Help A Bitch Out

HaBO: Dancer Time Travels with Magical Claymore

This HaBO request is from Sandee, who is searching for a romance that got lost in a book culling:

It’s a Scottish time travel romance.

A contemporary dancer practices with a claymore and finds herself back in time. She has a “save the whales” tee in hot pink puff paint that she hides from the hero.

I owned this book for years but let it go during a cull before moving overseas.

I think it was late 90s.

Is there anything more 90s than puff paint?

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  1. Julia aka mizzelle says:

    Is this it? Love’s Timeless Dance by Vivian Knight Jenkins

    https://www.fictiondb.com/author/vivian-knight-jenkins~loves-timeless-dance~21736~b.htm

    A DANCE THROUGH TIME

    The pressure from her company’s upcoming show was driving Leeanne Sullivan completely insane. But the talented choreographer refused to believe she could be rehearsing a Scottish dance in her studio one minute–and in the seventeenth-century Highlands the next.

    A TIMELESS LOVE

    Whatever delusion she was suffering, the feisty beauty began enjoying herself when a clansman tried to bend her will to his own. A liberated woman like Leeanne would have no problem teaching virile lain MacBride a new step or two, and soon she’d hive him begging for lessons in love.

  2. Julia says:

    I have to ask – did Iain find that tee-shirt?

  3. DonnaMarie says:

    I feel it’s become so ubiquitous, you can probably leave the word Scottish out of any description of a time travel romance. I honestly can’t remember the last time some tripped into an painting, touched a standing stone or danced with a sword and landed anywhere else. It may have been the 90s.

  4. Julia says:

    I’m a newcomer to romance novels (thanks, Bitches!) – did Diana Gabaldon invent the lochs-and-cocks time travel sub-genre or did it predate ‘Outlander’?

  5. cleo says:

    @Julia – oooh, that’s a good question. There were A LOT of time travel romances in the 90s and not all or even most were Scottish, afair. The first one that I read was A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux – pub in 1989, according to Goodreads, 2 years before Outlander.

    In AKISA, an American woman gets dumped while visiting England, cries at the grave of a medieval English knight and whoops, brings the knight into the present day. She later goes back to his time. It’s a crazysauce book. JD wrote several more crazysauce time travels, including one to the Old West.

  6. ly g says:

    This kind of sounds like one of the Laird for All Time books
    by Angeline Fortin. But I think she might be an actress not a dancer.

  7. ly g says:

    Oh, I just realized those are too recent. Sorry.

  8. Sam Victors says:

    Quite a lot of Scottish time-travel romances, aren’t there?

  9. “Somewhere in Time” – the 1980 time travel movie with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour – that was my introduction to time travel romance. I was 10 years old, so I must have been sneaking into the living room to watch it with my mother.

    I wonder if it holds up today? Anyone know?

  10. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    Im not a huge fan of time-travel, but one of Lisa Kleypas’s earliest books, GIVE ME TONIGHT, was a time-travel romance. A young nurse in the 1930s is transported back to a Texas ranch in the 1880s, where she inhabits the body of her aunt (great-aunt?) and falls in lust/love with the ranch foreman. I haven’t read it in decades, but I remember it handled the “ooops, now I can’t go back” element quite well. The funny thing is I’ve never been able to get into much else Kkeypas has written, but I really enjoyed GMT. I don’t know if Kleypas even acknowledges the book—it’s not available in ebook format as far as I can tell; all I can find online are used copies.

    I’ll also second the Jude Devereaux. Yes, A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR was crazysauce, but totally fun and a good love story.

    (We seem to have gotten off-topic. I hope Sandee finds her book.)

  11. Hillary says:

    @Anna Richland — I found a DVD of Somewhere in Time at Walmart in the $5 bin, and it was a terrible disappointment. There wasn’t much plot to it, just angst and gazing. I remembered it being so much more!

  12. Angst and gazing and a lush musical score.

  13. DonnaMarie says:

    I will third the Jude Devereaux crazysauce. I loved those books.

  14. LauraL says:

    One of my favorite time travel books of the zillions published during the 1990s was Riding Shotgun by Rita Mae Brown, which is set in 1990s and 1690s Virginia foxhunting country. There is a little bit of romance in the book, but the best part is the self-discovery the heroine, Cig, goes through as she meets her ancestors. Haven’t re-read it in a while and now have to see how it holds up ….

    P.S. – Love the Jude Devereaux crazy sauce, too, and have a book she signed here somewhere.

  15. Denise says:

    Not an answer for the HaBO, but Gwyn Cready wrote several time travel romances, and they were set in various places in Europe–not just Scotland. I know offhand, France and England were locations. I don’t think she’s written anything in the past several years, but she won a RITA. http://cready.com/

  16. chacha1 says:

    I’m curious about this only because of the dancing-with-claymore aspect. A claymore is HEAVY. Cannot quite picture its use in a contemporary routine. LOL

  17. Laura says:

    Constance O’Day Flannery wrote time travel romance. a good deal of them seem to have come out in the 80s.

  18. PamG says:

    Favorite time travel movie? Time After Time (1979), a cross-genre tale in which Jack the Ripper steals H. G. Wells time machine and heads for the 70s’ Big Apple pursued by H. G. who then discovers true love in the 20th century. It stars Malcolm McDowell, Jack Warner, and Mary Steenburgen. Sorry, no Scots, just references to that “little Scottish restaurant,” McDonalds. However. . . .

    @Julia

    Lochs and Cocks is the name of my new [pipe] band. So, thanks.

  19. OKCReader405 says:

    Add another Knight In Shining Armor lover. Read it back in the heyday when Meg Ryan and Mel Gibson were perfect for the roles. I still pick it up at thrift stores to give away.

  20. Sandra says:

    Not fond of time travel romance myself, but it’s not just Scots. I’ve seen a multitude of Vikings as well…

  21. DonnaMarie says:

    @PamG, loved that movie, too, but it was San Francisco. I could never figure that out, because in every other iteration of this story, the traveller ends up in a different time, but not a different place.

  22. Well, I’m sorry the Somewhere in Time movie doesn’t hold up… sigh. I guess we did like slow, soft-focused and angsty back in 1980. I tried to re-read Knight in Shining Armor about 5 years ago and couldn’t get past how much the heroine cried and how she let the ex and ex’s daughter abuse her on the trip to England when the books starts. I truly couldn’t read that part, and ended up skipping around.

  23. Kareni says:

    @Anna Richland, for what it’s worth, I still liked Somewhere in Time when I rewatched it a few years ago.

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