Help A Bitch Out

HaBO: An Actual Knight in Shining Armor

This HaBO request comes from Rachel and is looking for this time travel romance:

My boss was just talking to me about her favourite romance novel of all time but she can’t remember the title or the author!

It’s a time-travel romance where a young woman, in great distress (possibly having just been dumped) is stomping through a graveyard, trips and falls, hits her head, and is woken up by a literal knight in shining armor. It’s set in either Northern Ireland or in Wales – definitely not Scots. My boss read this book in her twenties, so it might have been newly published in the very early 1980s.

She says the edition that she moved with her (across the country! Twice!) had a red cover.

My first guess is Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor. I’m not confident, though, as I haven’t read it. I just know there’s time travel, it came out in 1989, and had a red cover.

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  1. DonnaMarie says:

    I agree, this sounds remarkably like A Knight in Shining Armor. Wow! What a flash from the post. I read this one hot off the new releases shelf back in the day.

  2. DonnaMarie says:

    Flash from the PAST.
    I hate autocorrect.

  3. Holly says:

    Yeah, you can’t tell me this isn’t Jude Deveraux’s Knight in Shining Armor. I read it 3 years ago, so it’s still pretty fresh in my memory.

  4. Holli says:

    Heaving Bosoms podcast did an episode on this book (it is definitely Knight in Shining Armor). I reread it before listening and WOW did I have a different experience than I did reading it when it first came out.

  5. Candy Riley says:

    This is my favorite [old skool] romance, too! Also read back in the day. I don’t want to go back and read how it has stood the test of time as I fear it won’t do well.

  6. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    Another vote for A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR. I was a huge Jude Devereaux fan back in the day, I’m not sure how well that “old skool” vibe would hold up today though. I especially enjoyed Devereaux’s TWIN OF ICE/TWIN OF FIRE duet and the series (forgot the name) about three or four brothers and their various loves. That series stuck with me because in at least one of the books the hero has a mistress and continues to have a relationship with her after he marries the heroine. Sadly, Devereaux has had a hard time of things: after he young son died, she gave an enormous amount of money to con artists who claimed they could contact her son through seances, etc. People who prey on the grieving really are the worst.

  7. cleo says:

    This sounds a lot like Knight in Shining Armor but there are some details that don’t line up exactly.

    It’s set in England, the heroine gets dumped while on vacation and ends up crying in some church over the tombstone of a 16th C knight and somehow brings him into her time. Lots of things happen, they fall in love and then he goes back to his time. And then she goes back to his time, for reasons, but he doesn’t remember her so they fall in love *again*.

    Also, not all romance readers consider the ending to be an HEA.

  8. Jay says:

    That is 100% A Knight in Shining Armor… She is traveling with her fiance and his daughter across England and he leaves her in a church out in the middle of nowhere without her passport. Inside the church she falls crying onto a stone coffin with the image of a knight from the 16th century… who literally comes forward in time to help her. I liked that it’s set both in the 80s (totally written in the 80s) and in the 16th century. That’s done really really well (I think). The only thing I didn’t like was the way Jude Devereaux decided to construct the HEA… I thought it was weird and off putting. Didn’t need it…

  9. cleo says:

    Also, there were A LOT of time travel romances in the 80s and 90s.

  10. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    @Cleo: the only Lisa Kleypas romance I’ve ever been able to get into was what was probably her very first book, GIVE ME TONIGHT, a time-travel romance set in Depression-era and 1870s Texas. It was a great book, but I think Kleypas has disavowed it—it’s certainly never been available as an ebook as far as I can tell.

  11. Kris says:

    Can I add this to the mix. I don’t remember specifics but this is the description from Amazon…… After a particularly bad date, Jennifer McKinnon returns home to her Manhattan apartment wondering if she will ever find her true love. It turns out that she has been looking in the wrong place, and time. While visiting her sister in England, Jennifer stumbles across a “time gate” and is whisked back 800 years into the past. Just as she is about to be barbecued for being a witch, Jennifer is rescued by Nicholas de Piaget. After enduring months of matchmaking by his termagant of a grandmother, Nicholas has finally found the one woman with whom he can imagine spending the rest of his life. The only problem is that now Nicholas must find a way to convince Jennifer to stay with him in the past rather than return to her life in the future.

    Lynn kurland wrote a lot of time travel back in the day. I have a Very memory of this one.

  12. Maia says:

    What about Son of the Morning, by Linda Howard? It may be a little off, publication-date wise.

  13. Connie H says:

    While Son of the Morning is definitely a time traveling plot, the hero is a Templar Knight who time travels defending the world from evil as his Holy Mission. None of the plot points match at all.

  14. Cassie says:

    Totally A Knight in Shining Armor. What a fabulous story! Does it match up to these times? I don’t know but it was wonderful years ago.

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