My grandfather was a member of a book of the month club throughout the 40's, 50's & 60's. The club mixed all of the pertinent books of the times and man o man I wish I still had all of those books. They were a history lesson unto themselves. I had many of them as long as I could but they were all hardcovers and there were 360 of them. My sister had man as long as she could & so did my brothers. They were hard to move with, heavy and voluminous. I still have 4 of them. One about a little ghetto child whose mother fought the odds to save her sick baby in a modern land with no health care for the poor, one about the journey of entrepreneurial 49'ers who got in trouble with puritans by bilking all the gold out of drunkard panners by opening casino tents along the gold rush sites, one about a lady in the 1700's who falls in love with man below her families class, gets in an accident, loses her legs and grows wise, For Whom the Bell Tolls by the drunkard Ernest Hemingway & Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor.
Forever Amber was my guilty pleasure at one time. It is the very first romance novel and was banned in most places for being so bawdy. Literature considered it demeaning to the written word but underground sales were crazy, it is the hottest selling illicit book in history, though it holds no swear words or sex scenes at all, it is the first novel to present a woman with an "appetite" and an ulterior motive to boot, la femme fatale, only British so much more shocking. Everyone expected that sort of thing from the French.
So Amber is born the bastard daughter of a Lord & Lady who were to be wed but civil war broke out in England (the roundheads & the royals, the roundheads would go on to be the forefathers of puritan USA, leaving England in a huff because the new king was a party boy) and they were on opposite sides. So they would meet in secret and he goes off to die in war. She dies in childbirth and her baby Amber is raised by commomfolk who never tell her of her upperclassness because she turns out to be really hot & sexy & kind of snotty and they're trying to temper her down. So big strapping Bruce Carleton rides through the meadow one day after Cromwell dies and the King is restored and all the important men come back from the country side where they rested while the country folk fought the civil war. He sees Amber & pops her cherry at the fair and takes her to the city where she does pretty well for herself as an actress and eventually one of the king's kept ladies. But she always loves Bruce who won't marry her because she's common (common whore it turns out later when he's really mad at her) even though she nurses him through the bubonic plague, popping the big boil growing out of his groin & everything. So he marries a pretty pure daughter of a respected neo American in Virginia, buys himself a fleet of ships, moves to Virginia and grows tobacco. She stays in England, moves to the castle where the king lives, lives a bitchy catty life with the other royal mistresses (kind of like those reality tv shows) full of cash treachery sex & intrigue. Bruce comes to visit here and there and comes back with his bride and kids for a while. Things get all weird then he leaves to go back to Americas forever and Amber cries & cries. One of the king's men who really hates her guts for some plot she played against him gets the info to her that Bruce's wife died on the ship on the way back to America, so she gets rid of all of her stuff & books passage for America.
That's where it all ends but you can imagine the rest, she arrives in America, the wifey is alive, she gets cast out by Bruce, moves to New York, opens a bawdy house, gets filthy rich and has a grand old life, while her supposed true love Bruce Carleton gets cancer from his tobacco fields and dies, ending up in hell for being a slave owner and a classist.
There are weird things in this book. I reread it recently after not having read it since I was 12 or 13. At one point Amber is given a gift of a monkey and a little Jamaican boy servant while being jealous of her rival's gift of a big musclely ebony eunuch.
the book wasn't banned cause there were any sexual paragraphs at all, the lust for the ebony eunuch being the most shocking part of the book to the censors at the time.
we are all going to hell.
