This HaBO request comes from Berry, who is hoping to track down an epically crazysauce book. Berry does mention that the description is a bit upsetting and it could be triggering for some:
So this book was strange and a little upsetting. I want to find it so that I’ll stop being haunted every time I remember it.
(Pardon using a list, it’s the only way I won’t dissolve into a mess of “and then this happened??? I DON’T KNOW”.)
1. This was either a historical, a generic faux-medieval, or a fantasy setting, but it was definitely something ‘medieval-esque’. Published sometime before 1999.
2. It starts off with a heroine living in the woods, who finds an injured knight and takes care of him. The knight ends up marrying her and taking her with him when he goes back to his lord. (There’s a Jill Barnett book similar to this but it’s not that one.)
3. Said heroine was raised in the woods to hide out from the villain, who MIGHT have had her sister or mother (who might have been tortured/raped to death/killed herself), was basically a crazy psychopath who wanted her as a wife/slave, and moved on to the heroine after the other one died.
4. The knight doesn’t even know what a female orgasm is, so he has no idea why the heroine seems so pissy after sex. After all, HE enjoys it. His friend(s), upon discovering this, laugh their asses off at this and his complaint that ‘prostitutes never acted so angry after sex’ and lead him in the right direction. (Hero might have also been named Matthew?)
5. Knight hero doesn’t like the fact that his naive sylvan wife apparently gets along with the court jester and is a bit of a jealous dick about it. (Jester may or may not have been hot, I don’t recall.)
OKAY SO HERE’S WHERE THE CRAZY SAUCE STARTS.
6. The Bad Guy catches wind of the heroine’s location and threatens to invade the castle when the lord is away and the Knight is in charge. He demands the heroine. Knight waffles and the heroine DOES NOT want to go with the villain, so she doesn’t like that he’s not outright rejecting the whole thing aaaaaaaand that’s when one of his friends knocks her lights out (knowing the knight would have relented otherwise) and they deliver her to the psycho (she wakes up already caged up and IT’S PRETTY HORRIBLE). The court jester demands to be taken along too, and the villain agrees only because he feels that killing the jester would actually piss the lord/lord’s wife off more than his kidnapping stunt.
7. The lord returns, the knight hero rides out to save his wife (picking up the jester along the way, who had the crap beaten out of him for basically being a decent friend to the heroine), but arrives ‘too late’ as the heroine’s already in the villain’s castle. The villian decides that if he can’t have her, NO ONE WILL dun dun dun and slashes her wrists and leaves her to die. He tells the hero that she’s dead already and knight hero has something of a BSOD. (Villain may have been mopey about this like ‘I just destroyed the most precious thing in the world’ blah blah and been waiting for the hero to arrive to kill him.)
8. Heroine is, of course, not ENTIRELY dead and they manage to rescue her, but this is the thing, I don’t remember an HEA. I recall the heroine being angry and hurt at the hero and that she has a talk with the lord and that he tries to defend the hero and — ?? My memory says the book ends there with the heroine being all ‘maybe I’ll forgive him one day but right now I’m TOO DAMN MAD’ with her wrists all bandaged up.
Seriously, what was this? That ending was abrupt and unexpected, what with her being so angry and no resolution that I can recall. (Rightfully so, if I may add, WHAT KIND OF HERO HANDS OVER HIS WIFE TO SOMEONE SHE’S TERRIFIED OF. By god, there’s not enough groveling in the world.)
Oof. I’m sorry that went on so long. It’s been almost 20 years and I still don’t know what it was that I read. The older I get, the more I try to convince myself it all makes sense and I’m just remembering wrong. If anyone has any idea what this is, I’d be super grateful.
Well, this hero sounds terrible and I think we should throw him into a pit.
Thank you for helping me out, I’m so sorry I’m subjecting you all to this. I was about nine years old when I read this, and it was in the romance section which I was methodically devouring at the time after the kid’s and teen’s areas had been plundered already.
I’m kind of surprised it didn’t scar me right off from romance novels forever but at the same time, I was still happy she was so mad. Because she deserved to be. (I was totally rooting for the jester guy. Only decent person in the book that I can recall.)
Sorry, no idea.
“Heroine is, of course, not ENTIRELY dead”
Am I the only one who had a Princess Bride flashback from that?
I have no idea what this is but I’m kind of hoping for a sequel in which the heroine gets together with the jester since he seems the only okay dude in this mess????
Kinda wondering if this is Birdalone by William Morris.
That sounds like Through a Dark Mist, one of Marsha Canhams Robin Hood Trilogy
@Cate Checked your suggestion, it’s not that. Thank you for trying, though! (This book does sound quite epic from the summary.)
@Gloriamarie Amalfitano I’m not finding a summary of this book. Do you have a link? I’m inclined to think this was published sometime between the 1980s and the mid-90s though, since it was fairly graphic about sex in that way old romance novels were.
Oh well, if the sex was graphic, it is not Birdalone.
Had to comment: could it be honor, by Mary Spencer? The heroine is ward of the villian, who both killed her mother and marries her as soon as she is of age. There’s also a sister, who despises the heroine for being week. The hero is very honorbound, sexually inexperienced, but generally trying to do whats best for everyone, and she ends up with the villian for a while because of this ( fuzzy on the details) I really liked this one, it balances crazysauce with likable people, kept the book for the last 15 years over multiple moves.
Seconding Honor by Mary Spencer.
The villain does slit her wrists just before the hero arrives.
And, yes there is an HEA.
Sounds a bit like an old Johanna Lindsey’s Medieval romance.
Honor
by Mary Spencer
3.93 · Rating Details · 15 Ratings · 2 Reviews
DAMSEL IN DISTRESS
Her marriage to a cruel baron had left Amica of Lancaster frightened. And when the king sent Sir Thomas of Reed to her defense, his rough ways chilled her heart. Yet, as she grew to know the knight, she discovered that beneath his rugged exterior lay a very special soul, a man who could fill her dreams.
KNIGHT TO THE RESCUE
Thomas had never been a lady’s man. He could defend Amica as the king had ordered, but how could he guard himself from her? The lady’s innocent sensuality was stirring strange emotions, leaving him longing for far, far more.
This is an amazing HABO. I have no idea what this book is, but re: the ending, it could be, since you read it when you were young, that you mostly just remembered being really angry about the hero and forgot how it resolved. I feel like I sometimes do that with books, just remembered the bits that had the strongest emotional effect on me.
while I had no idea what the HABO was, I have seen part of it before. In the medieval erotic novel WHITE ROSE ENSNARED by Juliet Hastings (my favorite erotic novel), while the boo!hiss! villain has the hero and heroine captive and separated in his castle, he tells the heroine that he’s having the hero killed, then the henchman tells the hero the heroine was killed, before trying to kill the hero. (Of course, in RomanceLandia a hero who’s chained to a wall can easily overcome an armed, unchained person trying to kill them.) Naturally the hero and heroine both escape separately, can’t stop thinking about their “lost” love (even when able to get it on with other folks), and eventually run into each other by accident and have their HEA.
I wonder how common this sort of thing is (especially in medieval or regency novels, when the main characters can’t just phone each other to discover the other person is alive). It both makes the reader hate the villain even more and paves the way for the tearful, joyful reunion between the lovers. Those two books can’t be the only two to think of using this plot device!
@jimthered, you’re right, people must have been always losing each other in medieval times, no phones or email. After a while you just assume the other person is dead and get on with your life. One example I’m thinking of is “The Shattered Rose” by Jo Beverly. The hero goes off on a Crusade, his wife thinks he’s dead and has an affair(consensual) with another man, and the hero makes it home eventually to find her with a baby that’s obviously not his. I hated this book, the only Jo Beverly I never finished reading. I either DNF’d or skimmed to the end, so I don’t remember much about the ending, except I think her husband does forgive her and they end up together.
Also, and this is not a romance, but “Enemies, a Love Story” by Isaac Bashevis Singer uses this plotline. The main character lost his wife in the Holocaust, at least he thought she was dead. He marries the Polish Gentile woman who hid him from the Nazis during the war, and they move to New York. He’s grateful to the new wife, but she’s a peasant and doesn’t satisfy all his emotional and intellectual needs, so he’s also having an affair with a Jewish woman who is more his soulmate. Then wife #1 turns up alive, after all. I remember the guy spending a lot of time on the subway shuttling between these 3 women, who are in different apartments scattered around the city, and it’s quite comical. Very few writers but IBS could find humor in the stories of Holocaust survivors, but I guess that’s how he got his Nobel Prize. You won’t be sorry if you read this book, it’s my favorite of his.
Karin, in response to your comment “Very few writers but IBS could find humor in the stories of Holocaust survivors” a work that has humor intertwined with the drama, tragedy, and history of the Holocaust is MAUS by Art Spiegelman. This work (a comic book that helped create the phrase “graphic novel” for people too wimpy to admit they like reading a comic book) is hardly a comedy, but there are some funny moments in this tale of an adult son relating to his father, a Holocaust survivor who has troubles getting along with people. And in a nice bit of irony, the second book is called “And Here My Troubles Began” — and it deals with the father’s life *after* he was freed from Auschwitz. This is one of those must-read comic books/books/”graphic novels.”
Thanks, jimthered, I loved Maus!
Hope the title of this book is found sounds like fun to read, even with the crazy sauce….
Cat sent us an email with a potential lead on this HaBO: