The Taming

Friday Fiction 16 comments

The Taming coverThe Taming
Deveraux
1989

Submitter: If your idea of a romantic hero is a dude with anger management issues, zero people skills, and a bad case of lice, then here is the book for you! This is the tale of a lady who marries an impoverished misogynist and scrubs his entire castle. Despite the fact that he does not maintain his estate, she is somehow able to produce elaborate multi-course feasts. There’s a ghost, too, so maybe any kind of realism was too much to expect.

Also, we’re an academic library. Every book its reader notwithstanding, how in the name of S.R. Ranganathan did this get into our collection?

[Images, below:] 1 cheesy book cover with bad font (for a good 10 minutes, I thought the title was The Famine); 1 page of lice; 1 page of the most disgusting living-dining room situation in print; and 1 page of a downright miraculous meal.

Holly: Oh, Jude. Jude Deveraux was super popular back in the day. The cover DOES look like The Famine!

The Taming - lice

rooms to clean

meal

16 comments

  1. How dare you, these are the books of my youth lol. My mother would allow me to read Jude Devereux because she considered them tame. I distinctly remember this one.

  2. When I worked in a public library as a teen, we had tons of Jude Deveraux books, and they were always getting checked out, and were always a mess on the shelves!

  3. My only association with Jude Deveraux is how she lost all her money to a scam artist/“psychic” who’s currently in prison.

  4. I first saw just the top half of JUDE in that font and knew this was going to be… well. This. My mom liked her work too. I wonder if it’s a step-back cover. Am thankful she never bought this one. I’d have remembered the lice and the floor. This does look like “The Famine”; apparently she and the ghost can get around the lack of food somehow?

    Thanks to the submitter for including the “best” pages.

    I’m thinking this was snuck into an order by the librarian at the time for personal use and nobody noticed for 30+ years.

    Jude’s still alive and writing!

  5. Was Devereux a way grift off Blanche Devereux from the Golden Girls. They borrowed her last name for some buzz?

    1. Looks like Jude Devereux started publishing as early as 1980 so that name came first.
      Wikipedia says, (OK I know) that the Golden Girls character was inspired by Blanche DuBois (to whom Blanche Devereaux is compared in the pilot script) and Scarlett O’Hara….oh. my. G_d.

  7. That fontface – mixing uppercase and lowercase letters with the same x-height – should be taken away from cover designers everywhere.

  8. Ha! there is a street in Metairie LA named “Severn”. Severn is also the longest river in Britain.

    Also be Jude Deveraux rich, but don’t be Jude Deveraux penny wise and pound foolish.
    https://abcnews.go.com/US/author-jude-deveraux-lost-20-million-fortune-telling/story?id=14371150#:~:text=Devereaux%2C%20a%20princess%20of%20the,a%20detective%20and%20court%20documents.
    Devereaux, a princess of the publishing world with more than 50 million copies of her books printed was victimized by fortune telling con artists who fleeced her out of $20 million over a span of 17 years, according to a detective and court documents.

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