Bodice Tipplers

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. Yeah I wasn't expecting that either.)

You got it, we're reading Message from Nam as our second 4 for 40 book for Sara! I would like to apologize to the Academy...

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. Yeah I wasn't expecting that either.)

You got it, we're reading Message from Nam as our second 4 for 40 book for Sara! I would like to apologize to the Academy...

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 prosthetic makeup expert? When Dex falls off a cliff and dies, Joanna keeps seeing him around, like, at the mall. Is Dex dead? Is Dex alive? Are all of these people awful humans anyway? It's The Boyfriend by RL Stine!

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 and we expected better of you, LaVyrle.

We read this book because Amazing Human Beverly Jenkins mentioned LaVyrle in a list she so graciously gave us of vintage romances she really liked back when we did our episode on Night Song. In the future I won't wait that long to listen to the lady because this book is so good except when it makes such weird choices in the last act.

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 periling! And art! Hanukkah Sameach!

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, you just have to experience it. There's no present-day sexual violence in this book, but her ex-husband emotionally abused her and in 1928 all sorts of awful Tommy gun business went down.

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 over with a car when he got too close to the truth! For help, Ann enlists the help of an ex CIA agent she had the hots for 6 months ago, Julian Aries. Together they have to fight fake ghost hunters, a real ghost, and their burning passion for one another.

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 it much. But then we came to this one. Warrior's Woman by Johanna Lindsey.