One more HaBO! Mariam is looking for a book that sounds completely off the wall – with twin heroines or something and a hero of… epic jerkwaddery:
Okay, so…I've been looking for this book off and on for ages, now it's simply become a challenge that I need closure for. In about 1999-2000, a classmate handed me a book, I read it, and handed it back the next day.
There are certain things I'm certain of, and details that are fuzzy. I think the novel was set in a frontier-esque foresty type of area, which I might have been assuming was American, but it felt very “Little house on the prairie” in atmosphere.
The main character is one of a pair of similarly-named twin girls. One is brassy and medically inclined, the other more softspoken and domestic. The novel makes repeated reference to her teeny tiny waist and ginormous boobs. Green eyed, and black-haired she's referred to as a pixie and petite and it's all very tropey.
Male lead was caught as a youth banging the female lead in the stables, and is sent off somewhere to make his fortune. He sends a letter within a letter to the girls' father; the outer letter asking to marry the brassy twin. The letter inside, once handed to the brassy twin, turns out to be for the softspoken twin, but she wants to marry him so she keeps quiet about it. He has a history of mistaking their names.
Turns out, he'd banged the brassy twin before he left, but promised to marry the softspoken one? or something like that, the softspoken twin definitely thought he was going to send for her. Generally, he seemed trashy to my thirteen year old self.
There's also a kid he wants her to raise, but i can't recall if it was a kid he had with a native woman, or not his, or something like this that further besmirched his character in my mind.
There's a subplot involving her medical expertise, and needing to save a misogynist neighbor after he grovels.
Now, the interesting thing is that in my research, I've come across a novel and film called Green Dolphin World/Street that is ridiculously similar in plot to this book. I've read the amazon preview, though, and it's definitely not that classy a book.
Anyone feel bad for the quiet twin? I kinda do. Do you recognize this book?
Could it be Twin of Ice or Twin of Fire by Jude Deveraux?
Aside from the actual banging in the stables, it sounds like Jude Deveraux’s Twin of Fire/Twin of Ice series.
Thirding the first two commenters. Though some of the details are off, this sounds like it has to be Jude Deveraux’s Twin of Fire/Twin of Ice series.
The banging in the stables was with a different woman, and the switcheroo with the names is actually the work of the doctor twin (Blair) who thinks her sister (Houston) wants to marry her original fiance instead of the stable-banging dude. Of course, Blair has totally missed out on how Houston likes her new fiance, since it happens in a different book.
Hi all, Thanks for helping a bitch out,
I’ve read both of Deveraux’s books, which involve the sister knowingly sleeping with her twin’s fiance, but that wasn’t in this book. He is off to make his fortune (sent away when caught in the stable) and sends a letter that he’s ready for a wife: “plz send your nubile daughter, kthx,” using the wrong name.
I was going to add in about Twin of Fire/Twin of Ice, but I see that Mariam knows of those books, and they aren’t it.
… But now I really want to go re-read Twin of Fire/Twin of Ice.
I think it’s a Johanna Lindsey’s A Man to Call My Own
Like @AQ, I thought of Lindsey’s A Man to Call My Own. . . or Julianne MacLean’s Adam’s Promise, but neither of them are exact matches to the description (or the publication date). I hope someone thinks of this one.