Kathryn wrote in with a very simple query:
Are there any good secret baby books out there?
I was bouncing around listopia on goodreads. They have lists for everything: best gay cowboys,
best friends-into-lovers, best use of glass dildoes (okay maybe not the last
one, though there are sex toy ones). Despite the variety, there are no
romance novels with secret baby lists, or romance novels with any baby
lists. So I put to you – food for thought – are there any GOOD secret baby
romance novels out there?
This is a good question! I’m usually baffled by Secret Baby romances – HOW and WHY do you keep them a secret, for heaven’s sake? Mostly HOW—babies are LOUD!
The few I have tried have been rather contrived, or surprisingly fun and awesome. Lisa Kleypas’ Smooth Talking Stranger is something of a secret baby romance – it plays with the trope, for sure. And RT has a list of them, too, that they recommend.
But since the Bitchery pretty much knows damn near everything, I figured you could help Kathryn out: which Secret Baby romance is the Bestest One?
@Sweetsiouxsie – that would be “Lady Vixen”. Captain Saber…. sigh… Old skool romance when a name said it all….
Check out the third book in Kaki Warner’s Blood Rose Trilogy – Chasing the Sun. Wonderful book, wonderful series. Highly recommend for your TBR pile!!!!!
I think people are mostly just naming the ‘good shit’ – very likely because naming the bad is as simple as pretty much ‘everything else.’
If I can remember the name of the book with the should-be-disbarred-lawyer, the secret-baby-martyred-doormat-heroine, the orphaned-plot-moppets, the tragically-drug-addled-wild-child-other-seeeecret-baby-sibling, and the utterly assholic PI ‘hero’, I’ll happily name and shame it because it was in a league of it’s own and all of it badness, but I think I obliterated the title from my memory what with all the head-banging.
This is not one of my favorite tropes, so I didn’t think I’d have recommendations. I was just looking for things to check out, and realized I’ve read quite a few of these. Most I like, or at least didn’t mind, but I would 100% classify Chasing the Sun as STA – not because of the secret baby, but because it is a terrible horrible no good very bad end to a thoroughly mediocre series (although to be fair, I never read the first one so I’m really only calling the 2nd one mediocre). Also, Nobody’s Baby But Mine makes me hulksmash angry and I frequently like SEP, so it’s not her. The heroine is an ignorant morally bankrupt moron, which is bad enough, but even more irritating is that she’s posited as some kind of super-genius.
Two older novels with the same basic plot, spoiled young rich girls have affair/marries working class heroes, get pregnant but parents/friends lie to the heroines, couples break up, meet again later, when the babies are young boys and the heroes are professionals, couples get back together. Single motherhood matures the heroines, heroes are likeable.
Dreams of Evening, Kristin James (early Silhouette IM)
No Other Love, Jeanne Stephens (I still reread this one.)
Can’t Stand The Heat? by Margaret Watson; there’s a good review of it on Dear Author. I think there’s also a secret baby in The Mysterious Miss M by Diane Gaston.
Local Custom is outstanding SF romance, does the secret baby trope well, AND is a good entry point into the larger Liaden series. Couldn’t pick a better example.
This is awfully spoilery, but Sherry Thomas’s Delicious features a secret baby plot that emerges late in the book.
I grabbed this one because of this post, and I loved it.