It’s time for another Rec League! We have another request from a reader. Here’s what Reader LauraLou is looking for:
I love, love, love stories where there is a language/communication barrier that is REAL and not magically poofed away!
Here are a few I can think of where this theme has worked really well: Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale, Wild at Heart by Patricia Gaffney, The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith, and Transcendence by Shay Savage. I would love suggestions for others!
Do we have any suggestions for her? All genres welcome, though LauraLou’s reading list consist of historical and scifi romances.
“Annie’s Song” by Catherine Anderson.
“Archer’s Voice” by Mia Sheridan.
“Daughter of the Forest” by Juliet Marillier.
Nit sure if thus one fits the bill but Tessa Dare’ s Three Nights with a Scoundrel has a deaf heroine.
*not *this …..never type before coffee!
Lyn Gala’s Claimings series – m/m SFR. The first one is Claimings, Tails and Other Alien Artifacts. It’s about a human trader on a planet with giant purple tutle/lizard life forms. It’s so, so good.
@cleo – Turtle lifeforms. It’s much better than this description makes it sound. It does have some references to past abuse and some mild BDSM (bondage and submission).
Jeffe Kennedy’s fantasy romance “The Pages of the Mind” was excellent. The heroine is a librarian and does research to help her learn to communicate with the hero, who is from a different culture. This is part of the 12 Kingdoms series, but can be read as a standalone.
Several of the Barbarian series by Ruby Dixon have language barriers though they are solved by technology eventually. (These are waaaaay more on the fun side of romance than Gann. Was there anything fun about Gann?). But there’s actual spoken language in a couple of them, ASL in one, and a selective mutism in the latest).
The Warprize trilogy by Elizabeth Vaughn has very real communication issues, both in language and in culture – just because you can translate a word doesn’t mean you understand what someone means when they say it. I loved them for this reason.
I don’t know if would actually apply, as the language barrier is due to disability, but His Road Home by Anna Richland features a hero that has severe difficulty with spoken language after suffering a TBI. I read it very recently, so it’s fresh in my mind. There are scenes where the characters are working through finding a method of communication, as both speech and writing turn out to both be very hard for him. As time goes on, they find out that he can communicate very well via text message. It’s not magically solved either; by the end of the book, he has regained some speech, but it’s still pretty difficult for him and he remains reliant on other methods to compensate. It’s a lovely book.
Shana Galen’s The Making of a Gentleman has a hero with limited communication/social abilities due to childhood imprisonment and isolation. (He was a noble’s child, captured during the French Revolution.) Kind of like Flowers From the Storm in the way the relationship between the hero and heroine unfolds.
Not sure if my recs are exactly what you are looking for but here they are:
A Hearing Heart by Bonnie Dee has a deaf hero, and is set in Nebraska in the early 1900s. The heroine (who is a schoolteacher that just moved there) saves him from a beating by some drunk bullies. Everyone believes that he has a low level of intelligence, but the heroine realises that this is not the case. She teaches him sign language and how to read. It’s a really sweet story.
The Texan’s Wager by Jodi Thomas has a hero who doesn’t speak, although he is able to. The heroine marries the hero to avoid hanging for killing someone. I believe it was self-defence, or she helped another woman who was in trouble, something along those lines. Anyhow, this was also a really sweet story. It’s set in the 1880s.
Darling Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt has a mute hero (he was severely beaten and lost his voice). He does regain his voice eventually. This is book seven in the Maiden Lane series, and the hero’s story really begins in book 6, so you may want to start from there first. Or read the series from the beginning. But I think It works as a standalone. Although, I highly recommend the Maiden Lane serie. The series is set in Georgian London.
🙂
The Spymaster’s Lady, by Joanna Bourne! It’s written so that you can tell the heroine is speaking French even though the text is (of course) in English–there are lovely word choices and syntax shifts that make it clear she is using another language. And in a brief scene where she speaks German, the syntax shifts and such are there too, but demonstrably different than when she’s speaking French.
I just read Without Words by Ellen O’Connell and it was great! A western where the heroine’s throat was injured as a child and she can’t talk.
Also, The Golden Dynasty by Kristin Ashley. Heroine is transported to another dimension and ends up in a savage country with warriors and face paint and fights to the death. There’s also a pet tiger.
Thank you for the recommendations, everyone! Lots of new authors here I haven’t tried!
In PNR, Kresley Cole’s DEMON FROM THE DARK where the hero, Malkom Slaine speaks Demonish and his heroine has to go all Ursula on him and speak with body language. Total keeper.
In YA Romance, I highly recommend Sherryl Jordan’s THE RAGING QUIET. Resilient heroine who goes from a bad situation to a worse one and makes a startling discovery about the maddened village boy.
I was going to recommend Shana Galen’s The Making of a Gentleman, but I see Theresa Romain beat me to it. It’s a book that I’ve enjoyed re-reading from time to time.
Mary Balogh’s Silent Melody has a deaf heroine. Haven’t read this one myself, but Balogh and all.
Michelle Diener’s Class 5 series is SF romance with Earth women in a First Contact scenario. First book: Dark Horse.
Andrea K. Höst’s Touchstone series is portal SF with some romance, and a protagonist who has a language implant but no linguistic commonalities with her hosts, so fluency takes time. First book: Stray. (Which is free!)
Ann Somerville’s Learning to Dharn (I hope I spelled that correctly) has a deaf hero (m/m). A few trigger warnings for some violence, but the romance was interesting and really sweet.
“Never Seduce a Scot” by Maya Banks has a deaf heroine who everyone think is mentally impaired, and IIRC, there’s some communication barriers along the way both from the heroine’s actual condition as well as her trying to make people think she’s not all there.
“Between a Vamp and a Hard Place” by Jessica Sims has language barrier issues between the hero and heroine for the last 15% of the book
Seconding Joanna Bourne, but putting in a caution regarding Mary Balogh’s Silent Melody – I love love love Balogh in general, but this is probably my least favorite. The heroine spends a lot of time communicating with her incredibly expressive eyes and all the magical understanding irritated me. I think it’s actually the book that sets up this one that has the scene where she’s basically Lassie explaining that Timmy fell down the well, but I was really never a fan of the way this particular character was portrayed.
I second The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan. I got so excited when I saw someone else had mentioned it! I love love LOVE this book. It’s technically YA, but it deals with a lot of heavy subject matter in realistic and serious fashion. And the love story is beautiful. Seriously, this book is on my permanent forever keeper shelf. Just be ready to cry and then smile.
“Local Custom” by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller is a marvelous book featuring a cross-cultural romance with a language barrier. It’s sci fi but the authors classify it as one of their “space regencies” for reasons which will be obvious when you read it–the authors are great fans of Georgette Heyer and it shows. There is courtliness, lace at the cuffs, cultural misunderstandings that hinge on subtleties of language, a secret baby, danger, spaceships, disapproving relatives, and an absolutely lovely romance that knocks me out every time with THE LONGING. Sigh.
Unspeakable by Sandra Brown has a deaf heroine.
The Things I Didn’t Say by Kylie Fornasier is YA. The main character has selective mutism.
Freedom’s Landing by Anne McCaffrey – scifi (with a romance, but it’s not the main focus of the story) – there are different nationalities and species in this, so there are communication difficulties, including among the hero and heroine.
The Best of all possible Worlds by Karen Lord. The hero is a highly evolved human, very logical, who have very few facial expressions because they’re telepathic, and who speaks a difficult language. The heroine is partly another type of human who’s super intuitive. Opposites attract! (Earth humans are the pan talented with many abilities but are still quarantined from everybody else because they’re too immature)
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley has a heroine who has to learn a new language after she ends up kidnapped (for good reasons), and has a moment when she flips out at the hero and then is shaken to realize that she’s fluently screaming at him in a language she’s only recently learned.
Not a romance, but I want to mention one of my all time favorite “overcoming barriers to communication” novels – Hellspark by Janet Kagan. It’s been recently digitally reissued.
It’s a fabulous anthropological sf about an expert polyglot sent to a newly discovered planet after a first encounter with an new species goes wrong. There are a couple understated romances in the story, but they are not the focus at all.
Cleo, I’ve had Hellspark sitting unread on my shelf for years; I bought it way back when due to my love for the author’s Star Trek novel, Uhura’s Song. You may have inspired me to finally read it. Stay tuned (best intentions and all that)….
Jennifer Ashley’s The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie has a hero on the autism spectrum. This makes for communication barriers in that she figures out how to effectively speak with him and vice versa instead of language barrier. It made me think about how my husband and I alter how we talk so the other really gets what is being said. I love Robin McKinley and enjoyed Elizabeth Vaughn’s Warprize. Both are great reads.
What a fascinating list! Since other books with not-strictly-linguistic communication difficulties because of culture are listed, I’ll add Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with 4 main characters and 3 pairings in 1960s Czechoslovakia. There are several chapters titled “A Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.” The sex is incredibly hot, also (though if you’re put off by infidelity this book is not for you.)
There’s also a film, La Grande Illusion, most of which focuses on an ensemble cast of prisoners of war in WWI (bear with me here) but the last third (?) of the film has an absolutely adorable romance between a French poilu and a German farmer, who’s had to keep the homestead going now that her men are dead. They communicate through gesture, actions, touch (!!), and I cry with happiness every time.
Rachel beat me to it, but I love Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians series!! They’re sci-fi romance and she’s an auto buy author for me. She just came out with the 13th in the series and writes about one a month. They all have some barriers in communication, but it is “fixed” by technology. However, in the 7th book, Barbarian’s Touch, the heroine is deaf and that presents not just a communication barrier but an added cultural one as well. I don’t want to tell you how it ends, but I find it fantastic. You should really try this whole series. The human girls are kidnapped from earth by bad aliens at the beginning of the series, but not by the heroes, and there is one story where the heroine is dealing with the emotional trauma of being raped while imprisoned, but I think it is dealt with very thoughtfully. And I really like this series because although rape is a huge trope in kidnapped/sci-fi books that I’ve read in the past, it’s not a major theme in this one. Overall, the language and cultural barriers between the human women and their barbarians is thought-provoking and often hilarious!
Also, Tall, Tatted and Tempting by Tammy Falkner has a tall, tatted and tempting deaf hero, Logan. It is awesome and I love the whole series as well. 🙂
On a side note, I’m so happy that a red league post came up that I had an instant answe forr! Yay! 🙂
Omg! *rec league
The language barrier is between the hero and his daughter the heroine translates. Excellent book. Unwrapping Her Perfect Match (London Legends, #3.5) by Kat Latham.
Ruth’s Bonded (Ruth & Gron, #1) by V.C. Lancaster There is a squick factor in this series because the aliens are ape like but the language barrier is a huge part of the series. I enjoyed them.
Bay’s Mercenary (Unearthly World, #1) by C.L. Scholey Haven’t read yet.
Captive Bride by Bonnie Dee has a Chinese heroine in the American West.