This HaBO comes from Kelsey, who wants to find this historical romance:
The novel starts in America. The heroine agrees to take a young girl to England to live with her grandfather. The heroine wants to go to help her sister find the father of her baby. He is supposedly an English Officer.
Girl refuses to go to England and runs away, so the heroine dresses as her (15 or 16 year old) and she, her sister, and grandmother go to London. She has to pretend to be young, while her sister does not really try very hard to find the father of her kid.
The hero is suspicious of the family as they are from American South and there have been some sneaky stuff happening in London by southern sympathizers. He tries to get close to he family and takes them to a botanical garden and makes the heroine ride a carousel. He’s embarrassed that he is attracted to her and she is so young. He follows her a few times and sees her doing some questionable things. Like going to a church and a book store, but asking things in a coded message sort of way.
At a party, the heroine and sister are overheard talking about the sister’s pregnancy. Hero gets drunk and goes to heroine’s house to propose very badly. The truth comes out and the real young girl shows up at the house. Hero is angry but the grandfather knew the whole time and asks them to stay.
At some point, the hero and heroine have to go find the heroine’s missing grandmother and end up in a very debauched May Fair. They hide in a fertility tent and get it on in there despite the hero being afraid he is too big for her and would create too big of a child and kill her in childbirth. His mom said some messed up stuff to him about how horrible it was to have him.
Later, the heroine and the young girl get kidnapped by Southern sympathizers wanting info on an American spy. The hero must save her, but grandma takes a lead in rescuing them.
Wow.
this sounds amazing.
Wow, indeed.
a paranormal romance or a book with paranormal elements
I’m confused and willing to look like an idiot by asking: what is paranormal in this description?
@Deborah: That was a typo on my part! I copied the post html from a previous HaBO so I could input the new request
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every time there’s some utterly off-the-wall HABO request, the comments reveal that there exist at least three titles–if not an entire subgenre–matching the crazysauce description.
I can’t decide whether I do, or do not, want this to be the case here.
</tangent>
And there are always people wanting to read said crazysauce.
No idea, but the first part of the description reminded me of an old movie The Major and the Minor. Ginger Rogers plays a woman who pretends to be 12 years old to get the discount rate on a train. She meets a guy in the military and winds up having to go to the military school where he works for the weekend, pretending to be 12 the whole time. They managed to make the romance not very creepy, and Ginger Rogers was AMAZING. She didn’t even have to dance much.
I used to watch that movie all the time. I stalked either AMC or TCM to record it on VHS.
Yes, The Major and the Minor was my first thought too!
@Kris – I was just about to mention The Major and the Minor!
Whew, this is a Funny Trope that played much better in ye olden days-or did it?
This kinda crzysauce sounds like my kinda story.
Oh yeah, sign me up for this!
Please someone know what this is so that I too can bask in it’s bananapants glory