This HaBO comes from Laura K. Curtis, who is looking for a romantic suspense novel that… you have to read this.
Trigger Warning for reference to rape and violence, k? I want you to be safe with yourself over there.
I read this within the last five years, though I am not sure when it was published, and I am 99% sure I read it as an ebook.
Romantic suspense. Heroine’s great tragedy is that she can’t have kids because she was terribly abused when she was young and forced to have a hysterectomy. (Possibly insertion of knives? There was sexual trauma in the book, I remember that.)
Here’s the thing that makes the book memorable: the hero is very wealthy, and when they’ve punished all the evil villains chasing them, he takes her “overseas” for “experimental treatments” and she has a pregnancy epilogue.
Yes. After her hysterectomy. It is never explained other than that “we’ll go overseas where there are experimental treatments.”
The rest of the book was actually decent, so I remember finding this ridiculousness all the more shocking.
I am so curious about these experimental treatments. Is that how you say “surrogacy” or “adoption” in other languages or something? Because DUDE.
Do you recognize this book?
I think it’s Lisa Marie Rice’s Nightfire. The third book in her Protectors series. Heroine was severely abused as a child. The last bit of violence her stepfather threw her into a wall so hard she broke most of her bones. Most of her childhood through young adulthood has been spent having many surgeries, and even now can’t walk real steadily. At the end of the book she and hero have been going back to London (where she had gone to school and has now set up an orphanage) and has had IVF treatments for 2 years & now she’s pregnant. Although I don’t think it was ever said she had a full hysterectomy.
Aha! I just did a search. Bone chips had severed her Fallopian tubes. That’s why she couldn’t have kids.
There are some similarities, maybe, in Drawn Together (Brown Siblings, #6) by Lauren Dane.
I say maybe, in that maybe(?) there’s some conflation of storylines.
The other place you might look for that sort of weirdness is the McCloud series by Shannon McKenna.
And I’m having a weird sort of memory of a Suzanne Forester. That would’ve been way, way back in the day though.
I don’t remember any specifics of any of these that perfectly match, but several of these have some of those elements, at least.
Plus- SCIENCE!
I hope this is an actual book (without accidental conflation), I really want to read it. REALLY.
Not RS, but Jo Goodman’s last book (new one dropped today, YEA!!!), In Want of a Wife, has a heroine who had a deliberately botched abortion, leaving her supposedly infertile. Then, Surprise, surprise, surprise…
Haven’t read this, but perhaps the experimental treatment was a uterus transplant which is an actual real thing now. Go Science! http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-01-15-uterus-transplants_x.htm
Lynda –
that sounds familiar, but I think maybe because I read it. IVF isn’t terribly experimental, and this book in my memory made it sound as if the treatment was some huge secret experimental thing that only billionaire jet-setters could afford to undertake. I’m pretty sure the WTFery wouldn’t have stood out to me from IVF…my nieces were conceived that way long before I read this book.
Though I am pretty sure I read that book…if it’s still on my Kindle I will have to check and see whether it’s the one I remember. 😀 Thanks!
Abdominal pregnancy is actually a thing. There was a woman in, I think, Italy in the late 70s or very early 80s. When my husband and I were residents in San Francisco in the very early 80s, we used to riff on male pregnancies, using her as an example. Plus, of course, that Schwarzenegger movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdominal_pregnancy
Coco –
The thing is, the rest of the book (as I recall) isn’t that much WTF, though I was frustrated by the heroine’s hangup on pregnancy (that whole “I want my own kids” is a bit of a trigger for me). The plot all seemed sensible (or as sensible as any high key romantic suspense) until the end when it went RIGHT off the rails. 😀
Though neither of us know the book, I think CG is on to something. That news story was from 2007 so it is feasible that a very expensive experimental uterus transplant might be tried overseas. Maybe the, as yet unknown, author saw that story and used it to give her book a fairy tale ending.
Or maybe, in a life-imitating-art kind of way the idea of a “miraculous” healing of infertility is so strong that scientists are desperately trying to solve this problem and a transplant is being tried.
“There are some similarities, maybe, in Drawn Together–”
I’m not sure Xandir and Wooldor Sockbat ever went through this.
“–(Brown Siblings, #6) by Lauren Dane.”
Ohhh… never mind.
Yes, Doug, but there was an episode about Toot Braunstein’s efforts to have a child through non-traditional means.
I think Joan Johnston wrote one where the heroine’s one of the heroine’s tubes was blocked, I think from some injury in her past. I think it was “The Texan”, but I’m not 100% sure.
Just finished a newly pubbed story where she is infertile due to chemo until the epilogue, when…..you guessed it! The miracle baby.
Ruined an otherwise decent read, IMO.
Interesting – lots of books to look up. And, yes, pregnancy is possible after hysterectomy. It would be an ectopic pregnancy and you would need to still have your ovaries. Depending where implantation happened, you might even get to viability and past. I believe an Italian woman managed it in the late 70s – and my husband and I used to riff on it as showing potential for male pregnancies back when we were house officers in San Francisco. Always good for a discussion at a party. Of course, then the governator went and did a movie about it and spoiled it all.