Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I had a huge Victoria Holt/Jean Plaidy habit once I got a library card. Before that, it was catch as catch can. Porn started at 8. I finally tried to get in trouble for it at 11, but it turns out my father really didn't care if I read Playboy at that age. Although their porn novels did magically disappear around that time. Halloo, too late.
Mythology was my parent-sponsored entree into fantasy. My mother probably still regrets that. My father gave me my first SF at 11 or so, and then that was over. I was also raiding my mother's spy thrillers and black lit collection from about 8 on.
Victoria Holts and pretty much anything she had around -- a lot of those big family saga books like Evergreen that were big at the end of the 1970s.
AKA Jean Plaidy and Phillipa Carr, too. And lordy, God is an Englishman, Penmarric and their ilk. Madeleine Brent, Charlotte Armstrong, and everything Mary Stewart ever wrote. I liked Barbara Michaels, long before she wrote Amelia Peabody and became Elizabeth Peters. Andre Norton was my gate to SF.
Oh, Barbara Michaels, yes! There was another one, too, not Victoria Holt, but she wrote sort of English women in jeopardy stuff. Dorothy Eden! Mom had lots of Mary Stewart, but I never got into those.
There was one other author, too, and I can't remember her name, damn it.
OH MY GOD YES. Thank you!
It was bothering me too, Amy. Now help me think of the Jane or Joan person who wrote gothics, british, sort of family saga-ish things?
And DuMaurier--again, practically everything she ever wrote. Apparently I didn't read anything written by a man for about ten years!
Jean Francis Webb, Joan Aiken Hodge, Jean English?
Damn, the book I'm thinking of isn't on the list for Whitney or Eden or Holt! I can SEE the cover. And it was almost a Marion and Indy story -- he was some adventurer who knew her as a child, and when he comes back, they fall in love. But it's completely international, like ... somewhere really cold, and then somewhere wealthy.
Wow, that's a lame description. But there was something in the title either with fire or dragon or possibly silk ...
Hodge! Thanks. I never read Webb or English, I don't know why. Apparently I read everybody else.
Could it have been a Michaels or a Hodge, I wonder? Or maybe this one?
I never read any Sweet Valley High either, although they were certainly in the library. I think they were more popular with kids slightly older than me. When I was a kid I was reading copious amounts of Babysitter's Club, Boxcar Children, and Goosebumps.
It's not that one, Bev, although it looks sort of similar.
I'm going to have to ask my mom tomorrow, damn it. And I know she's not going to remember.
