Episodes
-
His job is Amish! She's an accountant with an ulcer and a bad case of second chance romance! Will they fall back in love? Can she get over that weird beard thing? Find out in Cheryl Reavis' A Crime of the Heart, another of our "five heart romances"! If you're new to this, we're doing episodes on the list of books that Romantic Times reviewer Melinda Helfer awarded five hearts to (there are sixteen, out of ten thousand!)
This one is very sweet but their problems are real and grounded - if "I had your baby and I gave it away" adoption stories or religious communities shunning family members are an issue for you, they're discussed here in a way that's pretty realistic and therefore troubling to some people. Spoiler - they do not go find the adopted child.
-
He's Alex, an Oregon gentleman farmer with a very bad brother! She's Annie, a Deaf woman who's treated like garbage by literally everyone! Welcome to Annie's Song by Catherine Anderson!
There are some pretty strong content warnings for this one - it won't surprise you that it's full of ableism, both Original Recipe and Extra Paternalistic, of course. There's also a pretty harrowing sexual assault that starts the book off - it's not graphic on the page but it's very traumatic for the character.
-
Missing episodes?
-
This is our first intentional entry in a little project we're doing - friend of the podcast Steve Ammidown posted this fascinating spread with a list of all the books Melinda Helfer, a Romantic Times editor, awarded five hearts in a review. Sixteen books out of ten thousand! Well, it turns out we'd already done two of them - Lightning that Lingers and The Windflower, both by Sharon and Todd Curtis (sometimes writing as Laura London.) Go check out those episodes, they're fantastic books! So every now and then going forward we're going to do one of these five heart books.
This is a mercenary book, but it's surprisingly gentle - there's that hostage situation, but nobody is seriously hurt and it doesn't feel incredibly perilous. There's later a bit of a threatening situation but it is also pretty low key. The author makes up some fake South American rebels but goes to real Northern Ireland in 1987, bold move! This is a delightful romantic suspense book for its time period.
-
He's Pierce, a hot guy with a secret (and it's not that he's part of the military industrial complex, he's proud of that part!) She's Alicia, a widowed mother of two who works in a romance novel boutique! Welcome to Send No Flowers by Sandra Brown - if you'd like to listen to our previous book by her way back in Episode 36, which believe you me is equally head shaking, try our episode on Fanta-C!
This book is an absolute roller coaster, and I don't just mean the bobsleds at Disneyland that these two are trying to dry hump on. He literally kidnaps her kids in the woods! Her best friend stole her fiancé! She very sensibly takes a huge promotion and never feels like a bad mom about it, which is so unexpected in a book like this that I spent the rest of the book waiting for the other shoe to drop! (The other shoe is that Pierce is extremely cagey because he may or may not have a disease. Whatever.) The content warning that I forgot to mention is that her kids are realistically awful to her and any parent is going to be wincing hard at it. Too close to home, Sandra.
-
He's Ben, a cinnamon roll who bakes cinnamon rolls! He's Adam, a hockey coach and a pain in the ass! It's our annual modern gay Hannukah book - chag sameach, y'all! This year we read Ben's Bakery and the Hannukah Miracle by Penelope Peters.
This one does have some serious religious gatekeeping - we mention it because it is really upsetting because this dude is not the catch he thinks he is to be such a damn asshole telling other people how to do their own damn religion right. Argh! (We liked Ben so much that we had absolutely zero time for this Adam guy.) Also, advanced moppet warning!
-
He's Tagg, a Christmas-obsessed single dad! She's Leslie, a woman immobilized by a broken leg who cannot escape the holiday despite driving several states away and telling everybody she would prefer not to! He would probably be okay except that he's always "smirking" or "mocking" or whatevering his dialogue at her! For some reason his hair is very virile!
Warning: this book has intense levels of moppet. "My daddy will teach you to believe in Santa Claus!" which in another book would be hawwwt but in this one... There's also some pretty pushy sexual manipulation, when she says she wants to stop and he tries to pressure her and then freezes her out when that doesn't work. Ugh.
Also, I only just now realized that his name is Tagg as in "gift tag". I'mma go back up on this nice quiet private mountain with my cute dog and sexy furry green boots and have a drink. Happy holidays, y'all.
-
He's Scott, the dumbest fighter pilot to ever be trusted with a top secret time travel experiment! She's Rachel, a Civil War spy who has somehow never worn a corset! It's Till the End of Time, a 1994 time travel romance by Suzanne Elizabeth that has twenty whole reviews on Goodreads!
This is a silly book, so there isn't much to warn you about except that this man is incredibly stupid and that your tax dollars are being lit on fire, and you would not believe the terrible packing on display here. The book does (I mean this is a low bar but) understand that slavery is wrong and is entirely on the side of the abolitionists in it, but it does also fail the seriousness test in that upon time travelling and meeting enslaved people the hero just takes it in stride which is distressing.
So I couldn't remember everything when we were recording but these are the ten essentials you should always take when you go out in the wilderness OR WHEN YOU ARE TIME TRAVELING (even if it's a totally familiar trail - day hikers are the ones who get in trouble outdoors because they underplan!) On a routine hike you might not need any of them, but if the shit hits the fan you'll be glad you prepared - think about the worst that could reasonably happen that you could prepare for and pack for that. Usually that's a night out in the rough, a sudden weather change, or an injury anywhere between annoying and serious. Think none of that will happen to you? Then plan to take this stuff to help somebody else.
Navigation: map, compass, GPS, consider a PLB for real backcountry or backpacking trips - best practice is a paper map and compass as a backup, don't just rely on your phone! Light - a flashlight or headlamp can weigh next to nothing and you'll be extremely glad if you need it! Again, don't rely on your phone for this. Throw one in your suitcase too, I use mine a lot when I travel. Sun protection - hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, long sleeves, whatever you need. Best practice for looking hot your whole life. First aid - a simple kit including foot care and insect repellent can go in a sandwich bag at the bottom of your pack. It doesn't have to be elaborate, snakebite kits are nonsense, but you want to be able to stop bleeding, protect a blister, splint a limb, tame an allergic reaction, take a bee stinger out, that sort of thing. Leave the suture kit for people who know how to use one - if you do, you shouldn't be getting your first aid tips from a podcast about romance novels. (Pro tip, you're gonna want most of this this at Disney too!) Knife, and anything you might need to fix the rest of your gear. (So, if you have a tent, make sure you can temporarily fix a broken pole.) Roll of duct tape around a Sharpie is a good idea. A way to make fire - assume everything will be wet. No, you probably cannot do this with a bow drill in an emergency unless you've done it before. Shelter - can just be a space blanket, I have one in all my backpacks and my car's glovebox. Extra food - beyond what you're scheduled to need, you never know when you'll get stuck or encounter somebody in trouble. Extra water - same idea. A water filter, if you know there will be water sources, will work. Extra clothes - you can get wet, or the weather can change.How many of these does our erstwhile Air Force captain take with him a hundred and fifty years into the past? Well, he has some sweatpants, some snacks, and a flashlight.
-
Happy Halloween! He's Clare, a baron with a very expensive contractor's bill and a suspicious number of black armbands in his wardrobe. She's Lucy, a sheltered seventeen year old girl with a big inheritance and absolutely no friends anywhere. What a great combination! It's Greygallows by Barbara Michaels, who is also Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Mertz and probably a ton of other names - you may remember that we did an episode on her Devil May Care last year for Halloween, and that book has a guest appearance from the actual Christian devil! Old Scratch! The Father of Lies! The Prince of Darkness! This one, sadly, does not - but it's a delightful read and a great book for spooky season.
Fair warning, it includes some extremely realistic and therefore disturbing depictions of spousal abuse, most notably the scariest gaslighting I've seen in a book in a long time but also financial, emotional, and physical abuse with some attempted murder thrown in. It's not gratuitous at all - it's very well done and the heroine's legal helplessness under 19th century British law is definitely a major point of the book, but it is definitely going to hit too close to home for some people.
-
Welcome to our fourth (!) annual AnneRiceoween extravaganza featuring The Vampire Armand! We skipped Memnoch the Devil because we just did not want to read it, but don't worry, this book makes us find out what happened in it anyway! As usual, this episode features Friend of the Podcast Dr. Claire Mischker, weird audio (we had to change our remote recording platform so we all sound like we're living in separate wells) and an absurdly long runtime!
This book has some heavier content warnings than you'd even expect from a vampire book - it has a lot of sexual abuse both of children and adults, some child sex trafficking, monastic immurement, murder, bad dads both heavenly and temporal, way too much of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, and of course all the traditional vampire stuff like nonconsensual blood drinking and wallowing in angst. Oh, and it wouldn't be an Anne Rice book if it didn't have a long passage about becoming a vampire and shitting your pants.
The book I tried to remember and couldn't quite is Goddess of Filth by V. Castro - read it to decolonize your ideas about possession!
-
He's Vanyel, the whiniest teenager ever chosen for a top government position by a horse! He's Tylendel, doomed twin and bad decision maker! Forget it, Jake, it's Valdemar! This is the first in Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald Mage trilogy, Magic's Pawn - it is not a romance novel, there is no happy ending, there are only tears. The tears are, in fact, the point. It's the first book a young Sara ever read about love between two impossibly beautiful young men, plus it has omg horsies - so yes, I imprinted on it like a duckling.
There are some pretty intense topics in this book - it's got really heavy suicidal ideation and suicide, it's got a bitchy horse-what-ain't-no-horse who also dies by suicide, it's got some bad family business and some pretty intense homophobia, it's got some Mystic Native tropes, and if you read the other books in the trilogy you're going to run into some truly traumatic sexual assault and incest. Whee!
As promised, here's a write-up of Lackey's wild ride at Dragon Con in 1997! It really does involve a man who calls himself Pony White claiming he got attacked by ninjas. You gotta read the whole thing to get the whole story.
From the same source, if you're dying to know what "filk" is, here's a pretty good explainer with examples.
-
She's Merry, a naïve teenager who mostly sits around waiting for something to happen. He's Devon, the evil pirate who kidnaps her mostly by accident. It's the War of 1812!
Laura London is actually Tom and Sharon Curtis; we previously did a Loveswept by them that was a lot of fun, Lightning That Lingers. Check it out!
We've been sleeping on this book for forever - it actually got recommended to Sara by a coworker years ago, when we first started, and we should have read it then because it's a blast. The best part, of course, is everybody who isn't Devon - there's a band of Merry Men, most notably Dread Pirate Rand and Disaster Bi Cat, but don't forget Ship Pet Raven who is a person and Best Pirate Dennis who is a pig. It does have a genuinely shocking amount of threatened and past rape for such a fun and fluffy book, most of which are pretty abstract but there's some tragic backstory to some characters, some of it you'll expect and some of it you won't. And of course there's dirty deeds, some of which are quite expensive - although you'd expect more pirating? Honestly though if I'd have known this book had a queer androgynous silver haired bitchy pirate I'd have been on it thirty years ago.
-
Welcome to the second episode of our Jackie July extravaganza! This one is on Hollywood Wives, which was reissued this month. Many things happen in this book to many people! Some of them seem medically improbable! Watch Elaine, Ross, Neil, Montana, Gina, Buddy, Angel, Randy, Karen, and more as they call each other on the telephone and have exhausting sex with each other! It's bananas and complicated but it is a ton of fun.
Content warnings in this book: everything. Literally everything. We got sex murdering, incest, Evil Gays, Evil Lesbians, a ton of sexualization and trafficking of young teenagers, a genuinely upsetting botched abortion, baby selling - it's in there. (Surprisingly, this has a lot less weight talk and disordered eating than Scruples? Then again, the modelling industry has less weight talk and disordered eating than Scruples.)
We also talk about the launch of our new Patreon subscriber bonus episodes, starting with the Hollywood Wives miniseries - now sadly delayed for the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, because even a 1985 TV miniseries is struck work. Yes, greedy billionaires are standing in between you and finding out what Candace Bergen as Elaine wore to the party she hosted an hour after getting out of department store lockup! What can you do to support striking workers, you ask? If you're local to a picket line, you can join the picket or donate food and water - check the WGA and SAG-AFTRA picket schedules! You can also donate to fundraisers like the Entertainment Community Fund - remember, most striking workers aren't rich A-list stars, and they're giving up a lot to strike.
-
Welcome to Jackie July! We're dedicating this month to listener favorite Jackie Collins because we're in the middle of a Jackaissance - a fancy new 40th anniversary edition of Hollywood Wives is coming out (introduction by Colleen Hoover!) and two of her daughters, Rory and Tiffany, are doing press for it. We had a blast sitting down for an interview with them and we think you'll enjoy it, too. Later this month we'll dedicate an episode to Hollywood Wives and then we'll have an episode on the insane 1985 miniseries (Candice Bergen! Robert Stack! Anthony Hopkins?!) as a special treat for our Patreon subscribers.
In the interview we talk a lot about Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story - it's a 2021 documentary available on Netflix in the US and various other places abroad; it's a lot of fun and we really recommend it.
Have we done a Jackie Collins book before? You bet your sweet patootie we have! Our 45th episode was on Lucky - check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts!
For more Jackie content, her website has a ton of fun content and links to her social media, which continues to be updated with archival material and release updates! Check it out at jackiecollins.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
-
She's Luna, in witness protection! He's Elar, a horny eel monster! It's Courtney's birthday so we're going off script and reading Electrified by the Eel, a modern paranormal romance short! (Come for the eel sex, stay for the heartfelt tangential argument about the number and location of centaur dicks.)
So the book itself notes trigger warnings for drowning - look, it should have also mentioned a guy gets raped to death by lady eels (I mean, he had it coming, it's fine, nobody's gonna shed a tear for ol' Rick, but it's something you might want to note?) Also it's kind of a breeding fantasy and nobody has informed Luna of this fact, so that might be a bit of an issue for some people. Also this dude is a fish man but according to the cover he has nipples, so any animal biologist listeners are going to need a warning. I mean, eel reproduction is really mysterious! Maybe this is, in fact, how it works!
-
Buckle up Jane, it's the Regency! Harriet is a fossil hunter! Gideon is a viscount, which is evidently a job! He's grim and broody and has an Evil Past full of Scandals and also a cool scar! She's Tracy Flick in a pelisse! There are smugglers! And parties! It's Amanda Quick's Ravished!
Surprise - nobody actually gets ravished in this book. I know, right? There's an attempted rape that's foiled by Wile E. Coyoteing a boulder onto the guy, which is the way I'd like to see all rapists handled from here on out. There is also an exceedingly gentle kidnapping, some ugly murders in the past including one set up to make a young woman look like she died by suicide, and an awful lot of fossil talk. This author, who also writes as Jayne Ann Krentz and several other pseudonyms, often writes men who are, ahem, very forceful - in this book he's absolutely met his match and I think this one will be fine even for people who are turned off by that aspect of her earlier books.
-
Gwynne is theoretically a powerful druid! Neil is clearly a date rapist and also a bard! Anyway, here's Wonderwall! This is Talisman of Valdegarde, which - I swear I am not making this up - is an official Dungeons and Dragons Choose Your Own Adventure-style romance novel!
Unsurprisingly there are no content warnings here except for the anxiety that Choose Your Own Adventure books evidently elicit in people besides just me! Thanks to Meghan Ball, whose Tor.com article Roll for Romance: The Forgotten D&D Romance Novels of 1983 gets rediscovered by social media every six months or so and which inspired us to track a copy down via interlibrary loan. These books are hella out of print and quite expensive, so if you'd like to check one out consult your local library! -
It's time for our fourth annual check-in with Martha Waters! That does not seem possible! And yet! Her latest book in the Regency Vows series is To Swoon and to Spar.
Viscount Penvale has been working for years to buy back his ancestral home, Trethwick Abbey, from his estranged uncle. And so he’s thrilled when his uncle announces that he is ready to sell but with one major caveat—Penvale must marry his uncle’s ward, Jane Spencer.
When the two meet in London, neither is terribly impressed. Penvale finds Jane headstrong and sharp-tongued. Jane finds him cold and aloof. Nevertheless, they agree to a marriage in name only and return to the estate. There, Jane enlists her housekeeper for a scheme: to stage a haunting so that Penvale will return to London, leaving her to do as she pleases at Trethwick Abbey. But Penvale is not as easily scared as his uncle and as their time together increases, Jane realizes that she might not mind her husband’s company all that much.
Check it out April 11 (or preorder!) at Print, Martha's local bookstore, and keep an eye out for her launch events in April!
-
Welcome to the second episode of our Valentine's Day 90's Bad Boys-a-thon! This time we read Lisa Kleypas' Dreaming of You, knowing full well that we dare the wrath of the Derek Craven fan club. He's a moody emo Cockney kid from the mean streets, made his money and unsure of what to do with it now that he's got it! She's a spectacled young authoress, fresh outta Green Acres - she wants to get a good look at the big city but what she mostly gets a good look at is him! She starts the book off by killing a man and ends it by beating the snot out of a mean girl! She's a Sara-without-the-h, objectively the best kind of Sara! It's great!
This one is generally safe for all romance readers, but it does have a brief sexual assault (it's so clearly not going to happen that we forgot about it until we started recording) and a throwback Evil Blonde.
Check out our show notes at bodicetipplers.com to see some fun international covers!
-
He's a rake, a dastardly dastard, a blackened heart in a big nosed body! She's Spunky and extremely wee! There's a really hot scene with a glove! It's Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels! This February for Valentine's Day we're reading all your favorite 90's bad boys. The spiritual heirs of Edward Rochester. The rakes, the scoundrels, the emo ones. Broody like hens! Inventing Hot Topic! Thinking they're ugly! Running around being rich, because their behavior is much more tolerable if it comes with plenty of money!
Hey check out the dumb modern cover, on which she's a giant and he's Tom Thumb.
The only content warning in this book is that it's got some weird fat shaming business going on - it's not intense, especially after Scruples (my god what isn't), but it's very strange and out of place here.
-
Billy Ikehorn-Orsini is IT. Extraordinary wealthy, profoundly chic, and her diamonds have names. Valentine is the next big couture designer. Spider is a photographer who somehow now is the guy who makes a store cool. Whatever, just go with it - together they are the minds behind Scruples, the boutique that sounds suspiciously like a Cracker Barrel that put Rodeo Drive on the map for women like your mom and your aunties and your grandma who read this book in 1978! It's Scruples by Judith Krantz!
There's a serious warning about this one. This is the most upsetting depiction of disordered eating that I've ever seen presented as aspirational in a mainstream book. This book almost certainly has a body count; it depicts an "awakening" in France with a specific calorie count, it makes anorexia sound extremely chic and liberating, it fetishizes iron control of food intake as much as it fetishizes women's clothing. If you're sensitive to this, do not read this book. If you can handle plenty of fat shaming and overvaluing of thinness but not the part of the book that's a literal DIY guide for acquiring an eating disorder, then when Billy goes to France skip until she comes back to the US. If you don't want to even hear discussion of it, we completely understand - don't listen to this episode, we'll catch you next time.
It also has everything else you're imagining in a 1978 trashy airport book (except, surprisingly, sexual assault) - it uses a lot of awful slurs, it has this whiplash attitude towards gay men and women back and forth between genuine familiarity and ugly sterotype, in an otherwise sexy scene it calls a man's testicles paunchy globes - it's a whole thing. This book is a lot and a lot of it is troubling - but a lot of it's amazing, it's an experience!
- Show more
