This week, Sarah and Jane answer an email from Kendal, who is looking for historical epistolary romances. If you’ve got one we missed that you recommend, please do email us at sjbpodcast@gmail.com! (Sarah in particular loves epistolary novels, as evidenced by this discussion on SBTB from 2012). Then we talk about what we’re reading, and yet again, we agree on a book. It’s getting to be a bit alarming.
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Transcript
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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to another DBSA podcast. This is episode number 123, and in this episode, Jane and I are going to talk about romance novels, ‘cause that’s what we do here. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me is Jane Litte, who is from Dear Author. Today we have a letter from Kendal who wanted to get recommendations for epistolary romances. And to be honest with you, epistolary is one of my favorite words to say, ‘cause it sounds like it’s something naughty, but it’s not really. And then we’re going to talk about what we’re reading, including a book that Jane and I agreed on. The fact that this is happening so early in the year is only a little alarming.
This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Wicked All Night, the latest sizzling-hot novella in the Wicked Lovers series from New York Times bestselling author Shayla Black. You can download this on January 20th whenever or wherever eBooks are sold.
The music that you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater. I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is, and of course the information is also in the show notes, which are on both Smart Bitches and Dear Author.
And now, on with the podcast.
[music]
Sarah: We are starting this podcast with a short email from Kendal. Kendal writes:
“Dear Bitches and Smart Authors,
“I have been on a podcast binge lately, and finding your book recommendations quite helpful (I have an overly long list of to-be-bought or borrowed titles in my day planner right now). I’m hoping that you might have a few suggestions for a very specific type of romance – the historical epistolary romance novel. I’m an avid letter writer, and I love stories involving letters between characters. For example, I absolutely adoredMy Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale and To Sir Phillip, With Love by Julia Quinn. Unfortunately, I have had a hard time finding others like this. Protagonists falling in love through the written word is my total catnip, and I would appreciate any help you can provide in finding more like this.
…
“Thanks,
“Kendal”
Sarah: Oh, Kendal. You might want to buy a whole second day planner because we, we have a lot of recommendations for you.
Jane Litte: The one that sticks out in my mind has always been the Connie Brockway one.
Sarah: My Dearest Enemy?
Jane: Yeah.
Sarah: Have you read that one?
Jane: Oh, yeah, I read all of her books. Before she, she kind of dropped off the face of the earth, and then she went to Amazon?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: I haven’t, I read part of her first book from Amazon, and it just, it didn’t have the same flavor for me. You know what’s weird is that I really love Connie Brockway’s books. I generally haven’t re-read them for a long time. Occasionally I’ll pull out, like, a Julie Garwood or, like, a Loretta Chase or Joan Wolf. There’s some authors I re-read regularly. But as much as I have great memories of Connie Brockway’s books and I think she’s a terrific writer – am I even talking about the same author? I’m looking at her historical romance –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: – and I’m like, wait a minute…
Sarah: Are you talking about the wrong person?
Jane: Well, she wrote All Through the Night, right? Yes, yes, same author!
[Laughter]
Sarah: Good morning.
Jane: I’m looking at her newer books, and I’m like, I haven’t ever read these books. Who is this person?
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: Am I getting her confused? ‘Cause some, you know, those Avon authors, even though they were different, I got them, they were all kind of smushed together in my head.
Sarah: Oh, no, I totally what, know what you mean. There’s a couple authors whose names I completely mix up when I try to remember their titles.
Jane: So, yeah, Connie Brockway’s My Dearest Enemy was the first book that had come to mind, ‘cause they actually include letters. I mean, I feel like in an epistolary romance, if there’s no actual letters in the text, it’s not a true epistolary romance.
Sarah: And there’s also degrees. Like, is the entire thing told in letters, or is it just an accent that’s sort of a heavy element to the storytelling? Like, there’s a, a Meg Cabot novel that I really, really enjoyed called The Boy Next Door, and it’s all in email and letters.
Jane: Right.
Sarah: But there’s this one scene at the end of the book, because every single part of the book is an email or a letter, there’s a part at the end when, you know, bad stuff is happening and she’s sitting in the stairwell with her laptop writing a letter: I just heard the door open! The bad guy’s coming down the stairs! And I’m like, pick up your laptop and run, dummy! What are you doing? So the, the idea that you have to sustain it all the way through the book can make it really, really tricky –
Jane: So –
Sarah: – when there’s bad guys.
[Laughter]
Jane: Right. So, like, a book that I remember that’s kind of a love story is Griffin & Sabine. I don’t – do you remember this? It came out –
Sarah: No.
Jane: It came out in 1991, and it was really kind of neat because it’s a smallish book, and it actually contains the letters. It’s all it is is the letters, and it’s small. The letters that the couple exchange –
Sarah: Ooh.
Jane: – and it’s, there’s gra-, there’s kind of like little, not graphics, illustrations and things, and it’s not a popup book, but it has artifacts in it.
Sarah: Ohh.
Jane: I didn’t, I guess there’s other books in this series, but I never read anything beyond the first book. I honestly can’t tell you what the story is about. I just remember being kind of enchanted with the paper production of this book, which was unusual.
Sarah: That is cool. I imagine very expensive and impossible to do now.
Jane: No, it’s, like, fifteen dollars on Amazon.
Sarah: Oh, really! Cool!
Jane: Yeah, so, so, I mean, if you really love epistolary romances, you might want to look into Griffin & Sabine. So, those are the two things that I had come up with.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: Those are, those are my homework assignment – [laughs] – for the podcast.
Sarah: I was doing a Google search. One of the things that popped up was one of your Daily Deals posts. Oh, this is from, like, last month. Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger, which is a, a male/male, but I think that’s, that’s contemporary.
Jane: Yeah, I, I think that that’s right. I love that yours is the first thing that comes up. GS vs. STA: Epistolary Romances.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah, Good Shit versus Shit To Avoid. Yeah. I, I am very sad that often when I research something, I end up pulling up my own website and going, oh, wow, I wrote that? That’s amazing! I had no idea! I didn’t remember it at all. I, my memory is a sad thing, and it’s, and it’s weird because you had recommended that, that historical romance by Erin Satie about the woman who brews ink, The Love Knot?
Jane: Oh, did that, was – I, I saw that you liked that book, and I thought, holy shit! [Laughs]
Sarah: I know! It is a rare thing.
Jane: So – I know. It’s – how funny. Well, we’ll have to talk about that book. The Goodreads list of popular epistolary romances made me laugh so hard.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: Did you look at it at all?
Sarah: No, what does it have on it?
Jane: They also include 50 Shades. Was there – ? I mean, I admit, I didn’t read part two and part three, so it maybe that there were letters in there, but I don’t remember any letters in the first one.
Sarah: Well, there were email messages –
Jane: Okay.
Sarah: – and there was a handful of them, and I remember them because that was the only part of the book that I liked.
Jane: Oh. You know, I do remember the emails. It was so funny, though. Doesn’t, didn’t E. L. James admit that someone else wrote those?
Sarah: What? No, I didn’t know this. Are you kidding?
Jane: Yeah, okay, so, a friend of hers or something was the person who actually wrote, like, the, the email exchanges.
Sarah: From what’s-his-face. Somebody else wrote that.
Jane: Yes.
Sarah: Oh, my God! [Laughs] That’s terrible! Oh, my dear Lord.
Jane: I’m pretty sure –
Sarah: Wow.
Jane: – I’m pretty sure I read that. Somewhere.
Sarah: Oh, my, well, you know what, those were the best part of the, of the book for me, because it was – I think I even said that in my review – that was the one thing that I really enjoyed, because it was – and, and clearly this comes from my dislike of being in the heroine’s head, which I had the same problem with Twilight, not surprising – that was the only voice I liked, and he was, you know, one or two paragraphs per chapter. I mean, setting aside the idea –
Jane: I did –
Sarah: – that this billionaire has all this time to write email to this co-ed – put, put that whole thing aside – he was the only voice of the thing I liked.
Jane: Yeah, I did think that they, tho-, those are clever. I, I swear to God I read that somewhere. I mean, I could be wrong, but I, I, I remember reading that and thinking that the best part of the book, like you said, wasn’t authored by James herself –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: – but that it, it came from a friend of hers.
Sarah: Oh, my gosh. Well, I have a couple. Well, a couple is two, right? I have more than two. I have, like, eight recommendations for Kendal, so get ready. And if you’re thinking, crap, I have to grab a pen and write these down, no you don’t, ‘cause we have show notes, and in the show notes I always link to every book that we discuss so that if you’re curious about them, you can go find them, and if you are thinking, I want to read more historical epistolary romance, I am here to help you out.
First, I will link to the Good Shit versus Shit to Avoid: Epistolary Romances post from 2012. There are a ton of options in the comments, both contemporary and historical. There’s a couple of really good books recommended, so if you’re curious, that entry is a good place to start, and I’ll make sure that I link to it, but I have more. I love epistolary books, even the ones that aren’t primarily romance, so I’ve gathered a couple of my favorite historical ones, as well as some books that I’ve seen mentioned as being awesome and some that aren’t quite romances but have a lovely, lovely quality to them that I think sort of matches what Kendal liked about the books that she mentioned.
So, first off, 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and the followup is called the Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. They’re both memoirs, because this actually happened to her, but it’s about a correspondence between a woman in New York, the author, and a bookshop and its manager on Charing Cross Road in London. It’s not a romance, but it is so incredibly lovely, and it has a kind of a warmth and charm to it that I think is one of the things that’s so wonderful about historical novels that are told in epistolary style. It’s a little easier to sink into the world because you’re sort of overhearing people’s conversations and, and, you know, snooping through their letters which are published for your enjoyment. It’s a kind of an intimacy that creates a world that I just, oh, I love them. So this is one of my favorites that I reread a lot, although it’s not a romance.
The other book that I recommend often, and I, and I frequently send to people who I know who are grieving is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer. This book was kind of read by everyone everywhere a number of years ago, but it’s also epistolary. It takes place during World War II. It doesn’t have a romance; there’s more of a, a mystery element to it, but what it does have is that same sort of escape quality, and I hate using that word because it’s as if, you know, our lives are all so miserable that we must escape the reality into the fictional world of our books, and that is, in fact, what I do, but it’s not because my reality is horrible. It’s because I like to travel, and travel is expensive, but books are on the couch with me. This is a way in which I traveled, when I was reading it, through time, and I was so absorbed into that world, and that’s one of the reasons why I send it to people who I know are grieving, because it sort of, it gives you a break from whatever is really, really pressing on you. It lets you escape into that world where there’s a different set of problems, but also an enormous amount of – I keep saying warmth, but it’s the best word for it – it has this wonderful quality to it.
As for romances, ohhh, yes, I have a few. In addition to My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway, which Jane already mentioned, there’s Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas, which has a number of letters inside it. There’s Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, which is not historical, except it takes place during the ‘80s, so it’s kind of historical? That’s told through email. It’s not quite the same as epistolary historicals, but I loved it in much the same way.
Sorcery and Cecilia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stemever, or Stevermer, Stevermer, I apologize. That is the beginning of a series, and it is so incredibly charming, I can’t even tell you. And the book is told through the letters between Cecilia and her friend as they are in two totally different places trying to solve the same mystery. It’s just wonderful! And there’s more, so you should start there and keep going.
One last book that I want to make sure that I mention is called Letters from Skye, and it is by Jessica Brockmole. Now, I haven’t read this, but I read about it on Heroes and Heartbreakers when I was researching some recommendations, and it caught my attention ‘cause it has all the things that I like. It is a story told in letters. It also features parallel storylines, so if you like the sort of timeslip qualities of Susanna Kearsley’s novels, this might appeal to you as well. The heroine of the story that takes place in 1940 is the daughter of the woman who is the heroine of the storyline that’s in 1912. There’s a whole bunch of mystery, and it’s historical fiction with romance all tied up in it, but it’s letters, and lots and lots of letters. The reviews are kind of mixed. Some people loved it because of the quality of reading and the correspondence, but other people found that the, the characters were a little too simplistic for their tastes. Either way, I still want to read this, because letters, and also Scotland and historical and letters. I don’t know what it is about the letters. Maybe it’s the, the nosy quality, but oh, boy, do I like epistolary romances.
If you have some recommendations that we have missed, and likely we have, you should totally email us at [email protected]. Next week I am doing listener email, so if you have ideas for epistolary romances that you would like to share, please email us and give us your recommendations. Also in next week’s podcast, in case you’re curious, I have a ton of recommendations and discussions about clergy in romances. If you were thinking, I would really like epistolary romances between clergy, maybe we’ll find something, but probably not.
And now, back to Jane and me discussing what Jane’s reading, because she’s taken a risk on Anne Bishop, and now I’m going to do it too, which is great, because if you haven’t seen the covers of these books, the heroine has hair that I, I kind of covet. I’ve never coveted a cover illustration hairstyle, but I really like this one. So, what are you reading?
Jane: I don’t remember; did last time I talk about the Anne Bishop books?
Sarah: Anne Bishop. No, I don’t think so, but if you start talking about it and it sounds familiar, I’ll stop you.
Jane: Anne Bishop, as you may or may not know, is on my list of authors I never trust, because she did this horrible thing in a series a few years ago.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: So, she came out with this new series about shapeshifters, and everybody loves them.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: And I was like, no, not going to read them. Not. ‘Cause I don’t trust her.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: I was all petulant in my bedroom, you know, deleting the emails and stuff like that and trying to just ignore the existence of these books. But for some reason, I can’t even remember why, I got book three in the series –
Sarah: Hmm!
Jane: – in my, yes, and I started reading it – against my better judgment, Sarah – and it was really good.
Sarah: Why did you do that? And it was really good?
Jane: I don’t know. Yes, really good. So then I read the first two, and it was really good, and now I’m hooked –
Sarah: Oh, crap.
Jane: – and I can’t wait. I know. I know! I do it to myself. But this is the, I think it’s called the Others. I – and you really like the Charles and Anna books, right?
Sarah: I do.
Jane: But, okay, so then, this has the same, it reminded me a lot of Charles and Anna.
Sarah: Really!
Jane: The dynamic.
Sarah: What’s the first one called?
Jane: Oh, yeah. I, gosh, why do you ask me these hard questions?
Sarah: I know, I’m, I’m a horrible person, asking you things.
Jane: It’s, I think it’s Written in Red. It’s a novel of the – yeah, Written in Red is the first one. Murder of Crows is, and a Vision in Silver is the, is the, third one, and it looks like they’re coming out, like, once a year. I mean, geeze, what am I doing to myself?
Sarah: You’re doing something terrible to yourself, and I am very concerned.
Jane: I know, but they’re really good. I’m going to re-read these books, and if she does something to the main two characters, I don’t know, we might have a misery moment.
[Laughter]
Jane: Yeah, so, I actually think you’d really like them, ‘cause I would recommend those books, Written in Red, Murder of Crows, Vision in Silver to anyone who likes the Patricia Briggs Alpha and Omega series.
Sarah: You’re really hitting my button here, because I re-read Cry Wolf at least once a year because it’s so good.
Jane: Oh, my God, so amazing, right?
Sarah: It’s so good.
Jane: What happens is this woman is a blood prophet, and what hap-, she cuts herself, and then she sees a vision, and these blood prophets are sold or kidnapped by their families for their own good to sanatoriums? Is that the word for it?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: Okay. And so they’re kept there because blood prophets will often go crazy and kill themselves –
Sarah: Right.
Jane: – because the need to cut themselves is so strong –
Sarah: Yikes.
Jane: – that – and they don’t know how to control it – that they end up killing themselves. And they say that a blood prophet only can suffer so many cuts in her lifetime before she’s going to die.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: So, so you have this impossible setup. Meg, the heroine, has to cut herself at some point –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – otherwise she’ll go crazy, but eventually, she’ll suffer so many cuts she will die. And you don’t know how many cuts she has at the beginning of the story, but it’s a lot.
Sarah: Oh, boy.
Jane: So she escapes the sanatorium with the help of another blood prophet, and she’s found by the shapeshifters, and I can’t remember where the story’s set, because the setting doesn’t both-, it wasn’t important to me; it’s the people that are important to me in this series, and Simon is the alpha of this community, and it has a lot of similarities in terms of, like, there, there’s conflict between the shapeshifter or Others –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – and the humans, and they’re trying to merge politically, and there’s a lot of racial animosity, and, toward them.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: So, there was one awkward moment when Simon and, and his people refer to the humans as monkeys –
Sarah: Guh.
Jane: Yeah, but that, yeah, I know. It kind of seemed to discordant to me when I read it, but the, the rest of the book really is kind of a sensitive look at otherness –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – so I don’t feel like it was meant to be pejorative in any way.
Sarah: And the series follows these two people, right, the alpha and the blood –
Jane: The blood prophet, right.
Sarah: – blood prophet.
Jane: The romance is a super slow burn. Like, it’s barely there, but they ack-, they acknowledge that something’s happening and, like, Simon doesn’t even understand his reaction toward Meg and that he’s falling for her, and people are kind of, like, tee-heeing in the background.
Sarah: [Laughs] That sounds like –
Jane: Which is cute.
Sarah: That sounds like the Mercy Thompson series.
Jane: Well, I mean, I felt like the dynamic was more Charles and Anna, but, but you might see it more Mercy and Adam. I, I, I definitely think it has that Patricia Briggs vibe. Not that I think that Bishop is copying her in any way, obviously.
Sarah: No, no, no, totally. It’s a flavor thing, not a copying thing.
Jane: Yeah, right! Exactly, exactly. So, it’s just, I think it’s a great series, and I’m worried –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: – very worried. Really worried.
Sarah: I’m sorry for laughing. [Laughs more]
Jane: In the Black Jewels trilogy, it’s all, it’s set up from the beginning that Jaenelle, the heroine, dies at the end. She has to make the sacrifice in order for her people, for everyone to be free and for the big bad to be destroyed, and I kind of feel like that’s what I’m being set up for, and I want there to be some miracle ending where Meg doesn’t die from the last cut because she’s away from, you know, the people are trying, starting to understand what blood prophets are and that there’s ways to control it and blah, blah, blah, and – I don’t know. I, I’m probably doomed.
Sarah: [Laughs] This may be another book that you should read on that cracked HP that you had that you chucked at the wall?
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: That one has already sustained damage. Maybe you should just load this on that, and then that way if it hits the wall again, it’s not a great loss.
Jane: So the other book I just recently read is Raze by Tillie Cole, and I was reluctant to buy this book, ‘cause I have read a previous Tillie Cole and really didn’t like it. But I broke down, and –
Sarah: You are just weak! [Laughs]
Jane: I am the weakest person ever. I mean, pretty much, you can talk me into anything.
Sarah: This is excellent. I will store that knowledge for later.
Jane: Well, anyway, I bought the book, and for one thing, I feel like she’s grown as an author tremendously.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: I thought it was a much better written book than the football book that I read –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – and fortunately for both her and me, I don’t really know anything about the Russian mafia, so she could be making it all up and it, you know – unlike in the football book where I was like, this could never happen!
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: It was an interesting book. It’s pretty violent. I thought some of it was gratuitously violent. There’s a lot of raping happening, and when I got to the end of the book, I couldn’t – one of my major problems was that the heroine was so passive. There was this, she’s engaged to – there’s, like, thr-, three heads or bosses of the, of this Russian mafia, and one of the sons is dead, the other son is disappeared, and then there’s the crazy son, so he’s the heir, and then there’s the daughter, and so they’re going to get married. So they’re engaged, and he just treats her terribly. He’s, was, he’s obsessed with her to a criminal degree –
Sarah: Guh.
Jane: – and, and he abuses her. He, he rapes her regularly, and those scenes are described in great detail. She never tells her father, who is the head, who is shown to, you know, be very protective of her and to not allow this other, this, her fiancé, the abusive one, get away with stuff. So, I felt like she did nothing to improve her circumstances, but then as I was thinking about it, well, isn’t that the classic example of an abused woman, that she’s in an abusive relationship, she’s ashamed of the abuse that she takes, she thinks that, that she’s in love with her abuser, so am I being critical of abused women by wishing this character had acted differently?
Sarah: Hmm.
Jane: And was this author just really good at creating the, the abused woman profile? I, I, I don’t know. I was at odds with myself this morning. One of the things I will say about this book is it’s very emotional, and it was unique. I felt like I hadn’t read the story before, and that what, that the worldbuilding she did for the, the Russian mafia was sufficient enough that I believed in this kind of implausible setup.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: It was almost all reality setup, but I believed in it because she did a good job of constructing that world. So, I, I don’t know. I feel really conflicted about that book. I, I, I know you won’t read the Tillie Cole book because of the subject matter and the violence and stuff.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jane: But I wish someone would –
Sarah: Yeah, I was listening to you, and I was like, no, that’s not for me.
Jane: Yeah. So, I wish someone would read it, and we could have this talk about this battered woman, and, you know, if, you know, I don’t know. I was just like, hmm, am I being overly judgmental here? In any event, let’s talk about the Erin Satie – however you pronounce her name. I don’t know.
Sarah: I think, I thought, I don’t know if it was Say-tee or Sat-ee-ay, but oh, wow, was that some elegant historical romance. I, I realize that I have a definite thing for competence porn, and the heroine was so competent, and there was so much information about how she did what she did, and it fit so deeply into her character that she would create ink that had long-lasting permanence because she couldn’t remember and had no permanence in her life, ‘cause she couldn’t remember things very well. She’d lost her family, her status and standing in society had been lost, and so the idea that she would go out and create permanent ink makes total sense, plus you get to see all the ink making, and that was so cool! So cool! I definitely have a quirky female competence porn thing that I didn’t realize I needed to indulge, because that just made me so happy.
Jane: Well, and I have to say that I think Satie, or whatever her name is integrates –
Sarah: Just call her Erin! I know how to say it! [Laughs] We’re horrible people.
Jane: – integrated ink making so well into the story that you didn’t feel like she was hammering you over the head with some history lesson.
Sarah: Yes!
Jane: Every time she revealed something about ink making, it was integral to the scene, and it, it wasn’t forced. It was all really effortless. I loved the worldbuilding. I felt like I was there in her brewery where she was stinking it up with her mold, you know?
[Laughter]
Sarah: And I loved how competent she was in running a business.
Jane: Yeah!
Sarah: And that she was, and that it was hard for her to know that she was doing well and to be proud of herself, that she had interest from these huge government offices who wanted to place all of their ink orders through her company because they’d heard how good her ink is, but that she had to be the only person who was proud of herself, because no one in her family was going to celebrate that she had done well in business. Because that’s so far beneath her.
Jane: Yeah, and I thought that the suspense of whodunit was really well done, although I didn’t understand why it was so important for them to, for the hero to discover who had done it.
Sarah: Yes. That’s totally true. The mystery part was not as strong for me, and the parts that were devoted to that, I was kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, go back. Ink. More ink, please! I wish to hear about inking, inking and smelly things! And having to find a, go, go find another warehouse. That was awesome! Go find another one! I like that part. [Laughs] Clearly, I am the most difficult-to-satisfy reader, and I feel guilty about that.
Jane: Well, I thought it was a terrific book too, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes kind of Courtney Milan or –
Sarah: Theresa Romain.
Jane: – who is the other author I – it was another author I was –
Sarah: I know Theresa Romain doesn’t, like, doesn’t, like, work for you as well, but the, the style of writing reminded me a lot –
Jane: No, she doesn’t.
Sarah: – reminded me a lot of the things that I really like about Romain.
Jane: Okay. I don’t know why I don’t like Romain more. I should, ‘cause she has interesting characters, but, you know, her voice and my reading tastes just don’t coincide.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: But I was thinking about someone else. Carolyn Jewel.
Sarah: Mm, yes.
Jane: Did you read Carolyn Jewel’s latest release? Her, it’s not, it’s like two months or three months ago.
Sarah: No, I don’t think I did.
Jane: It’s real, it’s really good. I mean, if you’ve liked any of her books in the past, you would like this one.
Sarah: Is this, what’s it called, Scandal?
Jane: I think so. Her, her names are not distinctive enough that I can’t, I can’t tell them apart, but it’s –
Sarah: No, Scandal was published in 2009, so clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about. [Laughs] Let’s see if I can find it. It has a black cover, though, right?
Jane: I don’t know. It came on my eBook reader. It starts, those start on page one.
Sarah: [Laughs] We don’t even see the cover anymore!
Jane: Covers? What are those?
Sarah: We don’t need those! Screw it! Yeah, don’t, don’t take them away, though; it’s my favorite thing. Okay, now I have to find it, and I can’t find it.
Jane: I saw – you know, Gena Showalter is writing contemporaries, mainstream contemporaries; did you see that?
Sarah: Really?
Jane: Yeah. So now it’s like, yeah, so, like, okay, remember Elizabeth Hoyt, Courtney Milan, I, I mean, I don’t know who else, are, they’re all writing contemporaries, and now we have the paranormal authors leaving paranormal to go write contemporaries. I just remember it was, like, three or four years ago, we were like, oh, there are no contemporaries. I know.
Sarah: We don’t need to save them anymore. We saved them. You know, this is all our fault, because of that campaign. All of this is happening because of us. It’s our fault.
Jane: I wish that were true. I wish that were true. Because then we could start new campaigns and revive old favorites.
Sarah: What would you revive if you could revive something?
Jane: I thi-, I, I mean, I think that there are books written everywhere that we want. It’s just a matter of finding them, but it’s really hard. Like, people are like, download samples! And I’m like, yeah, but then I spend the entire night reading samples.
Sarah: I did that. It didn’t work out well for me. Because all too often, the minute I pub-, when I’m, I read the sample, and then the minute I get past the sample part, everything falls apart. It’s like somebody hired an editor, but only for the sample.
Jane: Well, I mean, that happens too. Sometimes the samples don’t work for me ‘cause I’ll just start reading the sample, and I’ll be like, oh, I don’t know.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jane: I’ll go grab the next sample, and then I’ve read samples for, like, two hours.
Sarah: Yep.
Jane: I’m like, oh, I’m going to go to bed now.
Sarah: [Laughs] And you didn’t quite get your fix, but you got enough.
Jane: [Laughs] I know, ‘cause you read a bunch of stuff, right?
Sarah: Yeah. It was, it was all cumulatively what I was looking for.
Jane: [Laughs] I’m, yeah, samples are tough. Angie James is a huge sample reader. I don’t know. She makes choices based on samples. She’s a smart consumer. I’m a dumb one.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah, but I can’t, I can’t read, like, my, my tastes and Angie’s don’t line up either, because she’s willing to tolerate things that I can’t tolerate in a book because she’s after something different in that particular novel than I am. And so I can’t, like, I can’t –
Jane: Oh, I agree.
Sarah: She’s willing to over-, and I, and I’m trying to say this in a way, and, ‘cause I don’t want to sound like, you know, Angie reads poorly and I read brilliantly, ‘cause no, that’s not what I’m saying here. [Laughs] Although it sounds a lot like that, it’s not what I’m trying to say. She is willing to tolerate things that I find completely intolerable because she’s after the, the, the content of the story or something about the story. It’s like the difference with me and other readers with Kristen Ashley’s books. There, there are readers who are after the emotion that she is so good at writing down. I can’t get past the stuff that is in between me and the emotion, so I never get there. So with, with Angie, she can manage or overwrite or just completely reinvent in her head the things that I can’t get past because I can’t do that. You know what I’m trying to say here?
Jane: No, I understand.
Sarah: Okay, good, ‘cause either way, either way, I sound like a giant asshole, and Angie’s going to, if she listens, she’s going to be like, no, that’s not what I do! You go to hell! [Laughs] But you, you guys don’t have exactly matching taste either.
Jane: There’s a book she recommended to me the other day, and I could not get into it, and I kept texting her, and I’m like, what was, what did you like about this book? I’m at this point. Should I keep reading? [Laughs] I didn’t keep reading, ‘cause she said that there was no point if I didn’t like it up to that point.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: But it, when she says she likes something and it’s like, well, gosh, what am I missing here? I’m going to keep trying, so I’m going to go back to that book and try to figure it out.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: I’m not going to name the book though.
Sarah: I have to find what you found in this book. That happens to me a lot, all, all, especially with you. Even though I know our tastes are wildly divergent – in the reading sense, not in the dystopian YA sense – that you will love something, and I’ll be like, I want to find what you loved, but I don’t find it. I can’t – where, could you just tell me what page it’s on, cause I don’t know where it is.
[Laughter]
Sarah: ‘Cause, you know, when someone is excited about a book, I want to be that excited about a book. If someone’s totally excited about and, and loved a book, I totally want to have that same experience, because I love to enjoy books. That’s kind of why, a reason why I do what I do. But if, if I can’t find it, I just, just, just, just tell me how you got there. Tell me what I need to do to get the feeling that you got, ‘cause I’m not finding it, and clearly there’s something wrong with me. Always my first assumption that there’s something wrong with me.
Jane: Well, there is, but I never wanted to say it.
Sarah: [Laughs] Thank you! I appreciate that, finally letting me know. I, I just laughed so hard I scared the dog.
Jane: Well, there’s clearly something wrong with me, because I’m not liking this book that Angie liked.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, absolutely. Something wrong with both of us, but, you know, many, many people would line up to tell us what’s wrong with us.
Jane: I have people telling me what’s wrong with me every day in my Twitter feed. [Laughs]
Sarah: [Laughs] Excellent.
[music]
Sarah: And that is all for this week’s podcast. Thank you to Jane for hanging out with me on Skype for an hour while we talked about books.
Next week I will be doing listener email, so if you want to send some, that would be awesome. Our email address is [email protected]. I’m going to be reading lots of different messages about clergy in romance, how people interact with their libraries, more information about how come the books you donate don’t make it into the collection, which is something I kind of wanted to know and now I know a lot about. I love the fact that the Internet just lets me learn all these things. Anyway, if you have some ideas for epistolary romances or you have a book you’d like to recommend or a book you want to tell everybody about ‘cause it was so awesome or it filled your pants with rage, [email protected] is where you should send all of that information.
This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Wicked All Night, the latest sizzling-hot novella in the Wicked Lovers series from New York Times bestselling author Shayla Black. Download it on January 20th.
And if you hadn’t already guessed, the music that you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater. You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater. This is “Calgary Capers” by the Peatbog Faeries from their albumDust. If it’s not Deviations Project, it’s Peatbog, because awesomeness, and also, I figure Calgary is probably colder than where I am right now and maybe where you are right now, and I think that we should all do a guest podcast episode somewhere very, very warm, like the equator maybe, and you can all come, because it’s no good for us to be warm and for you not to be warm, right? We should all go be warm, ‘cause, wow, I’m tired of it being cold, but I figure Calgary, colder than where I am, so maybe I can either feel superior or very, very sorry, ‘cause it, the cold hurts my feelings; I take it very personally.
Either way, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, Jane and I wish you the very best of reading. Have a great weekend.
[capering music]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
Good podcast today! I’ve got the Erin Satie book in my TBR, and your discussion convinced me to start it next (by the way, I pronounce her name in my head in the French way, as Sah-TEE, probably because it reminds me of a French composer with a really similar name, Erik Satie).
Anyway, I wanted to suggest a book I’ve just finished for the listener who wanted recs for epistolary novels. Hard Time, by Cara McKenna has some really hot love letters, and they’re a big part of the story, especially in the first half.
LOL – thanks. I bet you’re right and Jane and I were both saying it wrong. (Our apologies, Erin!)
Claiming the Duchess by Sherry Thomas features a couple that falls in love over letters – though it is not entirely epistolary (besides, it’s a very short story.)
Paul Vlitos’ Welcome to the Working Week (contemporary and not a romance) is an hilarious novel made only of e-mails and short messages. Very funny.
Sarah, could you please write down the other epistolary romances you mentioned? I didn’t caught their titles. Thank you!
I love letters in books–I’d love someone to write a true epistolary romance that was entirely letters–and so I bookmarked this list of historical romances with letters a while back. I haven’t read all of these, but there are some more suggestions here.
@Cecilia:
Can you see the book covers in the entry above? If you have an ad blocker they may be hidden from view, but just below the “PRESS PLAY!” should be a few rows of book covers. The books I mentioned are:
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas
Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger
@Katie, I recently wrote an entirely epistolary Georgian-set historical romance novella. If I decide to self-publish it, I will probably buy an ad on the SMTB site, so watch this space 😉
Thanks, Sarah. Actually Love in the Afternoon’s cover didn’t appear the first time I loaded this page – don’t know why.
The titles I missed are Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede and Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole – I finally caught the titles! (By the way, I’ve been in Skye ages ago.)
Thanks for the recs (via the podcast and comments!) — I will now add even more books to my list of TBR.
And Sarah — you totally nailed it in terms of letters — warmth, charm, and falling into a story. It allows characters to share their thoughts in a realistic way and it has a slower build up than witty banter. Plus, when done well an author can show how a character’s voice changes from the spoken to the written word.
Just finished “The Lover’s Knot” (instead of knitting my left hand mitten). Loved it! The heroine is really interesting and such a good business woman (difficult to be at the time). I worried about the HEA, but I thought it was a very understandable progress for our two primary lovers.
I loved the Griffin & Sabine series and its followup series. If you love postal art and postcards and the idea of reading someone else’s mail, filled with exotic imagery and art and mythology, it’s for you.
84, Charing Cross Road is one of my all time favorites and the movie isn’t quite nice with Sir Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. It’s very much a picture of a New York and London that have disappeared with stories about war rations interspersed with book requests. I love a lot of Hanff’s books. Duchess of Bloomsbury is the journal she kept when she finally visited England.
And echo the Sorcery & Cecilia suggestions — a friend had recced it for years and I finally grabbed it on ebook sale and inhaled it while I was sick. Introduced me to the whole fantasy subgenre of Regencies with magic.
Among my favourite historical romance/mysteries written in epistolatory style are the trilogy by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. The heroines are cousins, one written by each author. The titles are Sorcery and Cecilia, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician. They’re light, frothy and engaging.
The first volume includes the cousins’ courtships and marriages, the second their wedding journey to France and Italy, and the third, ten years later, features their children and a mystery involving a strange young woman who comes to stay with one of the couples.
All three are told entirely in letters between the cousins, with additional notes between their husbands.
I too remember Griffin and Sabine!
I have a recommendation for a book like Griffin and Sabine, one with artifacts that the reader has to open and read to have the full story. It’s ARCHIE’S WAR by Marcia Williams. It’s a children’s book about one family’s life and experiences on the homefront in London during World War One, so it’s very timely right now with it being 100 years on. I was very absorbed by it when I read it with my children, and it has the flavor of a very good museum exhibit of artifacts – post cards, the little gifts the royal family sent to soldiers, etc.
ARCHIE’S WAR totally reminded me of the small but moving museum at Tyne Cot military cemetery in Belgium – yes, it’s a cry book, but it has the involvement of opening and reading all the little bits.
I had a different take on Meg Cabot’s Boy Next Door – I read it last year when I was trying to figure out how much email/text/epistolary stuff to include in His Road Home, and I realized I wanted to have much more of the characters’ reflection and the action and interaction around them, rather than just pure exchanges of text. I found that the long emails in Boy Next Door didn’t age so well – people have grown shorter in their digital communications (although not me in the comments here, sorry!). The loooooong emails detailing the whole story felt a bit like large shoulder pads, just not modern style. I liked the story bones, but reading Boy Next Door solidified for me that I feel like a 100% epistolary novel works in historicals (LOVE Chocolate Pot!!!) but not in contemporaries, mostly due to the pacing of modern life vs the past.
One interesting aspect of epistolary novels is the “unreliable narrator.” It’s definitely a different reading experience than third-person omniscient and even than first-person.
Thanks for mentioning some of my favorites: My Dearest Enemy; Sorcery and Cecilia; 84 Charing Cross; and Guernsey. Great topic, great podcast. 🙂
Laura kinsales My Sweet Folly
http://www.laurakinsale.com/books/detail/my-sweet-folly/
I loved Attachments, liked the Meg Cabot contemporaries with the email in them, but my favorite epistolary romance has to be Possession by AS Byatt. Wow. So powerful and intricately romantic. I think I underlined half of Randolph Henry Ash’s letters in that book…
I loved Written in Red and can not wait for the third book to come out. It comes out the same day as the next Sebastian St Cyr and so will be a wonderful release day for me.
I’ve never read the follow up to 84 Charing Cross Road and I was just at the library, darn.
Finally read Rainbow Rowell this week. Read Eleanor & Park and then went straight to Attachments it was a great two days.
I don’t usually like epistolary novels–the only one I’ve been able to get through was Dangerous Liaisons back in college.
As for clergy in romance, Debbie Macomber wrote a book a while back about 3 women, who become nuns and then leave the Church over the course of the book. It takes place in the 60’s and covers the period of time slightly before and after Vatican II in 1965, which I thought was really interesting and made me wonder if some of the nuns in the Church actually went through the same emotions when those changes took effect. If I’m remembering correctly, two out of the three women do have love stories throughout the narrative. The title was Changing Habits. I’m not sure when it was published, but it was probably a good 10 years ago.
I would have to second the recommendation for A.S. Byatt’s Possession. If you can stick with it (I vaguely remember that is started slowly), it is really a lovely book. Another good one I remember is a Pride and Prejudice sequel “Letters From Pemberley” by Jane Dawkins. It is a lovely sequel that plays out exactly what you would expect to follow the first year in a style you would expect from the characters. Doesn’t really take more than a 2-3 hours to read.
Three Weeks with Lady X by Eloisa James features a lovely letter exchange of letters between the H And h, written as she renovates his estate.
A non-romance epistolary novel that I really enjoyed is “Ella Minnow Pea” by Mark Dunn. It is set on an island, who has as its native hero the man who invented the phrase “The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog” that contains all the letters of the alphabet. As letters start falling off the statue commemorating him, the powers that be decide they should no longer be able to use those letters. The first letters to go are ones like “x” and “q” which are somewhat easy to work around, but towards the middle of the book they start to lose letters like “e” and things become increasingly complicated.
Although the premise may sound slightly gimmicky, the story is well written, with an interesting story line and characters. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys epistolary novels.
PS The title refers to one of the characters, Ella Minnow Pea, and if you say her name out loud you will discover her name relates to the letters in the middle of the alphabet “LMNOP”
There is a collection of Lucy Maud Montgomery short stories called “Across the Miles” which are all short stories involving letters. Most of them involve romance although not all of them do; but this is Montgomery so they are all great stories. (In fact, I have one of them in its original printing in one of the antique women’s magazines in my collection, dating from 1911.)
For those of you who may be Montgomery fans, Dell brought out a series of collections of her short stories and novellas several years ago, which are collected by theme. They include the above about letters, “Along the Shore” which are stories about the sea, “At the Altar” wedding stories, “Against the Odds” stories about hard-working young women overcoming difficulties, and “Among the Shadows”, spooky stories and stories about death. These are geared more toward adult readers so are very different from her YA books like “Anne of Green Gables”. I don’t know if they’re still available but might be worth seeking out.
I really enjoyed Somewhere in France by Jennifer Robson and I’ll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes which are set in 1914 and 1943 respectively. A modern take on Daddy Longlegs was Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay. Most of the others on my epistolary list at Goodreads have already been mentioned by others.
Across the Miles? How do I not know about this when Along the Shore was my favorite book growing up??? Must find now!
I LOOOOOOVE “Almost Like Being In Love”! It’s got a permanent spot on my keeper shelf. It’s sweet, funny, romantic, and doesn’t have any of the “I want my ex back and I’ll destroy anyone who gets in my way! psycho” vibe. The change in character relationships occurs in a very organic, natural, and believable way, and the secondary characters are as good as our heroes!
It’s not entirely epistolatory but Victoria Connelly’s “A Weekend With Mr. Darcy” is really great – the premise of the book is a University professor who is sharing a lovely correspondence with her favorite romance author, without knowing that ‘Lorna’ is really Warwick. Hijinks ensue 🙂 The book does feature the letters between Lorna and Warwick so you get to see how the friendship begins.
Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster isn’t quite a romance, but it does have romantic moments. It’s an epistolary (except for the first chapter) coming of age story about a bookish, orphan girl who unexpectedly gets to go to college around 1920. So funny and sweet! Her sequel, Dear Enemy, is quite different but also entirely in letters. And, together, the two books helped transform American orphanages – she had quite a reach!
Anne Bishop’s The Others series is amazing! I always read her books with trepidation because she can be fantastic or really disappointing (i.e. the Ephemera series) but these books are so good that they have shot to the top of my urban fantasy :best of” list (along with Kelley Armstrong, Tanya Huff, and Patricia Briggs). I have the prepub of Vision in Silver (book 3) sitting on my Kindle and I want to read it so badly and also I want to save it and savour it…
Nooo!!! I just started a Murder of Crows! Don’t tell me she kills off main characters?!? Not fair!!
Although… they’re really good and I’ll keep reading them until they aren’t.
E-cigarette is more better than tobacco, just try
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Hi, ladies. I’m new-ish to the genre and new to the podcast and blog, and just want to say you folks rock! So very enjoyable to spend time with you and let you weaken my impulse control even further. Love the podcast, but I’m really hard of hearing, and miss a lot. So a very heartfelt and sloppy thank-you to Garlic Knitter for her transcripts! You say they’re meticulous, and boy howdy, is that correct. Thanks so much, GK!
@Judy:
I’m so glad the transcripts are helpful and that you’re enjoying the podcast! Yay! If I can offer any recommendations, please feel free to email me any time.
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