The Vine: August 21, 2009
Hi Sars,
Here’s an unusual Mystery Book for you, or your legions of readers, to puzzle over:
I was an insatiable reader in middle and high school; the downside to this is that ten years later, almost everything has blurred together. At some point I devoured a particular historical fiction novel of which I remember exactly one thing, but that one thing is a doozy.
Towards the end of the book, the main character is having difficulty conceiving, so she visits a witch in the woods (I think) to get advice. After possibly drugging/seducing the main character, the witch tells her she will not be able to conceive until her husband “possesses her in every way possible.” So the main character goes home and, as we gather from somewhat euphemistic references, has anal sex with her husband, and promptly conceives their heir. I promise I am not making this up.
You may see why this plot point remained vividly in my fourteen-year-old mind, while the rest of the book has faded into the mists of time. You may also see why a quick Google search is not so helpful and definitely not safe for work.
This was an actual historical novel, nothing marketed as erotica or I wouldn’t have been allowed to read it. I think it may have been set in the age of the Crusades, or possibly the medieval time period, and I do remember distinctly that the author is a woman. I doubt very much it was published after 1998, as I remember it being a pretty battered hardback copy even back then. I had hopes for a while that it was part of The Shield of Three Lions or Banners of Gold, by Pamela Kaufman, but a recent re-read proved me wrong.
Any ideas? I would be eternally grateful to put this ghost of a plot to rest.
Thank you so much for your time,
Even At 14, I Knew Babies Didn’t Come From Buttsex
*****
Help me, oh Nation of readers!An image from this book, read over a decade ago, popped into my head recently, and I’ll have no peace until I track it down.
Definitely: A girl in a nightgown.Goblins.Most of the action takes place in stone tunnels/caverns underground.
Possibly: One good/rebel goblin helping the girl to spite the corrupt goblin monarch.A pale yellow cover with a painting of the girl in her nightdress and the good goblin navigating a stone tunnel.Girl originally lived on a farm (or some sort of big house in the country).A stolen younger sibling?Intermediate reading level and length (somewhere between Boxcar Children and Tolkien).
Girl NOT a princess
*****
Sars,
I have a friend who is trying to remember a book from his childhood.If it helps, he’s in his early 30s.It was a science-fiction book in which kids were alone on a spaceship.The detail he remembers is that the food replicator was either broken or difficult to work and as a result, the only thing the kids could get it to make was potato salad.
I’m hoping you or the readers have an idea.Thank you!
Becka
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
The goblin one sounds incredibly like Labyrinth, though the described cover does not appear on Amazon. Good luck!
I thought Labyrinth too, but figured that was too obvious. I’m so bad at remembering titles of old books, I’m never any help with these Vines.
But, I must say, MAN I LOVED the Boxcar Children when I was little. I wanted to be Jesse!
A thread on Ask Metafilter says that the spaceship one is Spaceship Hostages by Nicholas Fisk – check it out:
http://ask.metafilter.com/127924/Kids-scifi-with-nothing-but-potato-salad
Definitely sounds like Labyrinth though the book was a novelisation of the film so would probably have a picture of Bowie on the front. There were a couple of manga graphic versions / sequel stories but that would have been more recent. Maybe it was a similar kind of tie-in book?
How about George MacDonald’s The Princess & the Goblin and/or The Princess and Curdie? I know the writer said the girl was NOT a princess, but those stories popped into my mind right away.
The “potato salad” one is probably Space Hostages by Nicholas Fisk, though it’s actually egg salad : http://ask.metafilter.com/127924/Kids-scifi-with-nothing-but-potato-salad
I have to agree with Labyrinth for #2.
I am terribly curious about #1, but I’ve never heard of such a book. Wow.
Could the goblin one be “The Princess and the Goblin” by George Macdonald? I own it but haven’t read it yet–I loved Macdonald’s “The Light Princess” though. http://tinyurl.com/kstznt should show one cover that is nightgowny–the others (which I saw via my Facebook Visual Bookshelf app), if they show the princess at all, show her in day clothes. From the descriptions, she is helped not by a good goblin but by her friend Curdie, who also appears in “The Princess and Curdie,” which I also own but have not read.
I know you said not a princess… But my vague memory is that she’s not very princess-like, and the cover looks an awful lot like your description… http://tinyurl.com/no4aly
The novelization of Labyrinth was not bad at all, as I recall, and that plot sounds spot-on. I can’t find a cover with Sarah on it in her nightgown, but I totally have the mental picture of it.
If number two isn’t The Princess and the Goblin, it might be Goblins in the Castle by Bruce Coville, which might actually be about a boy, I don’t remember, but the rest of it fits.
Could the goblin one be The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Pope? It was fairies in that one not goblins but could be it.
Also 14? When/if you ever find that one I want to read it! Sounds bizarre!
The Perilous Gard?
#2: Totes “The Princess and the Goblin”! I finally know one of these! Oh man, I read that so long ago, but I remember loving it.
Kids, when s/he says *not* princess, i get mystified as to why you’d suggest the books that say “princess.” Is it just me?
I would say “Outside over there” by Maurice Sendak for the goblin one, but the reading level sounds too low. Otherwise I agree it sounds like the Macdonald.
I vaguely remember a book with something like the scene from #1 – a girl goes to see a witch named Melusine, who is naked and scarred, and gets a potion that makes everything seem dreamlike…for some reason I keep thinking it’s “Green Darkness” by Anya Seton, but I can’t be sure.
I pulled out my novelization of Labyrinth and it’s the dark-blue Bowie-centric version found on Amazon, which doesn’t jibe with the asker’s visual memory. The story, though, is eerily on point–almost inviting suspicions of plagiarism.
I was going to go with The Perilous Gard, too, despite the fairies-not-goblins thing, but otherwise it sounds right. I remember the little girl who went missing was named Cecily, if that rings a bell. Every edition I’ve seen has blue-based covers, not yellow, but… well, there are a lot of editions.
Now I wish I hadn’t given my copy away to the library. I’d like to reread it.
I’m dying to know what that first one could be.
@Buttsex (hee, sorry had to) I wonder if its one of the novels of Kathleen Woodiwiss or Diana Gabaldon. They’re historical romance/fiction. I think Gabaldon particularly rides the genre line between romance novel/legitimate writer so she might have snuck by parental censorship. I haven’t read them myself, but I remember my mother loving them and describing them as pretty trashy.
In “The Princess and the Goblin” I’m pretty sure the girl is not a princess in the regular world, but is some sort of secret princess.
Or at least she is not some cosseted princess in a tower…
Sorry for all the comments… The princess lives in a farmhouse, not a castle. She lives like a regular girl.
@ Kelly–I can’t BELIEVE that I’m not the only person on the planet who remembers the book Green Darkness and I totally remember that particular scene, too. She gets the potion to use on the old knight she married so she can get pregnant, only she chickens out only to later use it on the hot monk she’s lusted over for the whole book. But the rest of the book doesn’t fit. So I don’t think that’s it.
The second one sounds like a book I never read, but saw as one of those Storybook Theatre things on Saturday morning. It was animated and the little brother entered the goblin world through (I think) a garden shed. But I seem to remember that there was more than one sibling searching for him (the girl was the main one but a couple of brothers,too) and that the caverns were mines with jewels. And maybe there was a mining car chase scene a la Temple of Doom. Or maybe I was just high on sugar-infused cereal.
#2 sounds like it might be a Charles de Lint story, maybe, like the short story “The Stone Drum,” but Jilly’s a (young) woman & the goblin who helps her works for her professor/mentor. It’s in “Dreams Underfoot,” but the cover art doesn’t match.
Ok, since I have nothing better to do with my life than look this up (love a good mystery!)…
It was ABC Weekend Special, not CBS Story Break and it’s called The Secret World of Og by a Canadian author named Pierre Berton. I could only find a picture of the original 1961 cover which doesn’t look right. There are five kids total all with a name starting with “P”. And the goblins only say “Og” and there is one who helps them find the baby brother.
@ferretrick It’s not Diana Gabaldon. There aren’t any witches in the Outlander series, except for the one woman who they suspect is a witch but turns out to be another time traveler like Claire.
@Ferretrick…unless it’s in one of the Lord John books, then it’s not Gabaldon. I’ve read all of Outlander series, and there was nothing about a woman becoming pregnant after consulting a witch and having anal sex.
As for the others, I don’t know, but the spaceship one sound pretty interesting.
@Sally – I believe you’re thinking of The Secret World of Og. One of my favorite ABC Weekend Specials!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World_of_Og
@ Ferretrick: If you’re referring to the Outlander series, that’s definitely not #1. There are witches (sort of) and it’s historical, but the similarities end there.
Number 2 is absolutely NOT the Perilous Gard. It’s my all-time favorite book from childhood (and well worth the read – the world needs to know how completely rad that story is!), and over the years, I have gone through multiple editions as my various copies have worn out. There have only ever been two covers of the book printed in the U.S. – one blue, one gray – and they have only ever featured Kate, the main character. I still have three dogeared copies of it kicking around . . .
Goodness no, NOT Green Darkness OR Perilous Gard – both of which are fabulous books in their own right, and worth pursuing. Just not what 14 is looking for, at the moment. I can’t wait until we find out what it is, though.
@ferretrick It’s definitely not a Diana Gabaldon one. Lots of sex in her novels but there are no witches called upon to help a woman conceive, and thus no consequential anal sex. Sorry!
1) I have no idea what the book is. My only suggestion is to look up disorders involving the womb being attached through the rectum; there are, in fact, documented cases of a woman not having an actual opening down there, and having sex anally/giving birth the same way. Makes me wince to think about it, but I think it’s actually a documented phenomenon.
2) Even with the stipulation that the girl isn’t a princess, it _does_ sound a great deal like “The Princess and the Goblin.” If the OP remembers a ring with an invisible thread, I expect that’s the book she’s talking about. The Princess isn’t particularly princesslike, and the main hero of the story is a miner, thus why everything happens underground. The Princess gets lost in a bunch of cavers (in her nightgown), is found by Curdie, and they come back up above ground by following the invisible string that is tied to her ring. She lives in a sort of cottage and not a castle, her father is far away, and she’s a very well-behaved little girl. (Also, I remember the cover, and it was a pale yellow with an illustration on the front. Though my particular copy was a combo book of “The Princess and the Goblin/The Princess and Curdie”, so… yeah.
@IE: I saw “girl NOT a princess” as the writer’s signature, which actually meant I skipped it (I don’t always read the phrases-instead-of-names). If that was actually a part of the description, it was under the possiblies, not the definites, and furthermore where’s her sig then?
(And when I submitted my comment there were not yet other suggestions of The Princess and the Goblin. Sorry for the apparent repeat!)
Could the first book refer to the Queen of the Orcs trilogy? She is not a princess or queen initially, just an abused human who ends up being adopted by the orcs.
If the descriptions of the sex were euphemistic, is it possible that “sex from behind” was interpreted by a 14-yr old mind as anal sex when it wasn’t intended as such?
Could No. 1 be “Mists of Avalon”? It’s got a medieval setting, is written by a woman, and was first published in 1982. There’s definitely a lot of kinky stuff going on when Gwenhwyfar’s trying to get pregnant, including visits to sorceresses, and she ultimately ends up in a threesome with Arthur and Lancelot. That scene is even more memorable if you’ve seen the made-for-TV movie with Michael Vartan as Lancelot. HOT!
There once was a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys. His palace was built upon one of the mountains and was very grand and beautiful. The princess, whose name was Irene, was born there, but she was sent soon after her birth, because her mother was not very strong, to be brought up by county people in a large house, half castle, half farm-house, on the side of another mountain, about halfway between its base and its peak.
Third paragraph of “The Princess and the Goblin” which DOES have a girl in a yellow nightgown and blue cape in the tunnels with a goblin on the cover. I have the reissued copy and it’s awesome even if it isn’t the book she wants!
I actually know exactly what no. 1 is-it’s “Elaine the Fair” by Timothy Taylor. I checked it out of the library because it came up under a search for Robin Hood, and I was, um, unprepared for the explicit sex. It is a different retelling of the Robin Hood story.
Yeah, but in Mists of Avalon did Gwenhwyfar have a baby with arthur? ´cause I don ´t remember that she did… the one that does have one however is Morgaine, who actually was a witch and actually arthur ´s sister. So this book has an incest lovechild and I doubt that it would be prudish about anal sex, only thing is, it ´s not exactly historical… and again, arthur ´s only child I think was the one w his sister…
@Jen the mere description of Elaine the Fair on Amazon is pretty mind-boggling. “The first third of this overlong, nonstop-action romantic saga focuses on Elaine: her countless suitors, her traumatic past (she was nearly hanged as a witch simply because of her good looks) and her homoerotic fixation on her lady-in-waiting Sandra.”
Anal sex sounds about par for the course in such a novel.
A couple of people have mentioned it, but I’ll chime in and say that the goblin one sounds a lot like “The Secret World of Og” to me. It was one of my favourite books as a kid!
#1 is definatly not “The Mists of Avalon.” It’s not exactly prudish, but no witch-inspired anal/behind sex either.
#2 is definetly “Outside Over There” by Sendak.
http://www.amazon.com/Outside-Over-There-Caldecott-Collection/dp/0064431851
@Amber: EW EWW EWWW. I shrieked when I read that, and my two little kids came running, and there was just no way I was going to explain WHY Mommy was rocking back and forth and clenching her legs. Gaaah.
@Amber – re #1: I could have happily gone my whole life not knowing that, and I guarantee you I will not be looking up that documentation. I’m not a prude & generally consider myself unfazable by sexual & medical discussions, but egads.
On the other hand, this is (among other reasons) why TN rocks. You learn the weirdest stuff without even trying.
@Amber – are you talking about obstetric fistulas? I can’t think of anything else even close to what you describe, but an obstetric fistula is not a normal condition, it is the result of severe trauma from childbirth with inadequate medical care. I don’t see how it could be confused with lacking a vagina or having the rectum and vagina merged.
The TN book club is getting more and more interesting….