Bodice Tipplers (Bodice Tipplers)

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.

1. 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!
2. 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.
3. Sun protection - hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, long sleeves, whatever you need. Best practice for looking hot your whole life.
4. 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!)
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Shelter - can just be a space blanket, I have one in all my backpacks and my car's glovebox.
8. Extra food - beyond what you're scheduled to need, you never know when you'll get stuck or encounter somebody in trouble.
9. Extra water - same idea. A water filter, if you know there will be water sources, will work.
10. 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.

You guys you guys this is it!  This is the big one! We are fifty episodes old and we are going BIG!  We have gotten so many requests for this one - we read The Thorn Birds, you guys, and we're gonna watch the miniseries (check social media for upcoming details about watching it with us!) and we got a secret guest (spoiler: Courtney's secret brother Nate) all the way from Australia, and of course it was a whole ass thing.  We lost Courtney for half of it!  It was a beast, but we had a blast and we offer it up to you as our 50-episode birthday present to everyone.

The Thorn Birds is one of those big family sagas they used to love to make a miniseries about.  There's a big house.  There's a spite will.  There's a million characters who mostly don't matter and a million things happen that also mostly don't matter.  There's Meggie, only daughter of the most ridiculously sterotypical Irish family to every Irish its way to New Zealand and then Australia.  There's Ralph (RALPH!), tormented priest and self-absorbed piece of crap.  There's other people who are related to these people but admit it, you're really here for Meggie and Ralph.  

You should not read this book if you're sensitive to depictions of grooming (nothing sexual happens between Ralph and Meggie until she is an adult, but they meet when she is a child and he is clearly obsessed with her and behaves in a way that isn't sexualized but is deeply inappropriate), vividly described marital rape, stealthing (!) by a woman, priests breaking their vows... oh and for some reason these people castrate lambs with their teeth?  I cannot WAIT for all the furious YouTube comments about how we don't understand that "people were different back then".

She's a feisty hoyden disguised as a boy!  He wears pantyhose and makes it look good!  It's the court of Louis XV (we totally get it wrong in the podcast!)  We're still on Zoom and we apologize for the audio quality!  That's right, it's a real romance classic - we read Georgette Heyer's These Old Shades, a book with a skeevy age gap, some grossly flippant talk about miscarriage, a good old Romance Novel Kidnapping, and the kind of people who are obviously aristocrats because they are attractive in a very specific inbred way!

We have a little first edition of this book - it's not fancy or anything but we're giving it away!  So if you're seeing this post when this is a new podcast, hop on over to our social media and comment on the post letting us know what your favorite historical romance is and one of you will win this book!

This podcast is brought to you by viewers like you!  But also by Crushing It by Lorelai Parker, published by Kensington Books.  Wherever fine books are sold!

Meet gentle Lady Madelyne, kidnapped by the studly Baron Duncan!  Meet a lot of people whose names we cannot recall!  Wonder why "honor" is spelled the American way but "splendour" got that extra u!  Thrill to dastardly deeds, "dastardly deeds" if you know what I mean, and last minute court intrigue for no reason!  It's Honor's Splendour by Julie Garwood, a
special listener request!

Welcome to spooky season, where we get ghosts in our brains that make us incapable of remembering the name of the book or half of the characters!  So so sorry, "Ted"!  OooooooOOOOOoooo spooooky!  We love Halloween here at Bodice Tipplers so we decided to give you not one but two Halloween books - the first is Devil May Care by Elizabeth Peters.  The second you'll have to wait to find out about - expect it at the end of the month.

They're a bunch of nuns on the run!  He's a... Basque terrorist!  Sure!  Whatever!  There's also a rich dying New York boss lady and a missing orphan, a secret society that runs all of Spain, several bullfights, at least two prison breaks, a Swiss bank account, and some sex murders!  Look out, y'all, it's The Sands of Time by Sidney Sheldon!

You heard us - we're diving back into the Sidney Sheldon oeuvre!  Fire up your meanest YouTube comments!  Why do you care so much?  Nobody knows! Why does Saudi Arabia love Sidney Sheldon so much?  Why did everybody get so mad when we did that Bloodline episode, on a book we liked?!  Nobody knows!  Anyway, we did not like this one so get ready!

This has. Oh god, it's impossible to list all the content warnings for this one.  Sexual assault both in the past and present; gang rapes and assaults on minors theoretically consensual and otherwise.  Cruelty to animals.  Cruelty by animals!  Racism!  Terrorism!  Fat shaming! If it bothers you, just assume it's here and you're probably right.

You're gonna want to check out our website for a rundown of all the international covers of this one, of course.  I think my favorite is the second Indonesian one.  High effort!  High marks!

 Adam is a Jewish sub who's tired of seeing Christmas all over the place.  Tate is a trans Daddy who's looking for somebody to take care of.  In our annual December tradition of reading gay Hanukkah novellas, we present His for Hanukkah by Reese Morrison!

No real triggers in this book - it's very sweet.  The only thing that might be upsetting is that Adam's anxiety, which is very realistic and may be too close to home for some people, and Tate's crappy family, which may also be too close to home for some people.

Happy New Year's, y'all!

In this episode we take a timeout to reflect on the ghastly history of racial violence in America by doing a deep dive into South Carolina's ugliest past and inviting Leslie from Geeky Girls' Night In and Geeky Girls' Guide to Life to speak. The first two segments carry strong content warnings about murder, legal lynching, and a police shooting mischaracterized as a riot.  If you'd like to skip to Leslie's emotional segment, you can start around the 35 minute mark.  

He's a bear. Like an actual bear. She's having a midlife crisis. This seems like a pretty extreme response. This is Bear by Marian Engel, which won the Governor General's Award in 1976 and is evidently the most controversial Canadian novel of all time. Sounds like a skills issue to me.

You know that joke about how you can build a bridge with your bare hands and they don't call you a bridge builder, and you can saw down a tree and cut it into boards and make these cabinets but they don't call you a carpenter, but if you fuck one bear... anyway this book is about Lou the bearfucker.

This is, of course, our addition to the discourse on "man or bear?" - if you've been living under a rock, there was a whole thing that started on TikTok but ended up in print media of all places about asking women if they'd rather be alone in the woods with a strange man or a strange bear. And then a whole bunch of men on Reddit very handily made it clear why women will pick the damn bear. The entry I found most interesting was this one I mentioned in the episode from a woman who does extreme wilderness bikepacking - worth a read if you haven't seen it.

Are... are you actually ready for this?  (We were not.)

Get ready for some Jackie Collins all up in your face-parts!  Lucky Santangelo is a boss businesslady who Has Sex.  A whole lot happens in this book - everybody gets married six times, at least one hotel is opened, dirty deeds are done on yachts....  I honestly do not know how I could possibly describe the plot.  I can tell you that if you are sensitive to literally any content whatsoever you should not read this book because it has it all.  Child brides!  Rape!  Child rape!  Gratuitous dead babies!  Everybody has sex with everybody else's dad!  Racism!  Fat shaming! The idle rich!  One of these people has so much cocaine she has to have a special cocaine panic room in her house to keep her cocaine in!  So if any of that sounds like something you definitely do not want to hear about, by all means do not listen to this.  If all of that sounds like something you absolutely need to hear about.... by all means, join us.

Here we go again with my nominee for "Most Likely to Catch an Intervention For Smoking Strawberry-Flavored Crack", Johanna Lindsey!  Finally, we've read one of the kind of books I was really expecting to come across when we started doing this podcast - the kind of book I wrote our long and thoughtful On Language and Consent page about and then for some reason it's turned out we haven't needed it much.  But then we came to this one.  Warrior's Woman by Johanna Lindsey.

Welcome to Sandra Brown's Fanta-C, which should have been a sweet contemporary romance from the 80's but is actually kind of fucking disturbing in the weirdest and most unexpected way.  Meet Elizabeth, a prissy lady who wears pantyhose and slips and owns a store that sells potpourri for your mistress, and Thad (THAD!), a silver fox who has puppies at his house.  This is actually a great little book about a lady who has a rich dirty fantasy life but struggles with real life, except WARNING there is a big fat out of place ravishing in the middle of it, which we'll discuss.

NOTE: This episode formerly aired on YouTube; you can view it there if you want to see our beautiful faces.

We had the opportunity to try something new - we were asked if we'd like to interview debut author Martha Waters about her book To Have and to Hoax, you know, back then when the world was young and we were allowed to leave our houses.  Martha was really nice and we feel really bad that all her fun book release party stuff got cancelled - however, she's doing a virtual launch Tuesday April 7th on Instagram at 7 PM EST so maybe go join her there.

To Have and to Hoax is a Publisher's Weekly starred Regency romantic comedy about... well, about somebody who fakes contracting a fatal respiratory disease so, like, timely!  This is a great time to support your local bookstore, so we've linked to Martha's local Chapel Hill bookstore Flyleaf (where her party was supposed to take place) if you'd like to buy a copy.  Looks like they're doing $1 media mail shipping if you spend $25!

 She's a pilot and owns her own charter service!  He's an actor preparing for a role!  Together they are oh my god they are so boring you guys.  Welcome to a super short episode of Bodice Tipplers where our luck in series romance runs out!  It's got... well, it's got planes.  It's got a cute flight suit.  It's got a shuttle launch, which you would think would be exciting but don't worry, it isn't.  It's got rib-eatin'!  It's got getting caught in the rain!  And yet.

It's caper time!  No serious triggers in this at all, just good ol' caper stuff like chloroforming and Interpol.

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 Brig McCord (no really), a Hatchet-scenario survivor, ex-soldier of fortune, and rancher.  She's Johanna something or other, hot redhead-in-certain-lights and general doer of nothing in particular (except for, of course, big game hunting with her dad.)  It's a tale of murder, mystery, and doing it - it's Ride the Thunder by Janet Dailey!

Content warnings for this include big game trophy hunting which is super gross, including some skinning and stuff, mild ravishing, a guy who's just an asshole to women including sex workers and anybody over the age of 25, and a father daughter relationship that doesn't seem to be incestuous or anything but it just kind of pings your Bad Dad radar.  Oh and of course murdering murder.  On the other hand, anti-content-warnings: no horses die and there's a gay character who isn't evil or funny, comes out in a nice scene to his sister, and then does not die.

Jamie is fiery!  She has a horse named Wildfire that she likes to ride bareback!  She is beloved by all and has zero flaws except... a terrible sense of direction! Alec is... large!  And rude!   And none of these people know a damn thing about medieval Scotland!  You got it, it's Julie Garwood's The Bride!

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!

Guess what, y'all?  It's a very special crossover episode!  We got together with the ladies from Textual Tension and all four of us had to read this piece of crap that Fabio "wrote" so we hope you appreciate what we do for you.

So.  This book.  Jesus fuck.  He's named Ryder Remington (yes really) which is kind of all you need to know.  She's masquerading as a tavern wench to investigate a disappearance.  In, get ready, Charleston.  You know we love it when these books go to South Carolina.

Nobody actually gets sexually assaulted in this book but there's a lot of aggressive bullshit, kidnapping, blackmail, ahistorical jabronis, etc.

Because we did this one in two different states the sound quality is a little off.

Did you know that Fabio had a line of clothing sold at, I shit you not, Sam's Club?  HE DID.

Did you know that this already-embarassing book to carry around came with a goddamned centerfold, completely unrelated to its content?

She's a public menace, he's trying his best to be a devil may care rake but keeps landing on "that cat in the Pepe le Pew cartoons" - it's Dreaming by Jill Barnett, a book with surprise witches, a shocking number of shipwrecks and kidnappings, and a cautionary tale about staying away from people who are "clumsy as a character trait".  

No major warnings for this one unless you count "didn't know this was a sequel until halfway through" and "oh my god somebody save this man".

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.

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.

Y'all I don't even know, this is about an 80's lady with fake boobs who dies and gets stuck being a fairy godmother for an 1890's-era girl in Colorado.  I swear this is the god honest plot of this book.

This WOULD be delightful but in fact it's alarmingly full of some insanely intense fat shaming, plus some shockingly evil family emotional abuse, including hella gaslighting.  Seriously, this is supposed to be a light and frothy book!  And it is!  But if any of that sounds like it's going to bother you, the light and frothy tone of it is going to make it a lot worse for you.  The fat shaming gets to insane and hysterical levels (I don't mean hysterical like ha-ha.)

I think Jude Deveraux is accidentally letting her own body issues slip out, because she makes the enormous mistake (heh) of telling us exactly what this woman weighs.  Please understand that she's supposed to be so fat that the whole town feels a little sad revulsion when they see her out in public.  (Not that any weight would make that okay!  Obviously!)  But this poor girl is a whopping ONE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO POUNDS.

Thrill to the very Canadian film adaptation of LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory (you may want to listen to our episode
on the book first, but you totally don't have to because obviously we didn't prepare so why should you?) It's got Christopher Reeve and this Deborah Raffin lady we really liked and JT Walsh's butt, and it made $26,000 at the box office.  No, not $260,000.  Anyway it's surprisingly good and you can watch it for free on Tubi if you don't mind commercials!  Or you can rent it on Prime for $2.99, which is a measurable percentage of this film's overall earnings.

Do be aware, this movie (like the book) has some pretty hardcore slut shaming in it, and unlike the book has a seriously disturbing courtroom scene where the defendant's wife's marital sexual history is put on trial.  It's legit upsetting.  Otherwise, it's a sweet slow burn and we liked it a lot.

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.

 Honey is a figure of legend, a giantess astride the world!  She is five feet and nine inches tall!  She is a private investigator!  Lance (YES LANCE) is a prince!  His way hotter friend is sheik-adjacent!  This all sounds awesome but in fact it is sadly very boring!  

We wanted to read one of the Sedikhan books that everybody seems to really like - but we did not like this one.  Please let us know which one we should have read instead!

You can probably guess from this that there's some bullshit Fraudia Arabia-style blue eyed sheikh business going on here; other than that the only content warning is that Honey gets real dumb real fast for no reason whatsoever.

We have had all our shots and we are back in the same room so get ready for some seriously overexcited people!  (That would be us but it would also be the people in this book.)  Fancy Pants by Susan Elizabeth Phillips - she's a British socialite with big "See You Next Tuesday" energy, he's a hot redneck golfer with a self esteem problem, they slap each other in parking lots more than the average couple does!  Secret babies!  Imaginary Jack Nicklaus!  Real Jack Nicklaus!  Riches to rags to riches!  Found families!  The weirdest citizenship ceremony you have ever seen in a book!

We ended up really enjoying this book but the content warnings are not a joke, y'all.  It's got dead toddlers, non-custodial kidnapping, sexual assault of underaged girls, a guy you previously liked being a complete monster to a nine year old child, the n-word, 80's homophobia, fat shaming perpetrated by Eva Peron, some ladies who may or may not even be sex workers getting called "semi-hookers"... it is a ride and it is not a particularly safe or sanitary ride.  This ride has not been inspected by anybody.  Not even that sketchy dude who smokes around the gas cans. Nobody has signed off on this ride and you are getting on it at your own risk.  It does, however, have a good heart and real emotional growth in it.  It's a lot. 

He's a rich Taggart romance-novel-dude powerlifter with a big family and a sweet townhouse!  She's an emotionally locked down country mouse forced by one of those Improbable Wills to go to New York for a few years to investigate a crime that may or may not have happened to her dead or not dead grandmother and then they... put on a show about it.  Seriously, there is no way to describe this book, you just have to experience it.  There's no present-day sexual violence in this book, but her ex-husband emotionally abused her and in 1928 all sorts of awful Tommy gun business went down.

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.

We had a lot of fun talking with Denise Williams, author of The Fastest Way to Fall.  If you'd like to purchase a copy, please consider doing it from Dog Eared Books, Denise's local independent bookstore in Ames, Iowa.

Britta didn't plan on falling for her personal trainer, and Wes didn't plan on Britta. Plans change and it's unclear if love, career, or both will meet them at the finish line.

Britta Colby works for a lifestyle website, and when tasked to write about her experience with a hot new body-positive fitness app that includes personal coaching, she knows it's a major opportunity to prove she should write for the site full-time.

As CEO of the FitMi Fitness app, Wes Lawson finally has the financial security he grew up without, but despite his success, his floundering love life and complicated family situation leaves him feeling isolated and unfulfilled. He decides to get back to what he loves--coaching. Britta's his first new client and they click immediately.

As weeks pass, she's surprised at how much she enjoys experimenting with her exercise routine. He's surprised at how much he looks forward to talking to her every day. They convince themselves their attraction is harmless, but when they start working out in person, Wes and Britta find it increasingly challenging to deny their chemistry and maintain a professional distance.

Wes isn't supposed to be training clients, much less meeting with them, and Britta's credibility will be sunk if the lifestyle site finds out she's practically dating the fitness coach she's reviewing. Walking away from each other is the smartest thing to do, but running side by side feels like the start of something big.

BUT that's all!  For the low low price of this $5 used Harlequin paperback you also get: a sex pest on the mantel in Act 1 that goes off in Act 3! Labor law violations innumerable! A really awful 1981 guy! Fat shaming and diet culture that just kind of sneak up on you every so often! Sexual assault and really awful failures to support her afterwards! I am probably forgetting something!

For those of you not "in the know", Jayne Ann Krentz (actually Jayne Castle) writes under a ton of pseudonyms and this is one of them.  We wanted to read another one of hers since we HATED Ghost of a Chance. This one does also feature a very alpha dominant male, but other than the Romance Novel Peril and some kind of questionable breaking and entering there's nothing gross in this book.

This episode is sponsored by Kensington Books and The Rebellious Rancher by Kate Pearce, available wherever fine books are sold.

It's LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory, a book about not much in particular except the deep meaning of the heart until there's a war and then a... murder framin'?  This book has no nonconsensual sex but it does have a lot of discussion of childhood trauma, the past-tense murder of a sex worker, and some seriously weird slut shaming and then murdering of another woman which is really tonally weird and we expected better of you, LaVyrle.

We read this book because Amazing Human Beverly Jenkins mentioned LaVyrle in a list she so graciously gave us of vintage romances she really liked back when we did our episode on Night Song.  In the future I won't wait that long to listen to the lady because this book is so good except when it makes such weird choices in the last act.

I read this when I was a kid and it gave me VERY WEIRD KID IDEAS.  Now I'm returning to it and it is... even more fucked up than I expected?  Nora is one of those freshly orphaned smart Vicky Holt girls.  Charles Herrick, aka the Lynx, is a... brilliant sex monster?  It's hard to explain.  There's another dude too.  And a whole other family.  Is this even a romance novel?  Is this maybe a thriller?  I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.

This is going to be okay for most people but there's definitely an extremely controlling man, there's an attempted rape that ends up with the woman safe but the man's brains splashed all over the outback, there's a good bit of murdering but mostly, you know, the genteel kind.  No sex at all, overtly.

Can we appreciate this cover for a minute, though?  I love a good "women running away from houses" Gothic cover, but this one is really a fine example.

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.

We have a very special treat for you this episode! Miss Honey Analverkehr of My Mum is a Pornstar joined us all the way from Australia to talk about a book that had a big impact on her as a young person, John Norman's Kajira of Gor. Note: unfortunately, we had some audio issues with this one (we keep trying different things for these pandemic episodes but they keep on having different problems!) but we felt the content was so great we had to release it even though every time we talk over each other it sounds like we're bobbing for apples. It's fine, they were great apples! Miss Honey is fantastic and much more charismatic than we are, so you're not going to want to miss this one.

GOBBLE GOBBLE YO!  

He's America's Farmer.  She's America's Guilt.  Together they are our tryptophan turd - Stella Bagwell's Their First Thanksgiving.  Seriously, y'all, this book is awful.  He gaslights her, she's got a white savior complex, every woman in his family puts a solid 80 hours of work into Thanksgiving for five people... it is a damned mess.  We burned the book in protest.  Do you know what it takes to get two librarians to participate in a book burning?  NOW YOU DO.

The only real content warning for this one is a real "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime" situation even though a white dude totally wrote that Snows of Kilimanjaro book.  And gross gender norms.  And a truly ridiculous amount of pie.

Neither Sara or I had read this book as teens even though ALL of our friends had. We were the “too cool” girls which really meant we were painfully uncool.  Both of us recall this book being proudly displayed in the halls of our middle and high schools. V.C. Andrews was the most popular girl at any school during the 80s and 90s. She could have been crowned queen at a 114 different proms. In terms of who could generate a loyal army of teen girls it went Johnny Castle from “Dirty Dancing” and then V.C. Andrews’ for creating the “Dollanganger Series.”

For this episode we read the first Dark Shadows tie-in book about Barnabas Collins.  It's weird and uncomfortable and very much unlike the show you guys like so don't @ us.  Nobody get raped but lots of people get bitten and murdered and it's generally kind of unpleasant.

This crossover is also our last episode as part of the Collinsport Historical Society podcast.  If you want to keep listening to us, of course we'll always have our episodes here on bodicetipplers.com, but we'll be a lot more searchable on all of your podcast aggregators under our own name.

We recorded this one in... September, maybe?  Who knows!  Life is weird these days!  Anyway it's December and that's appropriate because this book has cabins! Spies! Amnesia!  It's White Lies by Linda Howard!

He's... possibly her ex husband but probably not her ex husband and he's got amnesia and is in full body traction!  She quit her high powered finance job because the FBI is paying her rent so she can let him grab her boobs!  If that sounds bananapants you're right, it's bananapants!  And honestly pretty good.  Amnesia!

This book is mostly fine unless soap opera wackitude bothers you - it does have some mild sexual aggression and boner-pestering.

If you're seeing two Navy Wife episodes in your aggregator, this is the one that doesn't have a bunch of weird audio problems!  We couldn't figure out how else to make sure that people set to automatically download episodes would get the corrected version once we replaced the file - our apologies.

Life comes at you fast!  When we recorded this episode focusing on the military and talking a great deal about our choices abroad we had no idea it was going to come out at the exact same time as our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Here are some ways to help people in Afghanistan and refugees arriving in the United States. If you served in Afghanistan, know that we're thinking about you and about how hard and complicated this is.

So!  Debbie Macomber's Navy Wife, first in her Navy series.  She's trying to cure her broken heart by moving cross country to sublet her brother's apartment!  He's in love with the sea but is cockblocked by mechanical issues on an aircraft carrier!  They get married after knowing each other for two weeks and guess what maybe that wasn't the world's best idea but USA! USA! USA!  No major trigger warnings here except of course for American hegemony and the military industrial complex.

Oh and I promised you - military tiaras!  Full mess dress in the 50's had tiaras for female soldiers, sailors, and Marines and you can see one here, from the Smithsonian.

Update: looks like the Navy just retired the tiara (along with the seriously cool boat cloak) as "optional" uniform accessories in 2016.  Which is crazy because I promise you I'd wear it all the time.  With the boat cloak.  I'd be the flyest lady admiral-type you ever saw.

Update to update: looks like you can still tiara it up if you're wearing your NOAA Corps uniform!  This is a boring PDF but I offer it as proof. AND NOW FOR THE WEATHER!

Happy lunar new year!  We rang in the Year of the Ox with Butterfly Swords, which was Jeannie Lin's first book.  It won the Golden Heart Award back in 2009 and started her illustrious career.

Ai Li is to be married to the powerful and hawt Li Tao, a scheming jiedushi.  When she discovers his treachery and his murder of her brother she escapes to warn her father, the Tang Emperor.  Except her father isn't really all that fussed about it?  She's helped along the way by Ryam, Noted White Guy.  They travel all around China meeting people and running away from people and hitting people with swords, which is delightful.

There's really no content to be concerned about in this book  - if you dig action packed historical romances there won't be anything in here that's an unpleasant surprise.

It's a happy Halloween in Bodice Tipplers land!  Get your spooky season on with Vivian, who's 16 and a pain in the ass and a werewolf!  She doesn't care what you think, Mom!  He's Aiden and he's that kid you thought was so deep and mysterious and hot in high school!  Other He is Gabe and he's... 24, and has a job, and is also a werewolf!  It's Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause!

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. 

Ever get super horny for Alexander the Great, conqueror of worlds?  You will.  Join us as we get classical up in here with Mary Renault's 1972 The Persian Boy, a book about a traumatized teenager whose vast ambition centers entirely on jumping Alexander's bones.  Heads up - this book's got all sorts of traumatic historical stuff in it including but not limited to forced castration, rape, enslavement, and up close and personal war.

We are honored to have a special guest for this episode - John Kinard teaches English at the University of South Carolina, is a librarian at Allen University, believes in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat, and still thinks a great deal about Elisabeth Shue's coat/scarf combo in Adventures in Babysitting.  Check out a piece John wrote for us on our show notes at BodiceTipplers.com!

Yooooo, it's a pre-Plum Janet Evanovich!  It's got capers and slapstick and... business!  Ivan is a schooner captain.  Stephanie is an ex-cop, now cute bread and breakfast owner!  Tess is maybe a ghost!  It's got no major trigger warnings beyond what you'd expect for this sort of madcap comedy business - gggggghosts, cold-ass Maine water, possibly a lie about a shower?, a whole ass town gaslighting this poor woman, bad cooking!  I don't want to give anything away but if you're okay with "screwball" including that gaslighting business this is harmless.

Jonathan, allegedly hot bad boy of Springfield, fakes his death and flees with his also-fake-dead baby daughter to start a new life away from the clutches of bazillionare Alan Spaulding.  Will he find love with Tammy, fellow Radiohound fan?  Or will her Bad Dad literally fucking kill them all?  LET'S FIND OUT in this, I kid you not, Guiding Light book which came out in hardback.  

Chag sameach! Welcome to our traditional holiday episode, where we do a modern gay Hanukkah romance ever year!  This one is Eight Nights in December by Keira Andrews, where Lucas meets Nate and then everybody around them has to go buy a new mop!  It's very sweet but also very sticky.

Check out our previous years' holiday episodes - there's only enough podcast for one night, but if you delve into the archive it will entertain you for four nights!  (I don't know what happened in 2020!  Wait maybe I do know what happened in 2020!)

2021 - His for Hanukkah - a trans man dom and an anxious Jewish sub!

2019 - Holiday Outing - snowed in with a dude... and the whole rest of your family!

2018 (well, we actually released it in January 2019) - Hearts Alight - sexy golem!

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!

Ayla is an anatomically modern human (is it technically Cro Magnon?  This is set in modern day Ukraine. To the Wikipedia!) orphaned and raised by a tribe of psychic Neanderthals.  This one isn't the one with all the doin' it (evidently that is Valley of the Horses which also has a bunch of blonde dudes who shop at Cave-REI), it's the one with a ton of rape and abuse in it. 

Lady Emily Turner has been a debutante for six seasons now and should have long settled into a suitable marriage. However, due to her father’s large debts, her only suitor is the persistent and odious owner of her father’s favorite gambling house. Meanwhile, Lord Julian Belfry, the second son of a marquess, has scandalized society as an actor and owner of a theater—the kind of establishment where men take their mistresses, but not their wives. When their lives intersect at a house party, Lord Julian hatches a plan to benefit them both.

With a marriage of convenience, Emily will use her society connections to promote the theater to a more respectable clientele and Julian will take her out from under the shadows of her father’s unsavory associates. But they soon realize they have very different plans for their marriage—Julian wants Emily to remain a society wife, while Emily discovers an interest in the theater. But when a fleeing actress, murderous kitten, and meddlesome friends enter the fray, Emily and Julian will have to confront the fact that their marriage of convenience comes with rather inconvenient feelings.

Get To Marry and to Meddle from your local independent bookseller or from one of Martha's - she's moved to Maine, so her new bookstore is Print, and her (finally in person!) party will be at her old North Carolina haunt at Flyleaf Books.

 HAPPY HALLOWEEN to those who celebrate! We're continuing our Halloween tradition by bringing you another Anne Rice jam with Special Guest Dr. Claire!  Last year we covered The Vampire Lestat and you should totally go  back and listen to that one too.  This time we didn't go for three hours - two and a half hours is not three hours.  We got off the rails because quite frankly this book never even got on the rails.  This book is a speedboat trying to use the train tracks.  That's our excuse here.

The Queen of the Damned is, we all agreed, where the Vampire Chronicles went off the rails.  It gets shaggy.  It makes... somewhere south of narrative sense.  It theoretically starts off where The Vampire Lestat leaves off (so if you want to know and you haven't read either, start with last year's podcast) but it actually takes half a book to get there.  It has a bunch of ancient vampires and some baby vampires.  It has crazy vampire mythology.  It has some seriously dicey understandings of the developing world.  It's bananas.  Meet Akasha!  She's the oldest vampire!  She has dumb ideas!  She's burning all the vampires.  She burns most of them but the ones she doesn't burn talk a lot!  Then a bog witch shows up and yanks her head clean off!  End of book.  See, Anne?  That didn't need to be five hundred pages!

Content warnings - it's a vampire book so it's got all sorts of nonconsensual stuff going on but,  like, even more so.  It has people who Rice thinks are asexual because she doesn't understand the term.  It has grooming.  It has bananas racism.  

Patreon alert!  In November we'll be doing a Halloween Hangover episode for patreons only about the Queen of the Damned movie!  Join now!

And as promised, don't forget to check out our show notes to see some international covers for this book at our website, www.bodicetipplers.com!

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!

Banner O'Brien is the worst possible lady doctor in 19th century Washington State, which I guess also makes her the best lady doctor around (but no, she is not good at this doctoring thing.)  Adam Corbin is the biggest assholes in 19th century Washington State and he does have plenty of competition.  They yell.  They slap.  They do it, a lot.  He's always "plundering" her various underclothes businesses.  They keep truly amazing secrets from each other.  It's a ride!

We're going where we won't slut shame you if several men, a few women, and the odd salt vampire have gone before!  We're talkin' bout Darmok and Jalad between the sheets!  That's right - we read Imzadi!

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!

Happy holidays, y'all!  We all needed something a little... lighter.  Something a little more... snowy.  Something with a mustache.  Enter Diana Palmer's The Humbug Man, the tiniest little book that packs the most chest hair!  He's another ranchin' Tate (why is that a trope?) who hates kids and loves ranchin' (childfree.)  She's a secretary who moved to Arizona to be close to Montana who needs some deep dicking, stat, but isn't going to get any until the last two pages.  It's really sweet and has almost nothing in it that's disturbing!

 Y'all, it's our first Loveswept!  She's a children's librarian, he's stripping to fund his owl-rescue habit!  It's incredibly sweet and just wonderful in every possible way, there are no major content warnings, just read this one - trust us.  

Monstrous teenagers and teenage monsters!  Thrill as mean teenagers fake deaths, fake zombiefication, fake other deaths, and then can't figure out why nobody likes them!  Chill as everybody has a silly expensive car but no moral compass whatsoever!  It's 2 AM, do your children know how to close and lock a window?

Joanna is a stuck up bitch.  Her boyfriend Dex is an insane gaslighting.... secret prosthetic makeup expert?  When Dex falls off a cliff and dies, Joanna keeps seeing him around, like, at the mall.  Is Dex dead?  Is Dex alive?  Are all of these people awful humans anyway?  It's The Boyfriend by RL Stine!

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!

Today we have a special treat for you - we got Henry from FireStarters  to read Grace Metalious' Peyton Place with us and let me tell you... it's a real Peyton Place in there.

I honestly can't even describe the plot of this book so let me just give you the trigger warnings, I guess?  So this book is trying really hard to shock you, which shouldn't shock you - the stuff that isn't intentional in it, therefore, is... more shocking?  So on that front look out for rampant 1950's racism that thinks it's progressive including whoa n-word count and awful depictions of mental illness, including a character who dies by suicide.  The stuff you're here for, though - the Peyton Place stuff - includes but probably is not limited to because my god: incestuous rape and abuse, secret illegal abortion(s), an industrial carnival accident, a cat strangled in absolutely bizarre circumstances (I mean seriously usually I'm the one freaked out by animal cruelty but the dead cat barely registers it's like that), suicide by hanging, a hard ravishing, and oh yeah a murder.

FireStarters is a podcast dedicated to discussing all the cultural references in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire", and therefore they already did an episode on Peyton Place  - but they only watched the movie!  Henry had no idea what he was in for.

 You guys.  We have done it.  We have finally gone so far down the rabbit hole of vintage romance that we have found one that is not on Goodreads.  Welcome to The Leopard Tree by Valerie Parv, reigning queen of Australian romance! 

There's a UFO!  It's Australia!  He's a... he's an ex-military rodeo bronco buster and she makes ugly jewelry and has an awful fiancé and she'd like to pretend that he's from outer space but really there's a sad and sordid little crime story!  I dunno, all crammed into fewer than 200 pages!

This book does have a kidnapping and threatened rape (although not by the hero) and a disabled character who stops needing his wheelchair because he finally realizes his daughter needs him.

Merry Christmas!  For the holiday we read Nora Roberts' Gabriel's Angel.  Despite this being listed as a Christmas book in Novelist!  Despite this having holly and a fucking snow globe on the cover of the reissue!  THIS IS NOT A GODDAMNED CHRISTMAS BOOK.  I have feelings about this.  BIG FEELINGS.

The more you know!  Her maid would have had to deal with it, and of course this is one of those books that forgets about maids all the time.  Whatever.  That's not the biggest historical issue with this book and I don't know why it bothered us so much, compared to the ghost who gives GPS directions and weather reports.

There's some pretty upsetting content in this book, including but not limited to the truly grotesque (but not graphic) sexual assault of a side character, a graphic (but not grotesque) miscarriage that's actually dealt with in a serious way, some "light ravishing" on the part of the main character and a major secondary character - there's a lot of crying during sex in this one.  There's also a ghost!  Napoleon! Proxy marriages that are also stealth trick marriages!  Magical boobs!  It's a lot!  Happy Episode 69 to us!

So here's part two of our epic Flowers in the Attic episode, wherein we invite a Very Special Guest to explain what happened in the rest of these bugfuck crazy books and then run out of tape. 

She's brought her masters' degree in performance piano and her new Trans Am to the bright lights big city Detroit to... engage in corporate espionage for her eighteenth cousin once removed.  He's a 36 year old high flying executive with the world and all the women in it at his feet.  Together they do crimes cry a lot have a gross 80's boss-secretary relationship. 

This is obviously gonna have some content warnings.  In addition to the urrrrgh of the whole workplace romance thing, there's also some child abandonment, some chucking kids into the Doberman enclosure, some ludicrous it's-a me, Mario! Italian stereotypes, some sexual callousness - the whole thing is kind of a mess.  The biggest problem a lot of people will have with this is that she's presented as REALLY young.  Younger than her chronological age.  She keeps getting mistaken for a teenager.  It does have good outfits though!

Check out our website for this one to see some international covers for this book, which are as usual amazing and also bananas! 

We were asked if we'd like to interview Melissa Croce about her new book, Single and Forced to Mingle - a guide to what to do if you're unattached and have to go do things.  (Somebody remind me what doing things is like?  I think I've forgotten!) It comes out today, so go get a copy wherever you buy your books! 

The Hood by Carin Rafferty:  It's 1992!  She's a treasury agent!  He's an... accountant!  A white savior accountant!  Just read it, okay?  This white boy plays basketball in his Daisy Dukes in it, it is amazing.

He's Stephan, a time travelling good Nazi! She's Laura, a woman he will not leave alone! It's Dean Koontz's Lightning, the first of our summer road trip books! To explain the amazing graphic my husband ran up for this - I am almost certain this is Koontz's own Terminator fanfic, predicting Badass T2 Sarah Connor years before that movie came out.

If you didn't see this amazing profile of Dean Koontz in the Washington Post last year please enjoy this gift link! Why yes, it is weird! He really does wear his hair like that! Is it his hair? I dunno, I mean, I'm sure he owns it, yes. Every day! All the time! His wife just walks into a room and there it is! People's lives, man!

So if you're new to the Koontz, prepare for some damn content warnings - this one's got wack-ass ableism, Fated Child Sex Abuse, the strangest fat shaming I've ever seen, kids burning alive, oh yeah Nazis (at least they're the bad guys, never thought I'd live to have to say that!), I probably forgot some. I will say that when we call this guy a "good Nazi" what we mean is a traitor to the Nazi cause, not the other thing. We wouldn't be reading one with the other thing.

This isn't really a romance novel - for you young people, this is an extinct breed.  It's an airport book.  It's about rich people doing awful rich people things and it never forgets to mention a brand name.  It's about Poor Little Rich Girl Elizabeth whose father seems to have accidentally set up a tontine in the family business - only one of her cousins is actually trying to murder her but honestly, they all want to and it might as well have been any of them so does it really matter which one it is?

Lady Emma has two weeks in American to lose her reputation and not be forced to marry the dastardly duke.  Kenny has to drive her around Texas to get back in the good graces of the PGA Tour so he can play pro golf again.  Why yes, this does seem radically mismatched stakes!  It's Lady Be Good by Susan Elizabeth Phillips! 

This is one of those wild Susan Elizabeth Phillips joints, so all of the content you should be aware of is simultaneously 100% for real and also 100% ridiculous - everybody in this is incredibly over the top.  The two that feel actively distressing is a major deception by the hero and this whole "blackmailed into marriage" business; on the "less realistically portrayed" side you've got a well-intentioned roofie-ing, a woman struggling with infertility who is cured by a big dick, emus in peril, a SEP-trademark parking lot throwdown, some family trauma drama, and a state fair baby race gone bad.  

If you like this one, check out our previous Susan Elizabeth Phillips episode about a book that shares some characters with this one, Fancy Pants!  Until I went looking for that link I forgot that Eva Peron fat-shames somebody in that one! That's wild!

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!

He's Justin, a doctor who just moved to Cookoutville, moved on from his dead wife, and about to move into a swank ranch property.  She's Lorren, a children's book author not interested in love since she divorced an Awful Husband.  It's Tonight and Forever, Brenda Jackson's first book!

Generally all of the potentially troubling stuff in this book happened in the past - there's an emotionally and physically abusive ex husband, an uncool mustache, a Dead Brain Cancer Wife, that sort of thing.  Unfortunately the mustache is in the present of the book, as you can see from the otherwise fantastic cover.

He's a cat burglar, she's an ethnobotanist, they both get their cardio in and it's Medicine Man has a weirdly paced baby with Romancing the Stone!  On this special Thanksgiving episode we give genuine thanks to Stacey Abrams for her tireless work flipping the state of Georgia oh my freaking god you guys!  And if you'd like to thank a black woman for doing a hard grimy job nobody else wanted to do, don't give her more work to do - give her money!  Go buy her books!

No major trigger warnings for this episode except that it's romantic suspense, so there's some torture-murder in it.  And a lot of instant oatmeal.

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. 

Welcome to our All Souls Day Spoooooooktacular Tradition!  In accordance with the ancient scrolls, every Halloween we read another Anne Rice book and invite Dr. Claire Michker to drink too much and talk about it!  This year, we read The Tale of the Body Thief, and we have nobody to blame for it but ourselves.

If you're watching the show but haven't read the books, or if you've read the books and haven't watched the show, or whatever your situation is, know that this episodes has book spoilers up through, obviously, this one, and that Claire and Sara had watched the show up through episode 5 and may have dropped a spoiler or two.  If you have no idea how it works out with Claudia and do not want to know, you might want to hold off on this episode.

This book is a smorgasbord of trigger warnings including sexual assault, colonialist racism, attempted suicide, sort of a sideways kind of body horror? and a little light nun bangin'.  If that sounds titillating, don't worry, it is also the most boring thing.  It's just Lestat talking about God to people, forever.  That's the curse of eternal life; you get to keep living but Lestat comes in your window and drones at you about religion at night.  

This could have been a really fun, tight novella - Lestat is bored and godlike, and this guy Raglan James comes by and makes him an offer - James can body-swap, and he'd like Lestat to pay him 10 million bucks to be mortal again for the weekend.  Everybody is like "don't do it, Lestat!" so of course Lestat is all "I'mma do it, y'all!" and then of course it does not go according to plan and then Lestat goes and begs for help and everybody says "We told you that was going to happen, Lestat!" and Lestat is all "Poor Lestat!"  Anne Rice then gets to expense a cruise. This should not take 500 pages, but don't worry - Lestat fills all 500 with words.

If you want to see some fun international covers for this book, check out the show notes at our website!

If you'd like to check out our previous Vampire Chronicles episodes you can listen to them wherever you get your podcasts, obvs, or here:

The Bodice Tipplers Meet the Vampire Lestat

The Bodice Tipplers Bow Before the Queen of the Damned

Avoid accidentally making eye contact with Paxton Andrews.  If you absolutely must enter a room with Paxton Andrews take extreme precautions so you don't die horribly in the Vietnam War.  It's pretty good for her career as a journalist tho.

This one has no sexual assault but it does have a horrible pointless war, an awful murder-suicide, bombings, screaming, howling, and a mammy.  (YES A MAMMY.  Yeah I wasn't expecting that either.)

You got it, we're reading Message from Nam as our second 4 for 40 book for Sara!  I would like to apologize to the Academy...

We're back with Martha Waters for her second book, To Love and to Loathe!  If you remember, Martha had the unique bad luck to release her first book the week the world ended last year, and it's been so long that she's back with a sequel.

The widowed Diana, Lady Templeton and Jeremy, Marquess of Willingham are infamous among English high society as much for their sharp-tongued bickering as their flirtation. One evening, an argument at a ball turns into a serious wager: Jeremy will marry within the year or Diana will forfeit one hundred pounds. So shortly after, just before a fortnight-long house party at Elderwild, Jeremy’s country estate, Diana is shocked when Jeremy appears at her home with a very different kind of proposition.

After his latest mistress unfavorably criticized his skills in the bedroom, Jeremy is looking for reassurance, so he has gone to the only woman he trusts to be totally truthful. He suggests that they embark on a brief affair while at the house party—Jeremy can receive an honest critique of his bedroom skills and widowed Diana can use the gossip to signal to other gentlemen that she is interested in taking a lover.

Diana thinks taking him up on his counter-proposal can only help her win her wager. With her in the bedroom and Jeremy’s marriage-minded grandmother, the formidable Dowager Marchioness of Willingham, helping to find suitable matches among the eligible ladies at Elderwild, Diana is confident her victory is assured. But while they’re focused on winning wagers, they stand to lose their own hearts.

It's out today, so get it wherever you get your books!

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.

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.

Welcome to Robin Schone's The Lady's Tutor.  She's a wealthy Victorian politician's wife, proper in every way.  He's a halfbreed bastard... oh god I can't with this racist book, I just can't.  It's about a woman who asks for sex lessons with no lab component, and then she realizes her husband sucks and opts for the lab after all.  

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!

 Jake is a biographer (is that a job if you're not Kitty Kelly?) and Dixie is... oh come on.  So there's a Missing Star, Devon, and then there's Dixie, the tow truck driver, do I have to draw a map for you or have you ever read a book before?  The Law of Economy of Characters is absolutely in play here.  This is a surprisingly charming book in that "the big lie is gonna come calling" genre; it's even a fun example of the "quirky small town" business - and Sara found it in a Little Free Library!  

This is the old school romance that has dealt with body image issues better than any we've ever read, but we should still warn that it's about somebody who gained weight and is evidently literally unrecognizable?  But he's also, like, real dumb.  Jude Deveraux is tearing her hair out because somebody is happy and not cocaine-skinny.  It also has a friend who before the book starts died by suicide, disordered eating that's also in the past, and that Big Lie plot.  (It also has hilarious geography.)  In general though it's a blast and we'd like to meet the fun wine aunt who slipped this into a neighborhood LFL!

We're continuing our annual tradition of doing a modern gay Hanukkah romance for the holiday!  This time we've got Holiday Outing by Astrid Amara.  This is a sweet little novella about a guy going home for the holidays with the intention of coming out to his parents but getting trapped in a house with way too many aunts and uncles and fucking a gastroenterologist.  Also there's detecting!  And periling!  And art!  Hanukkah Sameach!

Welcome to Nora Roberts' Opposites Attract! Their names are, and I am not kidding, Ty Starbuck and Asher Wolfe.  They are tennis champs!  Second chance romance!  Will they go all the way (heh)?  Well table (tennis) that because BUCKLE UP BUTTERCUP to our shock and disgust this is a surprise abortion-shaming book!

Seriously, we wanted to do a fun sports book where they're both athletes!  Summer!  Tennis whites!  Tennis puns!  NO.  Content warnings abound: half the people in this book has gone no contact with the heroine without her knowledge because her abusive ex lied that she had an abortion! (I shouldn't have to say this, but if she HAD had an abortion that would have been entirely her right and her decision.  But she didn't!)  In fact she had a miscarriage after he... maybe tried to kill her?  It's unclear! Don't worry, the book doesn't care! Her father hasn't spoken to her since, and he's also her tennis coach! She has no idea! Also the dude is kinda grabby in that romance novel way, and when he thinks (ugh god this is so fucking enraging) that he knows what happened he shakes her and fantasizes about slapping her.  You, the reader, know none of this for the first 80% of this book! There's lots of sex but it's really boring! Probably there was more awful stuff in this but I have a hard time keeping anything in focus after the big one!

The ability to decide when and if to have children and what happens to your body is a fundamental human right.  Forcing people into  being broodmares for the state is a dire obscenity and, if there is such a thing, a grievous sin.  Are you mad?  I'm mad.  If you want to directly help people who can become pregnant retain control over their lives, consider donating or volunteering at a direct action abortion fund.  Abortion funds act to directly fund procedures and often give direct support to enable pregnant people to travel, get child care, escape intimate partner violence, and handle whatever they need to handle to terminate a pregnancy.  To donate nationally, give to abortionfunds.org.  If you want to give to a fund local to us, the Carolina Abortion Fund serves both South and North Carolina. And as always, subscribing as a monthly donor multiplies the value of your dollar immensely because it's money they can budget for.  

Don't forget to keep calling your elected officials, too.  Even if they're absolute wastes of skin.  (Believe me, Lindsey Graham is my senator.)  They tally their calls and every one counts.  

Try to take care of yourselves and remember, you're not alone.  There are a lot of us out here and we are not done fighting.

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.

Aye lads and lassies and wee bairns (wait, this is no place for wee bairns!) This is our hundredth episode, to our vast surprise, so we're gonna make enemies and talk about Outlander! He's Jamie, the only feminist in eighteenth century Scotland! She's Claire, a time traveling nurse with a boring husband! Buckle up, sassenachs, because if you know this book you know you're about to trip over a giant content warning.

The book, the TV show, and absolutely this podcast have a great big neon "sexual assault" warning on them. There is no ignoring the rape in Outlander - it's an omnipresent (and equal opportunity!) threat, it's not something you could just skip a few pages and miss, they probably don't even have a word for it in the way that fish don't have a word for water. Forget it, Jake, it's Outlander. It's traumatic and has real emotional and physical consequences and if it's something you prefer to avoid you definitely should not read, watch, or listen here. There's also some... I don't know how to put this, some spousal discipline? It doesn't really read as abusive, but he does hit her with a belt, which half of us were kinda into and half of us were absolutely not into, so your mileage may vary. And of course there's quite a bit of beating and murdering and witch burning and torturing, just for variety.

Let us make your social distancing easier with tits and dragons! Join us in your isolation suite with my last 4 for 40 - Anne McCaffery's Dragonflight.

Glynna is a beautiful teenager living on the Virginia frontier on the eve of the French and Indian War.  Kane (seriously) is... what does this guy do, actually?  He's a rich dude masquerading as a tutor but really on the hunt for a tiara his mom misplaced.  Is that really a career path?  Anyway, this is Fiery Virginia Jewel, by Elizabeth Leigh.... or is it?  You'll have to listen to the episode to find out whether this author exists or not - we put Steve Ammidown at Bowling Green State University on it, even!  Investigations were investigated!  (Spoiler: maybe?  It's murky?)

This book is absolutely chockablock with trauma - Glynna gets abducted and serially assaulted by a guy who keeps her tied up in a cellar, which is not great, but on the other hand it's actually handled pretty well by this book!  Which is a surprise, considering this book!  There's a serial killer!  There a really dumb guy, which is its own agony!  There's a ton of racism against enslaved African Americans and a little unwelcome bit in there about Native Americans!  There's a total disregard for anything even remotely historical, which.. I mean why write this very specific period if you don't care at all?!

So, for that reason, we have a special guest - Adrienne is, believe it or not, somebody who listens to our podcast who isn't related to us at all!  Not even a cousin by marriage!  A genuine over-the-transom fan!  She's a living history volunteer at Fort Dobbs and knows a lot about this time period.  For those of you who don't remember your ninth grade US history any better than this Elizabeth Leigh lady does, here's a refresher via Fort Dobbs site manager Scott Douglas (heh, bodice ripping blockbuster):

England and France had been enemies for centuries before either claimed parts of the New World.  In North America, several conflicts over territory in the early 18th century climaxed in the French and Indian War.

As a result of France’s growing attempt to connect her extensive dominions in North America by uniting Canada with Louisiana, she took land claimed to be within the Province of Virginia and began a line of military posts from the Great Lakes to the Ohio Valley.  Virginia responded by sending a unit of soldiers, commanded by 22 year-old Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington, into western Pennsylvania.  Washington ambushed a party of French soldiers in 1754, thus starting the French and Indian War: a conflict what would prove to the beginning of a global struggle for empire.

Other colonies were quick to raise soldiers to send to Virginia’s aid.  These “provincials”, or American colonists, would fight side by side with British Army troops in several major campaigns during the conflict.  Both European powers formed alliances with dozens of Native American nations, whose aid proved critical for military success.  The French had more numerous allies early in the conflict, which helped them defeat several early British assaults. 

Perhaps the best known and most-romanticized of these campaigns took place in the along the Hudson River in 1757, which included the siege and surrender of the British Fort William Henry to French and Indian forces.  James Fennimore Cooper used this as the setting for his 1826 novel “The Last of the Mohicans.”  This novel was adapted into the bodice-ripping blockbuster film by the same name in 1992, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and his flowing locks of hair.

By 1759, British generals brought more experienced and greater resources to bear on the French and tide of war turned in Britain’s favor as they captured the Ohio country.  By 1761, their armies had secured control of Canada, and had defeated the Cherokee in the southern colonies. The British also triumphed in their global campaigns, capturing territory in the Caribbean, West Africa, and India, and defeating the French in Europe itself by 1763.

The consequences of the French and Indian War changed the balance of power in the larger world in Britain’s favor, but also strained political relations with her North American colonies.  Just 12 years later, a new war, the American Revolution, would explode and lead to the creation of a new nation.  

Look, that man is fine in that movie and I will fight you.  Adrienne was a real champ, putting up with us and all kinds of nonsense - we literally had an earthquake during recording, she got kicked out of a library, it turned out that the author might not be a person... she was very generous with her time and knowledge and we had the best time. 

She also shared this fascinating article that gives more context to the kinds of goods sold at these backcountry stores in this time period, which means that this silly book actually got some stuff accidentally right about the fabrics available to these characters!  Who knew?!  (Not Elizabeth Leigh, whoever she is.)

We had the great pleasure of sitting down with Alison Cochrun to talk about her very buzzy book, The Charm Offensive.  If you'd like to purchase a copy, please consider buying from Alison's local independent bookstore, Vintage Books!  At this time there are signed copies available!

Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then that he’s spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise’s history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn’t believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he’s a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to connect with the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

It’s spooky season you mofos! That means a creepy book. This year we leave the world of ghost banging and half assed witches to deep dive into vampires! Buckle Up because we are riding the Vampire Lestat train. The follow up to Anne Rice’s 1976 book, Interview with a Vampire, is all about that vampy rock and roll lifestyle. Published in 1985 this book is a bedazzled and spandex approach to what to do when you are undead. 

Featuring special guest Dr. Claire Mischker, we take an EXTREMELY DEEP DIVE into this cultural phenomenon.  Trigger warnings include nonconsensual biting, mass murder of blonde guys, witholding mothers, wolf attacks, excessive eyeliner, and skinny jeans. And so many pirate shirts.