I really hate it when I could remember a book so clearly, but title and author’s name remain elusive.
Someone wants suggestions for fairy tale romances and contemporary retellings of fairy tales, and she’s particularly interested in the erotic romance kind.
After I pointed out All About Romance’s Special Listing: Fairy Tale Romances and a list of Love Spell’s Faerie Tale Romance series* from the 1990s, I remembered the one where the heroine was the sleeping beauty and the hero who woke her.
There were princes before who tried to wake her with kisses, but they failed. They were stung by poisonous thorns of whateveryoucallit (my mind’s blanking here for some reason, sorry) that wrapped around all walls and floors of the abandoned or neglected castle.
Then we have the hero making his way to the castle. He shouldn’t be there as he isn’t a prince. He’s merely a guy who’s intrigued by the tales of this apparently exceptionally beautiful sleeping beauty he had been hearing about since he was a little boy. (I think he was actually an ironmonger? I can’t remember.) He enters the castle without the town’s knowledge. Finally, he finds her in the sleeping room and sees all these skeletons around the room. He immediately gets the picture: he’ll die if he fails to wake her.
He’s gutted that he can’t return to his life outside the castle. He curses his curiosity and need to see. He has a closer look at this sleeping princess. She’s indeed an exceptional beauty. He kisses her. She doesn’t wake. He isn’t surprised. He’s not a prince, after all.
And this is where my jaw dropped: He looks down at her and basically thinks, “She is a beauty. Sod it. I’m going to die here, anyway.” He proceeds to have sex with her.
While he’s having his way with the sleeping beauty, she slowly wakes and reacts. Only then when she has an orgasm that all the whateveryoucallit plants break apart and away from all walls of the castle.
I can’t remember the rest of the story, but I do remember that
- Our hero – who didn’t know this until later – turned out to be an illegitimate son of a king, who was an enemy of the princess’s father, and the king’s true love: the Queen wife’s sister.
- Our hero was a selfish messed-up arse with – until the discovery (see above) – a serious complex about the social status between himself and the princess, and treated her accordingly, e.g. rape as a means of asserting his role in their relationship and – or so I perceived it – psychological torture by belittling her over her lost Royal House, her beauty, her ability to ‘seduce’ him at will, and her unnaturalness (she was immortalised during her sleep so she was roughly a century older than him)
- Our princess was pretty much the “ice princess” type, with a deep grudge against the hero for taking her virginity without permission and for not being her equal as he wasn’t a prince, so she spent a lot of time trying to scratch his eyes out and sulking in her room. Oh, and getting raped. How could I forget that? Also, she – credit to the author – didn’t treat her servants as equals or even humans, since she saw them no more than those who were born to serve the likes of her
- There was a sub-plot involving a conflict between two Royal houses. One was hers and one was – as they’ll discover – the hero’s. They found out from an old nurse-maid, who stole the newborn hero away when the king’s “barren” wife wanted the newborn killed after she had the mother, her own sister, killed. When the now elderly Queen discovered that the newborn was found, she was afraid because the King – now sick and dying – would make the hero his successor, not the Queen’s chosen one (and her secret lover), as soon as he found out. It’s this part that actually made it interesting. Complex with all this power games and manipulation going on. It almost overshadowed the hero and the heroine’s own relationship, in fact.
It had all the conventions of a medieval-like romance novel, but it didn’t read or feel like it was a romance novel. If anything, I’d describe it as an erotic fantasy novel with a collective of romance conventions and tropes.
Actually, I’d describe the author as a hybrid of Dorothy Dunnett (complex plot and maybe writing style), Lisa Cach (fairy tale-like elements of her older works) and Jan Cox Speas (similar characters but not as dark as those in this book).
The nearest match would be Jan Cox Speas [AAR review of Bride of the MacHugh] and [author Susanna Kearsley's tribute], but it’s not her as she didn’t write characters that dark. Also, her historical romance novels are historical romance novels if a little different from the rest. Similar to LaVyrle Spencer, really.
I’m reasonably certain that it was published by one of those: Love Spell, Heartspell, Leisure or similar. I think this because that romance novel was unexpectedly complex and dark, which wasn’t the norm of what they usually published. If I were to read it and didn’t look at the publisher’s name, I’d think it was a Signet or a Bantam. Maybe.
The best thing about this book, to be honest, is that it prompted a truly interesting discussion between myself and a reader – I think Susan/DC? – at AAR’s old message boards about whether we could classify the hero’s sexual intercourse with the sleeping princess as rape. Susan gave so many insights that I ended up learning a lot from her.
Anyroad, I wish I could remember the title and author’s name. For that person who wants to read it and for myself for a re-read. Gah. Why didn’t I note the author’s name?!
That’s the problem. There was a period when I inhaled so many romance novels and didn’t bother to note authors’ names until I couldn’t remember a book I wanted to re-read, so I kept a book diary since then. Every time I remember That Dark Period, I headdesk. Why?! Stupidity does run in my family after all, so it’s no surprise that I had had a flash of that streak from time to time many times.
I wonder how would other readers deal with distinctive romance novels they can’t name. Do they do their best to track it down, or just let it go?