Help A Bitch Out

HaBO: A Request From a French Blogger

This request is from a French blogger who goes by Chi-Chi who loves romance, has a romance blog (WOO!) and needs help with assisting a reader in finding a book: 

I'm a French blogger, have been following you for years (have to say we love you and you were kind of the inspiration for my co-blogger and I to start one of the very first blogs dedicated to romance in French, years ago now)!

(SB Sarah: Merci! And awesome! This is their blog: In Need of Prince Charming, I Do Not Think So. You can use Google to translate it if you'd like. I did – it was fun!)

Thanks to that, some readers have recently started coming to us looking for books titles they had forgotten, wanting us to help find the title. Sometimes we get it pretty fast and sometimes… not so much! For this one, after moving heaven, earth and the internet upside down, I have decided to turn to you…

So that's how it goes :

It's a kind of contemporary romance (early 90's). Two Americans working for the governement want to inflitrate and spy on an arabian prince/sheik/sultan/something like that. Can't remember if they knew each other before or met because of the mission…

The girl volunteers, and she has to get herslef kidnapped in order to get sold to the prince/sheik/sultan's harem. She knows (you have to wonder how) that she looks like the type of woman he loves, and she agrees to do it because, since she is a virgin, she won't get raped along the way. At least not until she arrives to the harem, virginity being so much more valuable and all that.

At some point, the prince/sheik/sultan offers her to the American, while she is still a virgin (no idea how she is still a virgin at that point but it was probably all part of the plan), and for everyone to believe they did sleep together, he cuts himself to dab some blood onto the sheets. Later in the book, they do really sleep together, and get really worried that she is not a virgin anymore. Annnnnd that's all we could remember!

No idea why, where, no names, no clue as to the resolution of the story. I realise these are all very generic informations, but I really am hoping that someone out there can help us!

 

Do you remember this book? And it's lovely to meet you! Hooray for more romance blogs! Particulièrement en Francais!

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  1. For some reason this sounds very familiar to me, let me do a little digging, because I think I’ve read this one! (And if I haven’t, I want to!)

  2. Vasha says:

    Nothing to contribute to the HABO, but I do have a question for the authors of that blog. I browsed around and was amazed to find few, if any, French books mentioned—all translations. There’s a tradition of romance in France—they used to call them romans à l’eau de rose “rose-scented novels”, so what happened more recently? Is there really no one writing anything that appeals to the taste of today’s romance readers?

  3. Aly says:

    Hmmmm… a specific sheik romance… like finding a needle in a haystack!

    But it’s nice to find romance blogs in other languages! Nowadays the only blogs I find written in my own mother tongue are all “sold out” and only publish A+++ reviews about the books they get sent. Instead of publishing honest reviews they’ll just publish advertisements.

  4. Emily A. says:

    I love the title (translated) of the blog! It sounds great, but I don’t speak French.

  5. Milly says:

    I speak French and have been looking for some fun sites to keep up my language skills beyond the typical business French I speak day in day out.  Thanks for the link!

  6. Chi-Chi says:

    Thank you so much Sarah for publishing our request!!! 🙂

    Some of our posts have been translated in english, not much but still, you can take a look around and I hope you enjoy it…

    Vasha, romance novel written by french authors are very rare these days, mostly it’s a matter of publishing.

    Harlequin was the only publishing house for a long time and 99,99% of their collection was translated from english. A french editor started it’s own collection (j’ai lu) about 20 years ago but they also chose to publish american authors. Last year Harlequin had a contest to find french writing authors and it was a big deal, quite the novelty… We also partner with a Quebec based e-book editor who only works with french speaking authors from all over the world.

    So to answer your question, for the last 50 years, french publishers forgot about romance, and readers and authors alike are only now starting to look into it again. We do have some books that already qualify and we hope to write about it more and more in the years to come!

  7. Faellie says:

    Hello Chi-Chi.  Thanks for the info on French romance publishing, and love your site (Disney princesses in couture!  Book lists!)

    Milly, I used to buy j’ai lu books as a fun way of working on the French that I needed for work, and still have some of them – Tami Hoag was one I remember.  Now that books can be ordered over the internet and I don’t have to go to Paris or Brussels to find them, I’ll have another go.

  8. Lil says:

    No idea what the book is, but many thanks for the link. What a great way to practice my very rusty French!

  9. Takes me straight back to 1987! I used to read French language Harlequins for my advanced high school French class – I was the only student at that level, and the teacher stuck me in the back of a room with a French Harlequin. And I think one was a sheikh book (but not this one) and of course one was a nanny/widower book – that one I remember better. The joy of book reports!

  10. Kristi Davis says:

    No idea, but there was an awesome Johanna Lindsay book like that, however they were not CIA or anything. I think it was twins or something? Silver Angel was the name.

  11. I can’t contribute to the HaBO either, but am thrilled to see a French language blog for romance! I’m also trying to work on my French skills so I’ll be adding this to my reading. Bonjour, Chi-Chi! 🙂

  12. Apparently Silver Angel was the one I was thinking of as well, I thought for sure it was a category, but apparently not.

  13. Chi-Chi says:

    Thanks everyone for the warm welcome and the suggestion! Unfortunately, it’s not Silver Angel, but we will keep looking. Who knows, miracles do happen! 😉

    To all of you who want to practice french, please come and see us anytime, and don’t hesitate to comment in english! We use romance to practice our english, it’s nice to know it works for others too!

  14. Lauren says:

    Silver Angel is definitely worth a read, even if it’s not what you’re looking for.  If I recall, there’s all kinds of sheik-alicious identical twin taking his brother’s place awesomeness in it, plus some old skool ‘this is probably rape in the real world, but hey, she had an orgasm!’ kind of things going on.  I even think the pretend-sheikh who is really a British nobleman is also a ship’s captain.  The only thing that could have made it better was pirates.

  15. Trish Olsen says:

    Perhaps a book by Mallory Rush, Love Slave,

    Rand Slick knows the white slave trade is alive and well. But not even his wealth and power can buy access to the slave bazaar.

    Rand needs a woman… with very special talents.

    Private detective Rachel Tinsdale is facing the most dangerous assignment of her career: being auctioned off as a Wall Street mogul’s plaything.

    Then the nights bring new danger: an aching desire to share in Rand’s shadowy secrets and show him the pleasures of a woman who is no man’s slave
    this is the amazon description

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