You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is from Scarlett, whose mother deeply disapproved of her romance habit and tossed all her books one day. Scarlett has been looking for this particular novel ever since. (Scarlett, my sympathies.)
Okay this is a HaBo and I’ve been looking for it for YEARS because I can never remember the title. Or the author. Or the publisher.
Long story very short: my mother has a raging hatred of romance and she feels they are “inappropriate reading” I thought for a long time it was because she’s super conservative christian and, you know, sexy times, but no, after further discussion it’s just because she doesn’t like “saccharine, mushy stuff”.
Anyway, this led to me hiding my romances in high school under my mattress, or in various places in my closet. And one summer while I was gone my mom cleaned OUT my room, I came back to a nice, organized room (we can talk about the privacy violation later) and NONE of the books or music or anything that I loved that she felt was inappro survived.
So. The book. The reason I am emailing. The cover was a dark blue or maybe a purple, and it had a gorgeously hot dude, a lady who may have had red hair (it was def above the shoulders) and he was holding up a little boy. The guy was a single dad, the kid made his way to the woman’s house next door through a hole in the hedge (the woman couldn’t have children herself so seeing the child was Very Very Intense for her), she returns him to the dad (they’d just moved in) and says something about if he wants to see her again he can go to “the Garden” and he’s all confused cause she doesn’t have one, but see, that’s a pun because her name is Eden and the name of her flower shop/nursery is The Garden of Eden. Soooooooo clever to my fourteen-year-old mind.
There is also some stuff about his receptionist being an old lady who’s super judgey and takes an instant dislike to Eden, but then the dude and the kid get chicken pox or something and Eden takes care of them and the old lady receptionist is like “SHE IS EXHAUSTED YOU MEN SUCK DON’T YOU SEE THAT THIS WOMAN HAS BEEN RUNNING HERSELF RAGGED AND WHY IS THE CHILD ENJOYING THE OATMEAL BATHS SO MUCH THAT CANT’ BE NORMAL” and they have like this instant happy family complete with grandma before the boy’s mother shows up and she’s this icy, Nordic type (because OF COURSE SHE IS) and I want to say when she eventually leaves town she sees a child on a plane and has a niggling bit of “what might have been” but then immediately shakes it off because “pfft, children are not for me, I will find a man who is rich and have lots of sex” because Icy Nordic Type is icy and clearly there is a mother/whore dichotomy going strong in this book.
There was also some static early in the book because it took a while for the dude and the woman to get together because she couldn’t have kids and Was Hurt Terribly (of course she was) so there’s this suuuuuuuuper intense scene where they’re making out and she runs away because there’s almost sex and he follows her and traps her at the hedge and is like “you hold my son, why in GOD’S NAME won’t you hold me?!” and basically I’m pretty sure this novel was what cemented my love for telenovelas, romance in general, and reawakened my dormant and not-understood little-girl feelings for Uncle Jesse because damn.
I’ve googled, I’ve tried amazon, I cannot find it. It may have been a harlequin (I wouldn’t be surprised cause there’s a child), but I don’t believe it was a series and it definitely didn’t have the name of any of the imprints like Blaze or whatever on the cover. Help, please! I need to know if this book is as batshit over-the-top as I remember!
Much appreciation for any help you can provide.
THIS SOUNDS AMAZING. UTTERLY BONKERS AMAZING. Do you recognize this book?
“Finder’s Keepers” by Sharon Sala?
http://www.paperbackswap.com/Finders-Keepers-Sharon-Sala/book/0061083909/
And while my mom never understood my romance addiction, the only thing that kept her from secretly ditching them a few at a time was that fact that I re-read them. I was always terrified that when I’d be gone: camp, college, trips, etc, they’d disappear. But so far, she’s been good, but half my collection is still at her house, and this just makes me want to go get them.
If so, this is prolly the cover:
http://www.fictiondb.com/author/sharon-sala~finders-keepers~40639~b.htm
I knew this one–yes, it’s Sharon Sala’s Finder’s Keepers–and wow,, you remember a lot of detail.
And I can’t even with the violation of privacy.
I am so sorry about the loss of your romance collection. That’s awful.
Hey Scarlett, Sorry your Mom threw out your stash. 🙂 Yes, the book you described was an old one of mine… Finders Keepers….
I’m so glad you liked it enough to remember all those details.
Happy reading,
Sharon
Whoa.. Glad you found her book. Scarlett, your mom is probably nice but was once hurt by a book Soo bad she went all kinds of nuts on your book stash.. Kudos to you for not getting hung up on the crime. I hope you get your collection back. It sounds like you have good taste 🙂
Oh holy cow, I love the Bitchery. Thank you all so much, that is absolutely the book and I’m buying it today! Thank you, thank you!
(and re: my mom, she’s pretty rad, I’ve forgiven her for The Purge, but not going to lie, whenever I find a book that she got rid of I generally send her a text with a selfie of me holding the book and some variation of “YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD KEEP US APART” and she responds with some variation of “It was ten years ago, Scar, GOD LET IT GO”)
Best HABO thread ever!
Because (1) Sharon Sala! and (2) the ending, with the selfies! YES!
I’m guessing your mom is going to receive another text soon, Scarlett 😉
@Anna, that’s what I was going to say!
@landslide, oh, she’s sooooooo getting a selfie with this one. I just did the math, and realized I’ve been looking for this book since 1998.
Nineteen. Ninety. Eight. And you guys found it in like ten minutes. Yeah. All the selfies. It might become my Flat Stanley. Ha.
this was great. 🙂
Scarlett, This might be your lucky day. I am in the process of selling my house and moving to another and as I was packing stuff ran across old copies of that book. If you would like an autographed copy of Finders Keepers, just send me your mailing address to my email. sharonsala@cox.net
I didn’t have a clue about the HABO, but a parent violating personal space/stuff struck a chord with me. Not only did my mother go through drawers in my bedroom (yes, I’ve been in therapy), she threw out my brother’s baseball card collection. Privacy violation AND hey, those could be worth a lotta money! These days, I’m giving him a baseball card each Christmas, because that shouldn’t have happened, and he is one of the best humans I know.
Oh Lawd, my evangelical fundamentalist mom majorly objected to my romance novels, especially and almost entirely because of the sex (still does, actually). I got Lectures and was forbidden to read them. Naturally, I hid them all over my room and read by flashlight at night when needed. She was one for violating privacy too and my room was fair game, though thankfully she never trashed my stash (though if I played “secular” rock, she took my radio). So glad you found your missing friend!
And Sharon, you are, as always, a class act.
This HaBO response thread makes me so happy … Sharon, you are truly generous and Scarlett…. wow. My mother tried a cull and had the earthly fires of teenage hell brought down upon her (sorry, Mom) and refused to set foot in my room again until I left for university.
@Karenmc: My mother, mad about some slight, stuck a huge box of carefully wrapped vintage clothes that I had collected in the garden shed….1982 rain was the worst ever in NorCal. Beautiful priceless clothes just ruined (and yes I had therapy too). I never had any privacy growing up and my mother gossiped about me, constantly!
This is the best HaBo ever!
Scarlett, I now expect a travelogue of pics with you and that book all over the world. Don’t let me down. 😉
This is an awesome thread! And so quickly found.
@Scarlett – I’m so sorry that your Mom did that, but I’m glad that you have a fun way to ‘get back’ at her now. When I used to come home for vacations during college, if any of my books were missing it was usually because my Mom ‘borrowed’ them from my shelf to read herself. These days I use the Bitchery to find 99 cent books to download to her e-reader for her.
Sorry nothing to contribute, just had to say this HaBO thread made me weepy, in a good way 🙂 Scarlett, I admire you, and Sharon Sala, I’m buying one of your books today.
Definitely the best HaBo ever!
Wow, this HaBO really struck a cord with a lot of people. I will say that, despite all the very many problems I had with my mother (manic depressive, bipolar, unmedicated; anger issues galore), she never judged my book selections, no matter what I would read.
Except for one time when I checked out both Mein Kampf and Das Kapital from the NYC Library when I was about 12 years old. Hey, I was curious. Always best to go to the source to understand. She didn’t disapprove of the reading material as much as being afraid that the Library kept a list of books read and would share it with some mysterious government agency. I knew in my heart that they wouldn’t, but I had no way to prove it until after 9/11 when they and other libraries refused to share reading history with the federal agencies, even burning and deleting records. I remember telling my mother then, “see, told you they didn’t do that kind of thing.”
Unfortunately, she was bad at snooping around my bedroom. I had to be super careful not to leave anything she could use against me around. Being a straight A student wasn’t good enough. It meant that despite wanting to keep a diary, I couldn’t because I simply wasn’t able to share my private thoughts and hopes and dreams in it, knowing my mother would read it when I was at school. No real places to hide anything in my small house.
@Sharon Sala–OMG you are the coolest author-lady! *flail* (that was perfectly professional and not even slightly ungracious, but, *ahem* Seriously thank you very much and I will be emailing you shortly, this is very generous of you and I’m ridiculously excited now!)
@June–Oh, it’ll happen. I’ll post links. Haha. This book is coming to me with Sephora. And Starbucks. And the park. And all the places, haha.
This thread makes me want to call my mom and thank her. I was apparently one of the lucky ones. She was an avid romance reader when I was younger and I remember getting to go through the box she kept under her bed and pick what I wanted to read. The local library had one of those bring one/take one swaps with old Harlequins like the perennial and personal favorite A Flaunting Cactus.
Awesomest HaBO EVAR. I’d like to petition Scarlett to do some guest reviews/rants/grocery lists on the site. Hilarious!
I will read the mullet out of (or maybe into) her articles/posts.
Dude, do you know how much I would love to guest write for this site? Holy crap. All day. Every day. With Finders Keepers by my side.
We obviously need a discussion group about moms because I had also a similar experience. I always hid my books, starting at age eight when I learned they looked like school books if you put a cover on them. All my old diaries are in code, btw. When I went to college, she threw out a bunch of biographies because they looked like romances. When I first married, my husband would laugh at me after finding romances under the bathroom sink or behind the flour in the kitchen cupboard. Finally, I am getting to the point where I can read what I want without looking over my shoulder. I even read a romance at my mom’s house over Thanksgiving. Though i was careful to keep it in my suitcase when I wasn’t reading it.
There is so much awesomeness in this HABO. Book identified! Autographed book found! Justice for criminal theft of books via selfie! Clearly a win on every front.
I was lucky, I had a mom who read Cosmo and Danielle Steel, although I swiped the cosmos and not the romances. (I’ve always liked the paranormal side, so I was in my YA Christopher Pike phase). Now I’m wondering what I may have missed out on!
@Olivia: GO GET YOUR BOOKS!
Kinda makes you think that forbidding something doesn’t actually work. Hmmmm.
I’m super thankful my mom supported me in reading anything. But, sad to say, my carefully cultivated collection of 1990s Seventeen and Sassy magazines are disintegrated in a dump somewhere. I’m super sad about that.
I loved this HABO and I’m so glad you found the book Scarlett. I can empathize. My mother did not have a lot of respect for my privacy but I have to say she would not have dared touch my books. And she never tried to sensor my reading. Did anyone else hide their ‘shocking’ mills and boons. I used to hide that I was reading Violet Winspear when I as about thirteen and I laugh at my teenage self now when I think how innocent those books are.
Sharon, I a buying one of your other books as well as Finders Keepers, you are a super lady.
@Stephanie:
Oh, gosh, Sassy magazine. I had no idea how amazing it was until it was gone. There’s a few archives online, though – you can relive the joy! There are some here: http://sassyscans.tumblr.com/
My mother has never approved of my reading material. But she would never, never throw away my books. Other stuff that she sees as junk is fair game (ripped clothing, old (comfortable!) sheets, chipped coffee mugs, etc).
I have to hide all of my favorite stuff.
On the other hand every person in my family, myself included, have sticky fingers. My mother will borrow my clothes, my brother will borrow my tools or my entertainment, food is never safe. (I steal hair products and makeup, and tools, always the tools). It should be noted, we don’t steal from other people, just our family and we call it borrowing.
When I was about 12 years old I went with my mother to the Home Depot and I spent some of my precious babysitting money on an exterior door knob with a keyed lock. It wasn’t too long after that that we started putting exterior door knobs on all the doors. We can’t be trusted.
To this day, I’m nearly 40, my mother does not have the key to my home.
I was just speaking to one of my girlfriends yesterday about another girlfriend’s crazy mother. We’re always talking about our crazy mothers and how they drive us insane. Both of us had the same kind of thought that our crazy mothers are not nearly so crazy as other crazy mothers are and how grateful we are that our crazy mothers are the sane sort of crazy.
I really feel for people who just can’t trust their parents. What an awful position to be in.
They always say, “Some peoples’ children,” I always say, “Some peoples’ parents.”
@Sharon Sala
You are so cool. I always knew you would be.
Finders Keepers was my first Sharon Sala. That was so, so long ago.
Hey, if you’re reading this anyway, wasn’t it you who wrote about some hunters getting dressed out in the woods? There was some crazy crop of mind altering something or other. I don’t even know how to search for this book! I know I read it in amongst a bunch of yours anyway.
You have gifted me with many, many hours of reading pleasure. I thank you.
Wow, I guess my mom wasn’t as bad as she could have been. There was no privacy in our house either (I shared a room with my emotionally abusive sister and closed doors meant nothing to my mother, except maybe Something’s Up And I Must Put a Stop to It) but I managed by waiting until everybody was asleep before calling my friends and boyfriend, and my diary was safe because to this day nobody can read my handwriting. She did throw out some vintage clothes that I was making over, and had a bad habit of giving my things away to my cousins’ kids, but she would NEVER throw away a book. I think it was because literacy came so hard for her (she was poor, dyslexic, and English was not her first language) and also she never forgave her father for burning her collection of original Batman comics from the 30’s (especially when she found out what they would have been worth.) She might not have understood my reading choices any more than I appreciated hers (we were the opposite -she was the romance-a-holic while I was the SF snob) but she was just happy I was READING.
@Sharon Sala, I love your books and now I love you even more. You are a class act.
I was lucky – my Mom loved romance as much as I did. She never would have discarded any of my things.
@Sharon Sala: love your books! One of my all time favorites is Sweet Baby- love that book! I re-read it often
Wow, even though my mum does still give me the hairy eyeball when she sees some of my books, I’m more glad than ever she never got on me about my reading choices. To illustrate: my mum found me reading Judy Blume’s “Forever” at age 9 (cos: Judy Blume), and instead of immediately yanking it away, simply asked me if I understood what I was reading (I didn’t) and used the occasion for The Talk. She did/does not, however, approve of my candy addiction.
@Sharon Sala – Look under “Authors Behaving Nicely” and you’re there with a big-ass star. You rock.
What a great HABO!
Even tho I’m so late jumping in, I was excited that I knew this one! I have almost all of Sharon Sala’s books in paper and have been slowly building my digital collection. I obviously love her books, but especially Sweet Baby, Remember Me, Out of the Dark, Jackson Rule, Dark Water, Reunion, Bloodlines, and my fave, Mimosa Grove. I think I feel some rereads coming on. 🙂
It’s so cool that Ms. Sala is giving Scarlett a copy of the book. Now that’s something special to share with Mom!
This may be too late for most readers who have already looked at this thread, but the digigal version of Finders Keepers by Sharon Sala is $0.99 at Amazon, kindle edition right now. (It’s 3/18/2015 8:59am Eastern Daylight Time.) A number of other titles by Sharon are also on sale for $0.99 kindle edition at Amazon: Deep in the Heart, Touchstone, DreamCatcher, Chase the Moon, Sudden Danger, Lucky, Second Chances, Tall Chief. I have them all in multiple print copies and just snatched up the digital versions too. Wonderful books, all of them.
@ LML, lol. I’m actually going home at the end of April for college reunion, and been thinking I need to bring the majority back. After reading these horror stories, though I’m definitely lucky. My parents pretty much didn’t care what I read or watched. The only objection I ever got was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, but only because it was on late, and didn’t want me staying up to watch it. Other than that, I think my parents were just happy I was reading. I had a lot of hearing and speech problems when I was younger, which made it difficult to learn how to read, so by the time I found romance novels, I don’t think they even noticed the difference, it was just more books.
@Andrea2, just picked up Finders Keepers and two other Sharon Sala books for my kindle. Thanks for the heads up about the 99c sales! I’ve never read any of her books, but after reading this discussion I’m looking forward to some quality binge reading!