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The Flame and the Flower
The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss is 99c! This is part of today’s Kindle Daily Deals, which also include some other romances. This is an Old Skool romance and for many, was their intro to the genre. I will warn you that there is rape and talk of it. For some, this book will hold a special place in readers’ hearts, while others say this one does not age well. What do you think?
The Flower
Doomed to a life of unending toil, Heather Simmons fears for her innocence—until a shocking, desperate act forces her to flee. . . and to seek refuge in the arms of a virile and dangerous stranger.
The Flame
A lusty adventurer married to the sea, Captain Brandon Birmingham courts scorn and peril when he abducts the beautiful fugitive from the tumultuous London dockside. But no power on Earth can compel him to relinquish his exquisite prize. For he is determined to make the sapphire-eyed prize. For he is determined to make the sapphire-eyed lovely his woman. . .and to carry her off to far, uncharted realms of sensuous, passionate love.
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One Dance with a Duke
One Dance with a Duke by Tessa Dare is $1.99! This is the first book in Dare’s Stud Club trilogy and features a horse breeder hero. Readers say this one is slow to start with, but recommend powering through! There is a marriage of convenience aspect that reviewers really enjoyed.
In One Dance with a Duke—the first novel in Tessa Dare’s delightful new trilogy—secrets and scandals tempt the irresistible rogues of the Stud Club to gamble everything for love.
A handsome and reclusive horse breeder, Spencer Dumarque, the fourth Duke of Morland, is a member of the exclusive Stud Club, an organization so select it has only ten members—yet membership is attainable to anyone with luck. And Spencer has plenty of it, along with an obsession with a prize horse, a dark secret, and, now, a reputation as the dashing “Duke of Midnight.” Each evening he selects one lady for a breathtaking midnight waltz. But none of the women catch his interest, and nobody ever bests the duke—until Lady Amelia d’Orsay tries her luck.
In a moment of desperation, the unconventional beauty claims the duke’s dance and unwittingly steals his heart. When Amelia demands that Spencer forgive her scapegrace brother’s debts, she never imagines that her game of wits and words will lead to breathless passion and a steamy proposal. Still, Spencer is a man of mystery, perhaps connected to the shocking murder of the Stud Club’s founder. Will Amelia lose her heart in this reckless wager or win everlasting love?
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Yours Until Dawn
Yours Until Dawn by Teresa Medeiros is $1.99! This is a standalone historical romance that came out in the early 2000s. It has a blind hero and some Beauty and the Beast elements. Several readers say this book has earned a spot on their keeper shelf. However, there seems to be a “twist” mentioned that readers felt was unnecessary.
Gabriel Fairchild’s valor during battle earns him the reputation of hero, but costs him both his sight and his hope for the future. Abandoned by the fiancée he adored, the man who once walked like a prince among London’s elite secludes himself in his family’s mansion, cursing his way through dark days and darker nights.
Prim nurse Samantha Wickersham arrives at Fairchild Park to find her new charge behaving more like a beast than a man. Determined to do her duty, she engages the arrogant earl in a battle of both wit and wills. Although he claims she doesn’t possess an ounce of womanly softness, she can feel his heart racing at her slightest touch. As Samantha begins to let the light back into Gabriel’s life and his heart, they both discover that some secrets — and some pleasures — are best explored in the dark…
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Penalty Play
Penalty Play by Lynda Aicher is $1.99 at Amazon and $2.49 elsewhere! This is the third book in the Power Play series, but can be read on its own. I’m always wary of heroes who refer to women as “bimbos.” However, readers like how much chemistry the hero and heroine had. It has a 3.9-star rating on Goodreads.
Minnesota Glaciers’ starting defenseman Henrik Grenick is good at two things: hockey and sex. He’s got it all—the career, the biceps, the babes. But the steady parade of women through his bedroom just leaves him wanting more, hunting for the next distraction. Until he meets Jacqui, who awakens a hunger he never knew he craved.
Fiercely independent Jacqui Polson has no time for the seductive hockey player demanding her attention. More band geek than bimbo, she’s in an entirely different league, and growing up with four hockey-crazed brothers left her with no interest in that world. But damn, Henrik’s hot. And when it comes to sex, Jacqui knows exactly what she wants.
As their relationship moves beyond games, Henrik needs more—not just of Jacqui’s touch, but of her. Jacqui discovers there’s more to Henrik than just the gruff facade. But after a lifetime of fighting their own battles, neither has ever let anyone get so close. As they soon find out, needing someone isn’t a weakness, it’s the only thing that matters…
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The Medeiros has a LOT of Beauty and the Beast elements — specifically Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. I might have liked it if that gimmick had been left out in favor of exploring the originality in greater depth. Seesawing between “this is a beloved children’s cartoon” and “that got really freaking dark” may cause whiplash.
It’s one of the first romance novels I read when I was a very young teenager and is responsible for getting me hooked on romance novels. I re-read it not so long ago and it was an interesting experience. Some of it was a little hard to take as an adult woman but the sense of nostalgia I felt while I was reading it made the unpalatable parts a little better for me. In addition, Kathleen Woodiwiss was a fabulous writer so that helped a lot.
No, I suppose TF&TF doesn’t really hold up, but back in the day? Well, you know any love is good love, so I took what I could get. Also, it is firmly and forever on the keeper shelf between TW&TD & Sweet Savage Love, because you never really let go of your first loves.
Picked up The Flame and the Flower for a quarter several years back.
Imo, if you don’t have nostalgic memories, skip it.
“Be Mine Tonight” by Kathryn Smith is 99c on Amazon Kindle. I don’t see a lot of standard historical romance with vampires thrown in, so I enjoyed the series. Though it’s been a while since I’ve read them.
Is there a long separation in the flame and the flower? Like, years long? I’ve been trying to place a book I read in the 80, s and this book may be it.
Months of separation yes, but not years.
Perhaps it’s best to think of old-school bodice-rippers the same way we think of puberty: something we had to go through to get where we are today but not necessarily something we’d want to revisit.
OK, so the book I remember had a similar beginning but there was a lengthy separation and a son named Adam. The hero went looking for the heroine, who had been gone for years. When she got back, the woman who had been trying to win her husband back died in a fire. I submitted this for a help a bitch out but never heard back and this is Driving. Me. Crazy.
@jws, I’ll toss one out there for you. Except for the part about the spurned girlfriend, and that I’m not sure about the son’s name, maybe Shirlee Busbee’s Gypsy Lady?
I started reading Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss when I was 14 years old (1974). I re-read The Wolf & The Dove (Woodiwiss) a couple of years ago and still enjoyed it. I tend to prefer books that keep the H/H together throughout so that helped. Even though SSL is on my keeper shelf, it’s more for nostalgia than anything else, as I’m not sure I could still read it now with the same level of enjoyment. Steve made my teenage heart go all aflutter. But I’ve met too many Steves in my time and have no tolerance nowadays.
Yo, did the back cover of TF&TF really have two instances of “sapphire-eyed” within 10 words of each other?!? Hats off to the size of those ovaries not giving a damn!
If anyone has a hankering for hot, snarky, and hilarious† paranormal romance, Amazon’s Daily Deal has the three Mercury Pack books by Suzanne Wright for sale for $1.99 each. And they whispersync for the same amount…
Caveat: the shifters have to deal with prejudice and hate groups, so this might not be the escapist reading I remember enjoying pre-2016. *sigh*
†Not Shelly Laurenston levels of hilarity, but a satisfying snicker-at-bad-jokes hilarity. YMMV.
I bought TF&TF (on sale!) & read it so I would understand all the references to it!
I also wanted to read the book that was “the first to follow the principal characters into the bedroom” (Wikipedia). Not sure one has to read it to appreciate its place & influence, but my retentive soul is now at peace!
I will say, it’s certainly not a reread for me.
I loved One Dance with a Duke for the most part – there was one plot point I didn’t like, but it is a solid re-read for me and always gives me all the feels!
I loved Yours Until Dawn. I definitely recognize it’s shortcomings but something about it makes it special. It’s on my favorites list and is one of the few kindle books I paid full price to get on my kindle, so yes I have the paperback and kindle version.
Even the blurb for TF&TF makes me a little queasy. DiscoDollyDeb is right. Let’s not do that again.
@jws Could it be a Virginia Henley novel? It sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.
I remember getting into romance by snitching copies of my Mom’s books. Woodiwiss (Shanna), Rogers (SSL,The Wanton, and The Insiders really traumatized me), Henley (TF&TF, Seduced, and Tempted…wowza), and Martin (many of her books were wallbangers for me because of cheating). I gave up re-reading them a few years ago after realizing my tastes and expectations were drastically changed.
Darlynne. YES. This one has the squick; It’s all front-ended but it is horrific. It’s not Woodiwiss’ only novel with rape (She was pretty bad for that with her early stuff) but it is the only one where the HERO is the rapist. In their first encounter, no less.
I happen to have a yellowed-with-age paperback of TF&TF (it says “over three million copies in print,” so it’s obviously not a first run, but it’s pretty freaking old — $3.95 for a 430-page mass market kind of old), and this is what it says on the back:
In an age of great turmoil, the breathtaking romance of Heather Simmons and Captain Brandon Birmingham spans oceans and continents! Their stormy saga reaches the limits of human passion as we follow Heather’s tumultuous journey from poverty… to her kidnapping at a squalid London dockside… to the splendor of Harthaven, the Carolina plantation where Brandon finally probes the depths of Heather’s full womanhood!
I am legit howling about the lack of subtlety with the probing.
On Friday, I AM JUSTICE by Diana Muñoz Stewart (which had a sidebar ad here in the recent past) is a Kindle Daily Deal for $1.99, price matched at BN, Kobo, and Google Play. (Apple is a pain for me to check, but I would assume they’re on the bandwagon.)
Whenever Woodiwiss and Rogers come up in conversations about romance novels, I’m tempted to revisit to see if I find them as enthralling as I did back in high school (Catholic convent school, lol), but the feeling passes pretty quickly. I suspect there’s no repeating one’s first reading, at a very innocent time in one’s life, of the old bodice-rippers. I’d probably find them long and tedious now.
I’m another who read (and loved) Woodiwiss, Rogers, Busbee, and their peers in the seventies and eighties. I’d be scared to read them now.
An English Regency heroine named Samantha..? This is a nineteenth century American-invented name. Ten minutes of research, authors!
@jws could your book be Deceive Not My Heart by Shirlee Busbee? That one has a long separation (5 years) and a kid the hero didn’t know about. I don’t remember the part about the fire, but the rest seems awfully familiar
@Ren Benton (20) – please correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure that Brandon’s (non-consensual) probing of Heather’s full womanhood did not “finally” occur at the Southern family plantation, but was pretty early on and takes place in the cabin of his ship. And then (I can’t believe I’m even giving warning, but) ! SPOILER !
— I remember being disappointed yet relieved that there wasn’t any further “probing” until Heather’s full womanhood had delivered the “it only takes one time, kids” heir. —
The SBTB comments have me laughing at myself (and Avon’s lackadaisical back cover “writers”), but then again… TF&TF was my first… and despite remembering thinking that Brandon was a jerk & Heather was a wuss, my 12-year-old soul barreled through those confusing & mixed feels (and every Woodiwiss, Rogers, Jennifer Blake – a guy, right? – I could get my hands on) and my neo-feminist ethos continued on to battle me for subsequent decades on the “acceptability” of reading Romance. And then, four years ago, I found SBTB. And quickly, all became clear: I had found my tribe. So once again, thanks, peoples, for always being here & making sense of it all.
(PS – @DonnaMarie (3) – how weird is it that last weekend I Wiki’d BTO just for the hell of it?! And I’m not even Canadian!)
@BetsyDub: Maybe the first probe was just the tip. Maybe the FULL depths of womanhood means anal. You never know with Old Skool.
Heather definitely wasn’t feisty enough for my taste, but I cut her some slack for being abused at home and then forced to go live with her rapist, which makes badasses out of statistically few people. At least she’s easier to stomach than Shanna, who went to the far other end of the spectrum to full-blown demonic evil.
I periodically try to read these for nostalgia, and I can’t even get to the cringey content because the prose itself is so overwrought. When I was young, I’d read whatever I could get my hands on, but now that I’m old and have standards, my tolerance for trudging through written quicksand is nonexistent.
@BetsyDub: Jennifer Blake is not a man; her real name is Patricia Maxwell and she published some gothics and very early romances under that name. Yes, Blake write old-school (rapey) bodice rippers at first, but she gradually moved to historicals and contemporaries (most set in Louisiana) where the heroine’s had much more agency. She’s a good writer and her books tend to much more historically accurate than most. “Jennifer Wilde” was male writer of the bodice-ripping variety whose books always included incredibly sexualized/objectifying language while the virginal heroine examined her nude body in a mirror. Back in the day, type of “male gaze” objectification in a romance novel was always a clue that the writer was male.
I apologize for all the grammatical errors and dropped words in my post above. It’s early here!
@BetsyDub
I left romance for a very long time after devouring it from about 10/11yrs to ~15/16yrs. As I got older I didn’t like that there weren’t enough “strong heroines” and too many Alpholes. And I fell into the whole “if you read romance you’re taking time away from IMPORTANT books you *should be reading”.
FF to 2012 and I’m stuck in NC w/no friends/job/too much time, and I pick up an old romance. I tried to read an old Johanna Lindsey and was “NO!”, and I used to love her. Fire in Winter was my 1st. BUT my sister had a Bridgerton-JQ and a Bastion-SL, and I thought maybe romance is different now.
I think I saw SBTB on TV promoting their books, found it at the library and lmao. I came here and saw SO MANY other SBs and now draw strength instead of shame from others who also share my love (and larfs) of romance.
<3