My last entry from earlier today was quite angry. And for good reason, of course.
But finding some 1970's Harlequin Romance paperbacks for sale at the library sure put me in a good mood. Hee hee.
There's nothing funnier to me than an old romance novel. Take this back-cover blurb from the Harlequin Romance classic Where the South Wind Blows, by author Anne Hampson:
"Melanie had had enough. For the second time in her life, she had lost the man she loved to her glamorous but unscrupulous sister, Romaine...."
I don't know what's funnier - that the title of the book reminds me of a polite way to say 'fart', or that Melanie's sister is named after lettuce. Romaine - HA!
Or take this delightful blurb from the back of Jane Corrie's The Island Bride:
"Life would now be very awkward if he, now the island's most influential man, revealed that they'd actually met for the first time six years before, when he had been forced to marry her - a teenage runaway he'd found hiding on his banana plantation."
I don't know about you, but banana plantations are hot. Oh yeah.
I'm so excited about my findings - you can't beat $3 for twelve books! And in my nerdiness, I was thinking....a paper about feminist/misogynist rhetoric in romance novels could be pretty awesome.....
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3 comments:
Melissa--
Thanks for posting this one! I needed a laugh after that last post (which made me BEYOND angry...)
At the risk of sounding cliche, this one made me LOL!!
I think the funniest bit is the sister named after a type of lettuce!
And I definitely think you should write a paper on the rhetoric of the romance novel!
I definitely love a good-bad romance novel, especially when there are characters named after vegetables.
Who knows, maybe while I'm perusing through one of these I'll come across a woman named Cabbage, and the book blurb would go a little something like this....
"Cabbage McLaine was just a naive, country girl, grooming horses on her father's ranch for a living. Then she met Holden de la Sol, a dark, mysterious man with a smile that could tear the buttons off a blouse. Holden brought the babe out of the barn, but what would the babe do when she uncovered the truth behind her beau's illegal coke-smuggling ring?"
Oh Cabbage.
Okay, now you've got me going...
"Strawberry Huntington was a lusty wench--serving girl in the local pub by day, burlesque dancer by night. She never believed she would ever fall in love, until she met the ruggedly handsome ex-pirate Brett Falcon. Will he steal the hidden treasures of Strawberry's heart with his one, steely blue eye and his finely chiseled wooden bicep?"
tee hee.
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