You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO request is from Tara, who hopes to find this contemporary romance:
I read this book in the early nineties. (I know!) It’s one of those books that’s always stuck with me, and I’d love to reread it again. What I remember:
– It was a contemporary romance.
– The heroine lives in an old house that she loves, but the house costs a lot of money to maintain. Her father and two siblings also own a portion of the house, and they want to sell, but she does not.
– The hero is a developer of some kind, I think? He makes an offer for the house, but for various plot reasons, he shows up at the house, pretending to be the heroine’s sister’s boyfriend.
– Hero and heroine make out and then the heroine feels guilty about making out with her sister’s boyfriend?
– In the end, the house is sold, and the heroine becomes a carpenter, I think.
Anyway, this is probably a long shot, but I’d love to find this book and read it again. The heroine had the coolest hobbies (she did pottery! they drank coffee out of mugs she’d made!) and it’s really stuck with me all these years.
Can we HaBO?
House Bound
by
Anne Stuart
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It’s an Anne Stuart. Will check out name and return. Didn’t remember sister’s boyfriend part but everything else is the same
It’s House Bound by Anne Stuart. Not by favorite. The heroine is rather too devoted to a house. But a good read.
House Bound Anne Stuart
Yes, it sounds a lot like Housebound, and it is one of my favorites. It feels like a really personal work–the heroine’s name is Anne, after all, and from what little I know, Stuart also had an academic father and younger brother and sister. Stuart would later use the same setup in Shadows at Sunset–the overlooked older sister clinging to the family home she can’t afford to maintain, the gay brother, the beautiful younger sister (though that one’s romantic suspense, so the father was straight up evil), which I like even more. Maybe you have to have loved something deeply and completely irrationally to relate, but I love how messy and human it is, in a way Stuart’s heroines often are and readers often object to. (The hero’s wife-died-in-childbirth issues are more typical.)
Note: the original title was Housebound. When she reissued it digitally it became House Bound, with a space. On Amazon the single word brings up the paper version; the spaced version brings up the digital.
I don’t know this book, but this HaBO absolutely made my morning! I was working construction and carpentry for most of the nineties, and drinking coffee from a mug I made while I read this. I don’t generally think of myself as memorably cool – any prior claim to heroine status rests on TSTL choices and how frequently I faint (low blood pressure) – and this was such a great random boost!
That’s lovely, kkw. From the blurb: “A renaissance woman, who doesn’t realize how gifted she is” – your new identity!
That’ll teach me to check in so late. The one time I knew the answer/have the book in the under the bed archive and everyone else has the answer.
This was it! Thank you, thank you, thank you – I’ve been looking for this book for YEARS!