Bodice Tipplers

It's spooky season you mofos! That means a creepy book. This year we leave the world of ghost banging and half assed witches to deep dive into vampires! Buckle Up because we are riding the  Vampire Lestat  train. The follow up to Anne Rice's 1976 book,  Interview with a Vampire , is all about that vampy rock and roll lifestyle. Published in 1985 this book is a bedazzled and spandex approach to wha...

Ever get super horny for Alexander the Great, conqueror of worlds?   You will .  Join us as we get classical up in here with Mary Renault's 1972  The Persian Boy , a book about a traumatized teenager whose vast ambition centers entirely on jumping Alexander's bones.  Heads up - this book's got all sorts of traumatic historical stuff in it including but not limited to forced castration, rape, ensla...

She's a public menace, he's trying his best to be a devil may care rake but keeps landing on "that cat in the Pepe le Pew cartoons" - it's  Dreaming by Jill Barnett, a book with surprise witches, a shocking number of shipwrecks and kidnappings, and a cautionary tale about staying away from people who are "clumsy as a character trait".   No major warnings for this one unless you count "didn't know...

We have a very special treat for you this episode! Miss Honey Analverkehr of  My Mum is a Pornstar  joined us all the way from Australia to talk about a book that had a big impact on her as a young person, John Norman's  Kajira of Gor.  Note: unfortunately, we had some audio issues with this one (we keep trying different things for these pandemic episodes but they keep on having different problems...

For those of you not "in the know", Jayne Ann Krentz (actually Jayne Castle) writes under a  ton  of pseudonyms and this is one of them.  We wanted to read another one of hers since we HATED  Ghost of a Chance.  This one does also feature a very alpha dominant male, but other than the Romance Novel Peril and some kind of questionable breaking and entering there's nothing gross in this book. This e...

She's a feisty hoyden disguised as a boy!  He wears pantyhose and makes it look good!  It's the court of Louis XV (we totally get it wrong in the podcast!)  We're still on Zoom and we apologize for the audio quality!  That's right, it's a real romance classic - we read Georgette Heyer's  These Old Shades ,  a book with a skeevy age gap, some grossly flippant talk about miscarriage, a good old Roma...

Welcome to Sandra Brown's Fanta-C, which should have been a sweet contemporary romance from the 80's but is  actually  kind of fucking disturbing in the weirdest and most unexpected way.  Meet Elizabeth, a prissy lady who wears pantyhose and slips and owns a store that sells potpourri for your mistress, and Thad (THAD!), a silver fox who has puppies at his house.  This is actually a great little b...

Jamie is fiery!  She has a horse named Wildfire that she likes to ride bareback!  She is beloved by all and has zero flaws except... a terrible sense of direction! Alec is... large!  And rude!   And none of these people know a damn thing about medieval Scotland!  You got it, it's Julie Garwood's The Bride !

In this episode we take a timeout to reflect on the ghastly history of racial violence in America by doing a deep dive into South Carolina's ugliest past and inviting Leslie from  Geeky Girls' Night In  and  Geeky Girls' Guide to Life  to speak. The first two segments carry strong content warnings about murder, legal lynching, and a police shooting mischaracterized as a riot.  If you'd like to ski...

Irish Thoroughbred  is Nora Roberts' first book - we wanted to see where one of the richest, most popular authors around got her start.  Well.  It is something. Adelia lives in 16th century Ireland and has lost everything, so she gets on a plane to 1980 and becomes a horse trainer!  Horse girl alert: THIS IS NOT A HORSE GIRL BOOK.  I have read a  lot , you guys, a  lot of books  with horse races i...

We had the opportunity to try something new - we were asked if we'd like to interview debut author Martha Waters about her book  To Have and to Hoax , you know, back then when the world was young and we were allowed to leave our houses.  Martha was really nice and we feel really bad that all her fun book release party stuff got cancelled -  however,  she's doing  a virtual launch Tuesday April 7th...

Let us make your social distancing easier with tits and dragons! Join us in your isolation suite with my last 4 for 40 - Anne McCaffery's Dragonflight.

This isn't really a romance novel - for you young people, this is an extinct breed.  It's an  airport book .  It's about rich people doing awful rich people things and it never forgets to mention a brand name.  It's about Poor Little Rich Girl Elizabeth whose father seems to have accidentally set up a tontine in the family business - only one of her cousins is actually trying to murder her but hon...

Avoid accidentally making eye contact with Paxton Andrews.  If you absolutely must enter a room with Paxton Andrews take extreme precautions so you don't  die horribly in the Vietnam War .  It's pretty good for her career as a journalist tho. This one has no sexual assault but it does have a horrible pointless war, an awful murder-suicide, bombings, screaming, howling, and a mammy.  (YES A MAMMY. ...

Avoid accidentally making eye contact with Paxton Andrews.  If you absolutely must enter a room with Paxton Andrews take extreme precautions so you don't  die horribly in the Vietnam War .  It's pretty good for her career as a journalist tho. This one has no sexual assault but it does have a horrible pointless war, an awful murder-suicide, bombings, screaming, howling, and a mammy.  (YES A MAMMY. ...

Avoid accidentally making eye contact with Paxton Andrews.  If you absolutely must enter a room with Paxton Andrews take extreme precautions so you don't  die horribly in the Vietnam War .  It's pretty good for her career as a journalist tho. This one has no sexual assault but it does have a horrible pointless war, an awful murder-suicide, bombings, screaming, howling, and a mammy.  (YES A MAMMY. ...

Monstrous teenagers and teenage monsters!  Thrill as mean teenagers fake deaths, fake zombiefication, fake other deaths, and then can't figure out why nobody likes them!  Chill as everybody has a silly expensive car but no moral compass whatsoever!  It's 2 AM, do your children know how to close and lock a window? Joanna is a stuck up bitch.  Her boyfriend Dex is an insane gaslighting.... secret pr...

It's LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory , a book about not much in particular  except the deep meaning of the heart  until there's a war and then a... murder framin'?  This book has no nonconsensual sex but it does have a lot of discussion of childhood trauma, the past-tense murder of a sex worker, and some seriously weird slut shaming and then murdering of another woman which is really tonally weird...

We're continuing our annual tradition of doing a modern gay Hanukkah romance for the holiday!  This time we've got  Holiday Outing  by Astrid Amara.  This is a sweet little novella about a guy going home for the holidays with the intention of coming out to his parents but getting trapped in a house with way too many aunts and uncles and fucking a gastroenterologist.  Also there's detecting!  And p...

Merry Christmas!  For the holiday we read Nora Roberts'  Gabriel's Angel .  Despite this being listed as a Christmas book in Novelist!  Despite this having holly and a fucking snow globe on the cover of the reissue!  THIS IS NOT A GODDAMNED CHRISTMAS BOOK.  I have feelings about this.  BIG FEELINGS.

He's a rich Taggart romance-novel-dude powerlifter with a big family and a sweet townhouse!  She's an emotionally locked down country mouse forced by one of those Improbable Wills to go to New York for a few years to investigate a crime that may or may not have happened to her dead or not dead grandmother and then they... put on a show about it.  Seriously, there is no way to describe this book, y...

Welcome to our Halloween Episode. Buckle Up Bitches. For this episode we read Jayne Ann Krentz's Ghost of a Chance. Published in 1984 this book was part of the Harlequin Temptation line. It is one of the earliest in the supernatural romance genre. On paper this book should be a Banger! Our heroine, Anne Silver is out to catch some phony psychics who are really cat burgers. They ran her brother ove...

Here we go again with my nominee for "Most Likely to Catch an Intervention For Smoking Strawberry-Flavored Crack", Johanna Lindsey!   Finally , we've read one of the kind of books I was really expecting to come across when we started doing this podcast - the kind of book I wrote our long and thoughtful  On Language and Consent   page about and then for some reason it's turned out we haven't needed...

I read this when I was a kid and it gave me VERY WEIRD KID IDEAS.  Now I'm returning to it and it is... even more fucked up than I expected?  Nora is one of those freshly orphaned smart Vicky Holt girls.  Charles Herrick, aka the Lynx, is a... brilliant sex monster?  It's hard to explain.  There's another dude too.  And a whole other family.  Is this even a romance novel?  Is this maybe a thriller...