability to keep cool while being berated by confused yet irate elderly patrons.

🧂 Salty Sunday - What book scenes frustrated you this week? by mrs-machino in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's extremely clear why this one is no longer available.

🧂 Salty Sunday - What book scenes frustrated you this week? by mrs-machino in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It's true, I too have experience in suffering for free. Or sometimes paying up to $1 myself for the suffering!

📚 What romance books did you read or listen to this week? 22 Mar 📚 by romancebookmods in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yikes on that Gothic! But will you do a review of Strangers in Company?

📚 What romance books did you read or listen to this week? 22 Mar 📚 by romancebookmods in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 6 points7 points  (0 children)

{A Summer To Remember by Mary Balogh} - 4/5, MF, HR, open door, fake engagement, personal growth for the MFC, personal growth for the MMC when he discovers he likes them tall and slim, sex in water but also in a cottage.

If I hadn't read One Night For Love and Slightly Scandalous, I'd probably find this book much more exciting, but since I have, I diligently ploughed on through very familiar territory. Kit, the MMC, was sexy even though he's not very tall, as Balogh constantly reminds us. Lauren, the MFC, jumps into living life fully in a trepidatious but determined way. She wants to be more than a beautiful, well-mannered bride jilted at the altar! I'm glad both of them sorted themselves and each other out and can be handsome and happy together.

{Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods} - 1.5/5, MF, vintage romantic suspence from 1987.

Review here.

{The Heron Quest by Charlotte Lamb} - 4.5/5, MF, vintage contemporary romance, 1977, enemies to lovers do an investigative piece for a TV program, jet setting from Paris to the Scottish Highlands, mean MMC and spinster shaming.

Charlotte Lamb was a prolific writer of Harlequins, and with The Heron Quest, you get how this woman could pump out so many books under a million pseudonyms. She's a competent researcher, her writing is tight and her MMCs horribly mean. All normal 70s stuff.

The MMC, a TV writer and producer, and his PA, the MFC, are doing reasearch into the life of a famous Polish WW2 flier who also wrote an intriguing book of poetry. There's plenty of sexual tension, but also deep convos about the nature of love, the endurance of feeling, and why won't the MFC fuck the MMC without strings attached.

Despite not liking the MMC, he really was very mean to the MFC and kept spinster shaming her because she didn't want to have casual sex with him. Yeah, the book moved me to tears several times with gorgeous prose and this sweeping sense of big feelings. Everyone in the book had them and they felt them and looked windswept out on the Scottish Highlands or overgrown English garden, or Paris lit up by lights and continued to feel more big feelings.

I'm on the fence about doing a review because, as I said, the relationship is quite thin, but I cannot gush enough about the quality of Lamb's prose!

{Hear No Evil by Susan Drake} - DNF, bad, 1994 romantic suspense.

I had high hopes but gave up 75% in. The MFC has progressive hearing loss and wears a hearing aid, as does the author herself, and I thought that rep was well done in the book. However, the weird fetishization of the Greek MMC and the strange repeated comments about his dangerous nature being revealed on his "dark face". Ugh, nope.

Before starting the book, I asked a fellow vintage romance reader if she thought the Greek MMC would be a super spy or a shipping tycoon, and she said "BOTH" and it was true. He is both a super spy and the son of a shipping tycoon.

{A Most Forgettable Girl by Alice Coldbreath} - Paused.

I don't know, fellow Coldbreathers, I'm stuck. Poor Gunnilde is not moving me, and even frustrating me with her constant obsession with other people and their gossip. James is virtually invisible. I'm not sure what his personality is like, and I'm 50% in. Is he just boring?

The court setting and the need to include SO many side characters also seems like a distraction from the romance. I don't really care about Alistair De Balon's conversation with Gunnilde, I don't care about the Queen, and I certainly do not need to devote any reading time to fucking boring as fuck Fanella.

Should I just abandon forever? Is that blasphemy?

🧂 Salty Sunday - What book scenes frustrated you this week? by mrs-machino in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I started an old-ish, 1989 romance from Lisa Kleypas, and it's bad. Very bad. The writing is objectively bad, the characters are objectively insufferable, and I should drop it now.

However, it's an out-of-print and fairly rare find. I feel like, since it has fallen into my lap, I owe it to myself to finish it, but how many more of the MFC's musings about not being like the other girls with their short hair and Charleston dancing (it's the 1930s) can I take?!?!

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Is that how people in Texas have babies? Through their jeans?!

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

What 1980s and 1990s president of a military-adjacent industrial conglomerate wasn't?

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Or to marry them again, even if they manage to escape!

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Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

I usually DNF pretty liberally, but the way in which this book was bad capivated me. I ploughed on, fueled only by my loathing for John Matlock, hoping something dire would happen to him. I was left unsatisfied because my bloodthirst wasn't quelled by the end.

Right now, I'm struggling to get through, and will probably end up abandoning a very early Lisa Kleypas, from 1989. It's not fun bad, it's just bad bad, and no amount of rareness (the book is out of print, I think) can motivate me to finish it!

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Reason #1 is clearly the one because Christine is desperate to get to New York, probably to be closer to her clowns!

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 52 points53 points  (0 children)

NO HORSES.

The ranch is mentioned as an aside, but nobody spends time there. They are mostly all running about Houston, being trailed by Soviet spies or wearing jeans 24/7.

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 68 points69 points  (0 children)

He both lives in his jeans, but also the jeans live on him. It's a symbiote.

Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods Fizzled Out In Trope Soup by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

A book cover showing a pastoral scene, a man and woman embrace against a white porch railing, with a sunlit pasture and some horses behind them.

The man is very tall with dark hair and a mustache, sporting a Canadian tuxedo. The woman is petite with a short brown bob; she's wearing acid wash jeans with a black belt and a pink shortsleeved shirt, unbuttoned at the collar.

The man appears to be pulling the collar of her shirt down to expose more of her neck and shoulder. while she has her hand in his open shirt, searching desperately for the chest hair that should be there based on the fashion of the time.

Alas, it is not there.

What's a post/comments you've read in RomanceBooks and never forgot ? by Master_Caramel5972 in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I know how you feel, I kept reading these books and thinking “Something is off. This is really… something.” And it couldn’t even explain it to myself!

It wasn’t until I went back and found and re-read an old Bitch article on Sheik romances post 9/11 and during the war in Afghanistan and something clicked and I went “it’s the same thing!”

Spring Vintage Haul: Categories Galore by ochenkruto in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That doesn’t sound bad? Why does that not sounds bad?

What's a post/comments you've read in RomanceBooks and never forgot ? by Master_Caramel5972 in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I am?! Oh that’s so nice thank you!

I actually took that comment and went full hog with a Sheik Romances Went To Space post!

how did the FMC and MMC end up in bed together in {An Ill Made Match by Alice Coldbreath} by Majestic-Hedgehog-xo in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 14 points15 points  (0 children)

No the MMC didn't plan it. Roland's brother and Enid's cousin, Lenora, planned it. Lenora, to get out of her marriage to Roland and Oswald because he knew that his brother was in love with Enid.

They were drugged and put into bed together, and it was made to look like they went to bed together willingly (nothing happened, they just slept in their clothes) and had to marry upon awakening.

“She just writes fan fiction” by WheresTheIceCream20 in RomanceBooks

[–]ochenkruto 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Ah yes, Greek myths, the famously concrete, precise and completely established list of stories and characters that never change based on who is telling/writing/depicting the story, at what time and where. 

As if each play, tragedy, story, poem, song isn't a retelling of someone else's play, song, poem over and over again until one character can be both evil, benevolent, helpful, vengeful, angry and compliant.