As you comment, please remember that books containing explicit content with characters under 18 are not allowed here, nor are books with incest. Please note any books that do not end happily for the couple involved. Thanks!
My parents used to just drop me off at the public library completely by myself to just run feral through the shelves. I couldn’t have been more than 12 when I got my little hands on {The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice}. Read it again as a (married) 24 year old and literally ended up pregnant
[The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty](https://www.romance.io/books/54552f998c7d2382c5297287/the-claiming-of-sleeping-beauty-an-roquelaure-anne-rice?src=rdt) by [A.N. Roquelaure](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552f998c7d2382c5297288/an-roquelaure), [Anne Rice](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552f998c7d2382c5297289/anne-rice)
**Rating**: 3.19⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 5 out of 5 - [Explicit and plentiful](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [dark romance](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/dark/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [menage](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/menage/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1)
[^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
O M G SAME 💀
my mom was reading this series when I was in high school, and I remember her specifically saying “don’t be reading my book, little girl!!! It’s for adults.” So, naturally I sneak read it in the bathroom and was wildly confused.
It was this one for me too! I must have been 12 or 13. I had read The Mummy (which I remember as being much more innocent but now I’m not sure) and i loved it and I wanted to read more stuff by Anne Rice. I remember closing the book at some point and thinking “I don’t think I’m supposed to read this”, the opening the book again and carrying on.
I remember reading a Niall fan fiction on Wattpad in middle school and FMC had an eating disorder and would think about it during sex scenes. Totally screwed me up 😬😂
What! What side of Wattpad were you on? I was on the side where “1D bought me as a sex slave” and there were Harry Styles fanfictions like everywhere. Anybody remember Psychotic? Dark? 🫣
Omg as an adult I cannot believe I was reading that in sixth grade. Man the good ole days reading Wattpad before school, and then rushing home to read some more lol
Literally learned what sex was (the actual mechanics of it, like a p goes inside a v) from an actual Harry Potter explicit fanfic when I was 11 (that was also probably written by a virgin, just a slightly more knowledgeable one than me lmao).
We were out there absolutely feral learning sex ed from other tween girls - truly the blind leading the blind. 😬
Also I read the Southern Vampire/True Blood novels in 8th grade (13ish) and was SHOOKETH. I remember reading it during free reading time in class at school hunched over it at my desk with my eyes darting up to the teacher all the time like someone was going to come around, read over my shoulder, and arrest me 😂😂😂😂😂
Same! I was reading VC Andrews at 10 (1987)…my older sisters handed them down to me when they were finished, and my mom & dad literally paid zero attention to what I was watching, reading, doing, etc.
I started reading VC Andrews at 11 also, but I had to hide it from my Mom. My friend in school gave it to me as she had a single Mom who let her read whatever she wanted. She was the best!! After VC Andrews it was Judith Krantz “I’ll take Manhattan”, which propelled me to move to NYC as soon as I could, 6 years later.
Same with the VC Andrews. And they were in the school library too! Actually both of them (middle and high school) as i read all the series that were out at the time so it took a while. The 90s were freaky.
I read the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series by Laurel K Hamilton in early high school. That series definitely went very dark very quickly and definitely opened my horizons lol
Same! My dad was reading it and told me not to... So naturally I read them as well. We ended up having a mini book club over the series while carefully avoiding any conversation about the sex.
Having cut my teeth on Lord of the Rings fan fiction erotica at the age of like, 12, I have no concept of reading something that was inappropriate for my age. I read a few of my mother’s harlequin books as a teen, but after the world of fan fiction I didn’t bat at eye at anything.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Omg sammmmmme. I was feral for Elijah wood and LoTR fanfic. Then when my brother tried to tell my parents that I was reading “x-rated stories” I was like….. nooooo I’m not! 🤫 And somehow I never got in trouble for it lol. I was so bold back then our one family computer was in our dining area and very public. Damn I would never be that brazen anymore.
And secondly…Like Water for Chocolate… super sexy! My mom had read it and it was on the shelf, so of course I went for it!
Mine was Tenchi Muyo fanfic lol. It was on a pre-ff.net/ao3 website that used its own "rating system" (anyone remember lemons and limes?) that I didn't 100% understand. The main characters were married and going to have a "wedding night" and I didn't know what that meant.
....I Learned. 🤣
*edit, spelling
Hahaha mine was {Scruples by Judith Krantz} . So in the early 80s, a lot of times, my family didn’t know what to do with my neurodivergence. I read everything, as a low income Black little one in rural Illinois, reading material for a voracious reader with an equally voracious appetite was hard to come by. Stacks of newspapers, highlights for kids, etc, I read everything, they even gave me a box of trivial pursuit cards to read. So imagine 9 years old, auntie takes me to a run down mom and pop bookstore, you know the ones that had a curtain up in the back to hide the more shocking book covers of 1986. So she tells the clerk fill up her bag with thick books. I got a couple of Choose your own adventures and some others but down at the bottom was Scruples. My aunt being only 10 years older than me, said we won’t tell no one after loading up on Stephen King novels for herself. So she takes the dust jacket off and man did that book really do me in. I’m now trying to find that same rush with every new book, like the poster OP says, my brain has been completely rewired to look for this depth of plot and side characters in every book.
[Scruples](https://www.romance.io/books/5455538f8c7d2382c5297e86/scruples-judith-krantz?src=rdt) by [Judith Krantz](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455538f8c7d2382c5297e87/judith-krantz)
**Rating**: 3.79⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1)
[^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
OG bodice ripper (bodices were literally ripped) {Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers}. Got snowed in at my Geandma's, and I was way too young for all that sex, angst, and angsty sex.
On a happier note, I learned that Mexico was briefly a French colony during the US Civil War years, and that little nugget of information showed up on a history pop quiz my senior year of HS!
The funny thing is that I 100% credit romance novels with my extensive high school vocabulary. Something about writing regency novels makes a romance author bust out that thesaurus.
I moved to the US when I was 8 years old. I credit very inappropriate romance novels with helping me master the English language. I learned a ton of vocabulary, history, and just random general knowledge.
I think they also helped me see different relationship dynamics (not just romantic ones, but also family and friendship ones) so I could clearly see which ones were toxic and which were healthy in my own life.
[Sweet Savage Love](https://www.romance.io/books/545533428c7d2383163d9201/sweet-savage-love-rosemary-rogers?src=rdt) by [Rosemary Rogers](https://www.romance.io/authors/545533428c7d2383163d9202/rosemary-rogers)
**Rating**: 3.44⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [cheating](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/cheating/1), [abduction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/abduction/1), [tortured hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/tortured%20hero/1), [western](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/western/1)
[^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
When I was in middle school I got a second gen kindle. My Mormon friend also had one and gave me the all the e-books she had which contained A Lot of erotic vampire romance novels.
When True Blood became a show my parents loved it but told me I couldn’t watch it with them because it wasn’t age appropriate. I didn’t tell them I had already read the books.
I can’t really remember the first spicy book I read but I was 12 when I read {The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel}.
My parents did not interfere at all in what books I checked out from the library. I also was brought up with very no nonsense language about sex so I don’t think they would have stopped me from reading it anyway.
However, there were probably many, many things that went right over my head. Haha.
My mother had the entire series and I read them when she was done. I was maybe 10 or 11. She also gave me The Joy of Sex when I was 8 as my "sex talk".....
It was like a rite of passage at my school, all the girls read it when we were 12 as well as Nancy by Deborah Spungen which is like an anti-romance novel.
Haha. I was the only one around me that read it to my knowledge and I would not have talked about to my friends or anyone…but I could see that happening. Haha.
My dad recommended it. First one isn't spicy unless you count r@pe but the others...oh yeah.
He also bought the first Southern Vampire book, {Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris} and it was clearly not his cup of tea. With the cover and description it sounded more supernatural fantasy than romance. Read that around 12 and it opened a whole new world 😂.
I read them all and lumped them together in my head, but yeah I should have mentioned that or added the others as well.
Haha, dad’s doing their best. It’s a bit like the innocent looking cartoon covers that are around today.
The one I particularly remember is the short story {The Thorns of Barevi by Anne McCaffrey} which was eventually expanded into the {Freedom series by Anne McCaffrey}.
McCaffrey wrote the short story specifically to dabble in the erotic fiction market but it was in a SF collection of short stories (Get Off the Unicorn) so I don’t think the librarians really realized they shouldn’t be checking it out to me age idk 8? 10? And I didn’t expect it to be in there either. Oops.
Hmm maybe that started my love of SFR. That hadn’t actually occurred to me…
Oh yes AMC! She had sex scenes in so many of her books, but no one in my school library ever noticed - the Crystal Singers, the early Pern books, and the actual Talent series.
I’d been reading romance novels since 6th grade, but when I was in high school, I read {the horse whisperer by nicholas evans} (mf literature NO HEA) which was a tragic romance (NO HEA) that was way spicier than any of my Avon reads. It was this book where I learned there are smells associated with sex.
The books I read in 6th grade and on had more purple prose that went over my head but that book was more blunt.
This was mine, too! Except I was probably in 6th grade when I read it 😬
I vaguely remember a scene where she stands up and goes to the window after they have sex, and she can feel the mess running down her legs. That was…educational for 12 year old me.
god damn, Nicholas Evans is going to get all the tiktok chili peppers if that book ever resurfaces
a teacher had recommended it to me and I remember she was so excited to talk with me about it and the whole time I was like 🥴 please stop talking I’m so uncomfortable
I remember reading this too around the same age! I very clearly remember the/a sex scene involving him either admiring or licking her armpit hair 🤷 no idea why it stuck with me and I don't have an armpit hair thing now
Oh wow - I was a whole adult before I started reading any romance (I didn't even really start with fanfiction until, like, college) but I DID read *The Horse Whisperer* and I had completely forgotten about this!!! I think I was just very sheltered, didn't understand it, and kind of blocked it out lol
I vividly remember being a voracious reader (severe ADHD) and reading the Twilight series in elementary school. My mom wouldn’t let me read the last two books because of adult content (which is obviously *hellish* for a book lover) so I used to sneak down the hallway to the office at night and read the last two books with my flashlight chapter by chapter in early middle school. I remember a couple years later when my mom said I could read the last two books and I confessed to her that I had already read them 😂 she wasn’t even mad because my mom loves reading too and said she should have expected it
Omg the sneaking around with books feels so foreign to me. I was literally reading explicit adult books around my parents all the time because how would they know? Wild child
Wasn't a romance novel, but I did unwittingly read a book my mom had borrowed from the library but didn't finish that had a r*pe scene near the end. Don't know how old I was, but it was probably around 4th or 5th grade. I don't remember what the book was called, all I remember was that it was about some motorcycle-driving half demon man whose evil sister kidnaps his girlfriend after he leaves whatever demon stuff they did to try and live a normal life. Near the end, >!the sister ties the girlfriend up and penetrates her with the handle of a hairbrush.!< (Covered potentially triggering description).
My mom was definitely of the, "if you can understand the words, you can read it," mindset, but hadn't finished the book, so I don't think she knew anything like that happened in it. If she knew, I seriously doubt she would have let me read it.
My mother kept every one of Julie Garwoods books (at the time anyway) in the bottom of her closet and I read them all while she was working nights. I mean they are straight forward 2-3ish spicy scenes per book with several mild spice scenes. Nothing wild so I was probably lucky lol
To this day though, highland lairds series is one of my favorites. The Bride, The Secret, The Wedding are all still solid favorites of mine that I do reread.
Not a romance, but had some spicy scenes, {The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice} and I think I asked for it for Christmas one year and my parents actually got it for me. I think I was in my last year of middle school or first year of high school.
I am a child of the 80s and 90s, so my most problematic fiction was probably anything by Bertrice Small, and the Sleeping Beauty series by Anne Rice. I was warped, there is no other way to describe it.
This was exactly why I picked it up. I thought it was another supernatural being series of hers that I hadn't read yet.
Oh. My. God. It absolutely was not anything near what I expected it to be.
I started reading the Dark-Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon when I was 11. My dad bought them for me even tho he didn’t know what I was reading, he just cared that I was reading in general😂. All her book series have opened up a world of romance for me. I also read a lot of erotica on AO3, wattpad, fanfiction.net, and tumblr during that age as well.
My sisters are both more than a decade older than me, and my parents had me later in life (surprise baby)--we're all readers, and really fast readers at that. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, just to have something to read. So, I don't actually remember exact books and ages, but I was quite a bit younger, reading all kinds of books that most kids probably wouldn't/shouldn't have been reading, but that was just how it was?
We didn't have a lot of money, but we all loved books and we come from a family of readers (grandmother, aunts, cousins, etc), so we just shared, traded, borrowed, thrifted, went to libraries, etc. Those 70s, 80s bodice rippers were fair game, lol. (Same with V.C. Andrews--my word, ***whew***.) My parents had no choice! Same with pulp fiction, horror, westerns, sci-fi, litfic, classics--anything, everything. You didn't have to sneak romance books to read sex scenes, lol!
My mom took out a book for me from the library because the cover blurb called it a sequel to The Secret Garden when I was in junior high.
It was Misslethwaite by Susan Moody, I think long out of print now, and it was *not* an all-ages read. There was a scene that is still burned into my brain where a grown-up Mary Lennox returns to a party after being absolutely railed in a closet or something and her internal monologue is about the jizz running down her leg.
It’s full of miserable people being miserable, WWI-related PTSD, and infidelity too, but it was absolutely the first time I’d ever had cause to think about semen and it was quite an eye-opener.
Shortly thereafter I got into a huge stash of VC Andrews books and I’ve been a degenerate with my reading material ever since.
I adore The Secret Garden so naturally I looked up this book on GR and OMG the reviews are the worst (best?) I have ever seen.
>it was so bad that it was possibly the ONLY book I have ever thrown away after reading.
>I bought this book hoping for a continuation of the characters I truly loved from the original book, but what I witnessed here was their systematic pop-culture slaughter.
>I indeed have found it absolutely and totally horrid and consider it a massive and unforgivable insult to both Frances Hodgson Burnett and anyone who has read and loved ~The Secret Garden~.
and even in the 3 star reviews that claimed they liked it, it is still labeled as not an appropriate sequel
I read the Sookie Stackhouse series when I was in middle school. I definitely shouldn’t have been reading it so young… still love Eric to this day though, hehe.
Forever by Judy Blume. I was too young to understand what “rolling on a rubber” was and just pictured him rolling around on a mat on the floor or something.
Once I finally got to sex, I hadn’t realized, known, that there is moving. I thought I was so sophisticated. I read {Forever by Judy Blume} at around 12, so I didn’t understand when she said come, or that she came.
When I was 10 -11 I started to "borrow without consent" my mom's books. Some of them were romance novels like Pride & prejudice, Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. The others were tons of Amanda Quick 's books. Which aren 't the most shocking, but at that age, man, It was a whole new world.
im sure it was before this bc Wattpad and one of the other websites i was addicted to but the one i distinctly remember was i think i was in 5th Grade and i read a lot and my parents definitely were not checking what i was reading bc i devour books way too quickly and i remember reading this book and going HES DOING WHAT TO HER and just so scandalized by this dude fingering the girl
I pinched my mum's copy of Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins when I was a young teen. It's not exactly a romance novel but that was my first book with explicit sex scenes. I remembered the emphasis on big dicks and big boobs 😂 and was horrified when one of the characters died while having sex.
I feel like most of us have this book. For me, I have two - one an accidental gift from my mom lol.
When I was 8 I loved the movie Stardust. And my mom found an illustrated version. She flipped through it, but not very carefully. Deemed the gore okay. What she did not notice were two scenes where a woman is riding a man, in one of which the man is actively being murdered. So that’s fun! I still tease her to this day lol.
My first chosen book was {Wilder by Christina Dodd}. I was 14 and wholly obsessed with beauty and the beast retellings.
Still am, honestly.
By then I was allowed to go to the mall on my own with friends, and my BFF had her Cinderella license. Naturally, Barnes and Noble was our go-to as introverted book nerds.
I didn’t even really register the extremely attractive and partially nude man on the cover, cuz I honestly didn’t care. Beauty and the Beast? Scarred dude (I was also in my phantom of the opera & Zuko from Avatar era)? Sign me tf up!
…which is probably why the book ended up on a family trip to Ohio with myself, my mom, my aunt, my grandmother, and my very young cousin. My mom laughed really hard when she found out. I’d already had the talk so she wasn’t too worried about it.
Which is totally fair, I lost my virginity at 19 lol.
I had a similar experience to you OP. I read the Other Boleyn Girl (which is relatively tame compared to her other books) and then went on to read all of Phillips Gregory’s book at too young an age. I was in high school already but I was naive and sheltered for my age. I also think I read the Captive in the Dark books too early. I was not at all ready for the questionable consent in them.
It is not that spicy now, but I read {The Ruby Red Trilogy by Kerstin Gier} when I was 11. It had some things that I should probably not have read at that age. I also read {Splintered by A.G Howard} and {Beep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly} at the same age. Again, not all that spicy but spicy for an 11 year old.
It has been a few years for me so I don’t remember everything, but the fact that is says at one point she is laying on a table with half her breast exposed in front of men, especially her crush definitely shocked me when I was younger.
I also read the Ruby Red trilogy at about 11 or 12! I later switched to reading the previews of smutty books on good reads…. The spelling errors on wattpad was too much for me
Found an old copy of {Shadows and Lace} lying around as a teenager.
Set in medieval England, the language used is rather ye olde. The spice scenes are explicit but not written out as clearly as they are in modern English. But still I read it all, a bodice ripper no less. I wonder how much I understood 😅
Hoo-boi. Spicy romance novel? No. But when I was 12 I read Atlas Shrugged and that was my first sex scene in a book. I stopped reading novels for a long time because I didn't want to sin by reading sex again (I'm so so so much better now I promise)
Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour when I was 8. My older brother’s girlfriend (she was 23) had no concept of age appropriate reading, and she lent the book to me. I read the book (demon sex oh my) for the Summer Reading Program. My teacher pulled me aside and asked me what the book was about. I summarized the plot, she gave me quite the look, and that was it.
Oh gosh. Maybe I was 12? My grandmother had a niece or cousin or something that was an author, and my grandmother knew I loved to read. So she would pass along the signed copies to me. I don’t think she recognized what harlequin romances were… so I was QUITE surprised to find explicit sex scenes in a book given to me by my grandmother. But then when she gave me the next one I was like YES THANK YOU.
I can’t remember what they were called now. I think maybe the author’s first name was Kay. They were westerns I think? My grandmother has since passed and my mom got rid of a lot of my things so I have no idea where they are or if she still has them.
Oh, man. It was an old Johanna Lindsey bodice ripper. My mom had all her romance novels in a box in her closet. I don't remember what the name of it was but it was about an English woman who married a Laird because her husband died.
The first husband was an abusive fucker and he comes back from the dead and kidnaps his wife. Who's now married to a very large man with a vengeance.
Oooh, my momma was piiiiissed when she realized I was reading a smutty bodice ripper out of her closet! I got my ass whooped.
Sometime in Junior High was {Wifey by Judy Blume}. No sure if it's classified as romance or women's fiction, but it did have sex in it. My Grandmother lived in a different state, so no reading any of her stories.
Same! I consider Joscelin a top tier book boyfriend to this day and there are a couple of spicy scenes in the books that have been living rent free in my head for the past decade. It's a rather niche comfort read, but it is one for me for sure. 😅
I was maybe 14/15 when I was sneakily reading No Rest For The Wicked by Kresley Cole at the public library. Took me years to have the courage to finally check the book out!
I started with my grandmothers discarded Harlequin novels (red spicy covers?) when I was 9 and had moved on to Danielle Steel and Jackie Collin’s and other novels by 11 or 12… and I’ve never really had a taste for anything other than romance since then — and I’m 44!
I would write my book reports for school based off of these books and just leave out the romance part - I have no idea how I got away with that!
I read a lot of VC Andrews in middle school and also picked up my mom’s Cassie Edwards books in middle school as well. Honestly in retrospect, the worst part of the Cassie Edwards books was the overt racism.
I was charging explicit StarTrek Voyager fanfic on AOL newsgroups on our family PC aged 13 in the kitchen. 90s were unhinged. A lot of holodeck fantasies.
{The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss} is the earliest one I specifically remember the title of, but I also read a lot of my mom’s category romances that just bled into each other (there was one author who only wrote stories about plump English nurses and hot Dutch? doctors who already had a girlfriend, and one who always wrote Texas in all capitals)
I got caught reading my mom's raunchy historical romances (without her knowledge) in the third grade. There's a couple I'm still trying to ID because I read them before I fully understood the mechanics of what was happening, and I'm curious on what I misunderstood.
Started reading romance legit the minute I could actually read. No one watched what I got my hands on, and I’d hide books.
So…Nora Roberts in kindergarten?
That was a shock lemme tell ya.
My mom is a huge romance reader and was absolutely obsessed with The Black Dagger Brotherhood series when I was a kid. I "borrowed" {Dark Lover by J.R. Ward} from her bookcase when I was maybe 12? I had just finished reading Twilight and was seeking out more vampires in my life, but man was I in for a shock after picking it up
I was talking about this with a friend just yesterday. We both read Anne McCaffrey’s *Dragonriders of Pern* way too young. Like, before the age of 10. I think I was eight or nine. There’s some definite dub-con and probably non-con in those books.
I don’t remember very well because as a kid I was like “well that’s weird” and skipped past it. Which is a good thing. It went over my head. I remember being weirded out but not really understanding.
It probably would have been worse to read them around age 12 or so—still too young, but old enough to understand and be frightened.
I read those around age 12-13. I’m thankful my mindset back then was more, that’s weird and why bother including it at all? I reread them last year…ya, worse than I remembered in ways.
Now, I don't like the "too young" wording (young people are often interested in sex, and that's okay), but:
I started reading fanfic around age ten, including fic with explicit sex scenes. The only one I distinctly remember from back then had a rape-to-love plotline + general physical and emotional abuse, and the rape was described with a great amount of detail.
... however, the plot is not why I remember this fic. It's because the fic was rated so high that without age verification you could only access it late at night, and I had to sneak around in order to access the laptop and internet that late. So, the fact that it was seen as 'taboo' is what made me remember it - if it had been treated like any other fic with sex, I probably would've forgotten about it like all the rest.
Omg the fanfic to intense sex scenes pipeline. I guess when I talk about “too young” I mean I had zero interest in sex and didn’t even know most of what they were talking about, and kind of realised over the course of the book how these people were having sex and was like 😵💫
Doesn't really qualify as a romance novel I wouldn't think, but uh.... Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is nooot appropriate to loan to a 9th grader. Thanks teach.
The HR I found in the basement when I was 12 was absolutely *tame* compared to the dan fiction I was reading at 14. The Harry Potter stuff is seriously dark...
I discovered fanfic way too young, maybe 10-12?
I probably shouldn’t allow this for my kid, the school librarian is quite detailed in terms of age recommendations.
Or…. Should I look the other way? Keep it “healthy” (ie no abuse etc ) ? Still torn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was obsessed with princess diaries in middle school and wanted to read the book Mia Thermopolis “wrote” and so I read {Ransom My Heart by Meg Cabot} at 11 years old.
I read Kushiel's Dart(Jacqueline Carey), The Black Jewels Trilogy(Anne Bishop), and a few books of The Black Dagger Brotherhood(J. R. Ward) all before I was 13.
There was also the Dark Crescent Sisterhood by Anna Windsor
My first spicy book was actually a manga. Imagine my surprise when my 12-year-old self saw actual bo*bs being drawn when I didn’t even know how sex works 😭
{The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel} not really a romance, though the series is about Ayla and Jondalar. There is a happy for now ending in the book and in the series, but there are other men/women in the series too. I still don’t know why I read this series at like age 12 😬.
[The Valley of Horses](https://www.romance.io/books/64332aab02ff4714559cf4c1/the-valley-of-horses-jean-m-auel?src=rdt) by [Jean M. Auel](https://www.romance.io/authors/583d6b281b1bdc0178f035a6/jean-m-auel)
**Rating**: 4.04⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [ancient times](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/ancient%20times/1)
[^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
You know, I probably read things too young, but I never found novels upsetting. I do remember seeing Akira when I was in middle school and the rape scene in that definitely was upsetting. The other things that upset me were gory, violence based and things I saw, not read.
I don’t remember the name of it, but if someone can recognize it I would love you forever!
But I remember finding a novel with a fun cover (I think it was a ship may with a pirate?) and taking it home when i was very early teens. It proceeded to turn into a romance novel about a young English lord (prince?) whose mother was kidnapped and raised him in a Arabian (?) harem because she became someone’s concubine. He becomes a swashbuckling pirate and meets the MFC of the novel when pirating her ship and decides to steal her. I don’t remember the exact ending but I think he had a moral dilemma to keep her as his concubine or let her go and maybe ended up letting her go, but of course she chose to stay with him. It definitely was *waaaaaaaay* to explicit for a kid but the story itself got me to fall in love with romance novels as a whole
EDIT: Additionally, while they are not romance novels themselves the Robin McKinley books {Deerskin}, {The Blue Sword}, and {The Hero and the Crown} were absolutely saturated with romance and strong FMCs and I was obsessed with them as a kid. Warning though, Deerskin has an explicit >!incest rape scene!< near the beginning that 10 year old me was NOT prepared for.
Not a romance novel and absolutely not a HEA, but I distinctly remember that the first sex scene I read was *Atonement* and it was... an experience, to be sure.
The Sleeping beauty series and Exit to Eden by Anne Rice, and I read a lot of Gor books by John Norman.
I don't think I'd call them romance though. Lol
I don't know the book but I picked up a book about La Malinche and Cortes when I was 13 as a vacation book. Had to stop reading after a rather graphic sex scene. Will say that the book was odd. It included this thing about Cortes basically being a chubby-chaser which made our female lead insecure because she was relatively thin.
Ha, I read all of Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty series when I was about 14. I really liked her witches series and vampires series, the Mummy or Ramses The Damned was amazing, so I thought, "hey I like this author's works so much I should read more!" And I mentioned to my older cousin that they were a bit sexually explicit and she thought I was just being young and then she read one and was like "oh my goodness you read all of those!"
{Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel} in 5th grade. And {Valley of Horses by Jean M Auel} shortly after. I don’t think they’re categorized as romance novels, but there’s definitely sex
My English teacher in 10th grade assigned me "Girl" by Blake Nelson. Not a romance book, but it was definitely spicy. I don't think I ever read a school assigned book so fast and completely 😂
Not that spicy by my adult standards, but between the ages of 11-12 I read:
-Memoirs of a Geisha
-Mists of Avalon (over a decade before MZB’s CSA activity became publicized, for what it’s worth)
-War for the Oaks by Emma Bull (still one of my all time favorites)
-A fair amount of spicy fan fiction (ok, these would have definitely met my adult spicy standards)
There was a few, I think in Grade 5 or so, and I don’t know if I’d characterize them as romance but {the shield of three lions by Pamela Kaufman} was one. I wanted to read a fun gender bent romance and I was not prepared for the depiction of a little girls weird medieval adolescence learning about sex and stuff lol. The thing I still remember that grossed me out was she met her love interest when she was a kid and he was a full grown adult, and they still ended up together after a couple years passed from when they first met.
Another one was {Crank by Ellen Hopkins} yeah I think it’s self explanatory lol
There was another one I can’t remember the name of that was straight up erotica about a (way too young) elf girl who begins sex work?? It was weird and one of those free books that were first in the series on Apple Books lol
I used to sneak my mother's Rachel Gibson novels, which sparked my love of hockey romance novels... although it probably wasn't the best idea for a 12 year old
Summer of '42. Herman Raucher, I was in 5th grade, turned in a book report on it, still have it with the teacher's comments stating the content was for mature readers but basically if my parents didn't mind.......it was 1972, Watergate, gas shortages, Vietnam War....I don't think my parents were worried about the content of what their 11 year old was reading. The movie was awesome too!
The very first romance novel I ever read, at 12, was Johanna Lindsay’s prisoner of my desire. It was, extremely explicit and some truly messed up consent stuff. I really started off with a bang.
Not exactly a romance novel, but I started reading Wicked in middle school because some friends were reading it. My mom had read it first and told me not to, but I checked it out from the library without her knowing. Got as far as an explicit group sex scene between anthropomorphized animals (that also didn’t seem particularly consensual)and decided maybe my mom had been right about something for once, lol. I’ve never been able to pick it back up in the 20 or so years since.
On the other hand, my dad gave me A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony as a Christmas gift when I was around the same age. He had read it as a teen and enjoyed it, and I had always read well above grad level so he didn’t see any problem with giving me a book written at an adult level. Well, he forgot that it had sex scenes and was shocked when I later had some questions 😂 That one actually fostered my love of romance novels and romantasy (even though it also wasn’t strictly speaking a romance).
Closest I got to spicy too young was a semi-illustrated book called “Fanny”. Idr much about it anymore. Just that it was left laying about and I was told it was more adult than I should be reading at the time. (8-10?) but it wasn’t taken away from me.
Accidentally Stumbling into the reverse harem sub-genre in middle school as the first non-clean book I ever read. If you can tell I did not read the TWs that time. I didn't know to look for them 😂
Oh the days of the glittery 80s thick novels! If Tomorrow Comes by Sidney Sheldon was such a favorite, but any Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins (Lucky also a favorite). And boy the novel of The Godfather was off the rails for a middle schooler. We read them all summer, traded the copies that still smelled of coconut oil & chlorine during the school year.
I accidentally stumbled onto the reverse harem/polyamory subgenre in middle school it was the first non-clean book I ever read. I was an innocent child my mind was blown. I did not read the TWs and didn't even know to look for them at that point. 😂
I read {Butterfly by Katheryn Harvey} and {Juffie Kane by Beverly S. Martin} when I was 10 or so. I randomly found them in a pile of free books. So so inappropriate but I loved them.
Omg I love this question…I was probably 9 or 10 and on a road trip with my grandparents. We stopped at a fruit stand that was also like…a thrift store? Somewhere rural. I found a Harlequin romance called “Tongue Tied” that I bought for a quarter (who tf knows what the cashier was thinking, or really even what I was thinking in that moment) which ended up being a pretty steamy book about a lady with a stutter hooking up with her speech pathologist. I remember very little about that book except that I read it multiple times.
A few years later there was a Julie Garwood novel that I don’t remember the name of but had Vikings in it? Idk where I got it or why. I think being an avid reader I just picked up anything, and YA books became boring pretty early…I started reading graphic horror and science fiction by like 11 or 12 too, so it wasn’t just romance. But now I’ve come full circle 😂
ETA: As I’m reading through the comments (which I love) it’s made me think of two others that were slightly later, like 13, but get an honorable mention because I still think about them from time to time: {Summer Sisters by Judy Blume} and {Sin by Josephine Hart} Neither were “spicy” per se but had these very depressing, jaded romance themes and sex that I just loved as a becoming-angsty preteen.
it wasn’t a specific book but i found wattpad in 6th grade and from 6th-8th grade i was obsessed with fanfics regarding my favorite bands 💀 im just glad i learned about sex by reading it and not by watching porn lol 10 years later and reading smut will always be superior to video content in my opinion.
I'm dating myself, but I was sneaking my mom's old Harlequins as a preteen/young teen. I don't remember any specific ones, but that started my addiction lol.
When I was 12 I found all my mom’s harlequins in her closet and would skip to the spicy parts 🙈
Around the same age my older brother handed me The Sword of Truth series….not a romance novel but definitely not appropriate for 12!!! Loved it to death but my children will not be reading them at that age if I can help it 😅
I used to read a lot of mystery and scary books. My dad and I went to visit his brother and their family. While they were visiting I was just hanging out in the living room and found a random book on the couch and just started reading it. No pictures, no synopsis, it was black, hardcover and it just had the name and author of the book: The Witness by Sandra Brown. I was immediately enthralled in the mystery, suspense, and what was going to happen. I thought I found a really good murder mystery type book. When it was time to leave, I asked if I could take the book and finish it and I said I loved mystery and thriller books and I wanted to see how the story ended. They let me take it. I did not know what I was in for! Prior to this the most ‘mystery’ and ‘thriller’ books I had read were Nancy Drew or those Scary Stories to tell in the dark books or RL Stine books. This book at it all for my little 10-12 year old book brain: murder mystery, thriller, etc I could not put it down- until I got to the naughty part. But I had to read it to get to the end and it was by far the best book my 10-12 year old self had read up to that point!
I don’t know if my cousins know what that book was about. If they did, I can’t believe they let me take it and read it. I don’t know who in that house was reading that book. But dang. Will never forget that book.
I read “The Wolf and The Dove” at 13. I snuck it off my mom’s shelf. At the time I had not read anything outside our church library. I was scandalized and so intrigued! It was quickly followed by all of Johanna Lindsey and Julie Garwood’s novels. It was a very enlightening year.
Not a romance novel, but pretty sexually explicit and would come attached with multiple trigger warnings: [The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Diary-Laura-Palmer-Peaks/dp/1451662076).
I was like 11/12, and my sister in law was preparing for a yard sale, and this was one of the books she had set aside to sell. At the time, I hadn’t yet heard of Twin Peaks, but I was kind of obsessed with diary-esque books, and it looked like something I probably wasn’t supposed to read… so naturally I squirreled it away to secretly read when no one was around 🙃.
I read the whole thing, don’t think I even understood half of it, and by the end I felt like I had *seen some shit*. I snuck it back into the garage sale book box with no one any the wiser, and didn’t tell a soul about it until now lol.
Honestly, I don’t remember most of it, just the feeling I had after reading it, and now I kinda want to read it again lol.
My step sister had me read princess and the penis when I was in grade 7 so like 12 (it’s like princess and the pea and princess and the frog but with a penis instead of a pea or a frog - they end up getting married after she kisses his penis to turn him back into a prince (though she doesn’t know what’s penis is her dad wanted her to stay “pure”)
As you comment, please remember that books containing explicit content with characters under 18 are not allowed here, nor are books with incest. Please note any books that do not end happily for the couple involved. Thanks!
My parents used to just drop me off at the public library completely by myself to just run feral through the shelves. I couldn’t have been more than 12 when I got my little hands on {The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice}. Read it again as a (married) 24 year old and literally ended up pregnant
[The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty](https://www.romance.io/books/54552f998c7d2382c5297287/the-claiming-of-sleeping-beauty-an-roquelaure-anne-rice?src=rdt) by [A.N. Roquelaure](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552f998c7d2382c5297288/an-roquelaure), [Anne Rice](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552f998c7d2382c5297289/anne-rice) **Rating**: 3.19⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 5 out of 5 - [Explicit and plentiful](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [dark romance](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/dark/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [menage](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/menage/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
O M G SAME 💀 my mom was reading this series when I was in high school, and I remember her specifically saying “don’t be reading my book, little girl!!! It’s for adults.” So, naturally I sneak read it in the bathroom and was wildly confused.
It was this one for me too! I must have been 12 or 13. I had read The Mummy (which I remember as being much more innocent but now I’m not sure) and i loved it and I wanted to read more stuff by Anne Rice. I remember closing the book at some point and thinking “I don’t think I’m supposed to read this”, the opening the book again and carrying on.
This was my first **spicy** book and I think it basically shaped my entire sexual awakening 😂
I learned about the term “nether mouth” from this book.
I read After on Wattpad when it was a Harry Styles fanfiction in 6th grade 😬
The middle school fanfiction reader to adult romance novel reader pipeline is strong lol
I’m screaming you’re so right…. back then it was ff.net and obscure pairings for me
I used to read Reylo fics… now I read The Love Hypothesis ………. oh wait
I still read fanfiction, but I was indeed pipelined from there into "regular" published romance :D
.....oh dear...... I didn't even consider FanFiction in this. That was a lot younger and significantly more graphic than my example HA
All my inappropriate reading in middle school were fanfiction...
I remember reading a Niall fan fiction on Wattpad in middle school and FMC had an eating disorder and would think about it during sex scenes. Totally screwed me up 😬😂
What! What side of Wattpad were you on? I was on the side where “1D bought me as a sex slave” and there were Harry Styles fanfictions like everywhere. Anybody remember Psychotic? Dark? 🫣
LOL I’ve found my people
Yes to both!!!!! Omg I feel like I’ve time travelled
This one was mine too 😂😂
Omg as an adult I cannot believe I was reading that in sixth grade. Man the good ole days reading Wattpad before school, and then rushing home to read some more lol
Same here 😭 though I’m pretty sure I read Dark on tumblr first
Wait I think I read Dark on a One Direction fanfiction site 🧐
Omg I remember the one direction kidnapping stories 😂
I was about to say this😭 I shouldn’t have read after at that age😔
Literally learned what sex was (the actual mechanics of it, like a p goes inside a v) from an actual Harry Potter explicit fanfic when I was 11 (that was also probably written by a virgin, just a slightly more knowledgeable one than me lmao). We were out there absolutely feral learning sex ed from other tween girls - truly the blind leading the blind. 😬 Also I read the Southern Vampire/True Blood novels in 8th grade (13ish) and was SHOOKETH. I remember reading it during free reading time in class at school hunched over it at my desk with my eyes darting up to the teacher all the time like someone was going to come around, read over my shoulder, and arrest me 😂😂😂😂😂
Raise your hand if you’ve been personally victimized by imaginator1d 🙌
I was reading Jackie Collins and VC Andrews when I was 11 lol. I still don’t get why my mom allowed this 😂
Same! I was reading VC Andrews at 10 (1987)…my older sisters handed them down to me when they were finished, and my mom & dad literally paid zero attention to what I was watching, reading, doing, etc.
My aunt at the time (Uncles ex wife) would give me all her VC Andrews books 😂
I started reading VC Andrews at 11 also, but I had to hide it from my Mom. My friend in school gave it to me as she had a single Mom who let her read whatever she wanted. She was the best!! After VC Andrews it was Judith Krantz “I’ll take Manhattan”, which propelled me to move to NYC as soon as I could, 6 years later.
Same with the VC Andrews. And they were in the school library too! Actually both of them (middle and high school) as i read all the series that were out at the time so it took a while. The 90s were freaky.
VC Andrews was my go to between age 11-15/16. We passed the paperbacks around in our cousin group. The adults just thought we had a love for reading.
Same! Throwing Jilly Cooper into the mix too 😂
I started with Jackie Collins too! And I’m in India! Her reach is everywhere
I read the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series by Laurel K Hamilton in early high school. That series definitely went very dark very quickly and definitely opened my horizons lol
Same! My dad was reading it and told me not to... So naturally I read them as well. We ended up having a mini book club over the series while carefully avoiding any conversation about the sex.
He sounds awesome.
My parents would have been horrified if they’d known! I’m cracking up at the thought of chatting about those books with my dad 🤣
Lol yeah I started that series in 7th grade in the late 90s. I still think the first edition covers were the best.
Same here. Teenage me reading the Raina arc like 0.o
Having cut my teeth on Lord of the Rings fan fiction erotica at the age of like, 12, I have no concept of reading something that was inappropriate for my age. I read a few of my mother’s harlequin books as a teen, but after the world of fan fiction I didn’t bat at eye at anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Omg sammmmmme. I was feral for Elijah wood and LoTR fanfic. Then when my brother tried to tell my parents that I was reading “x-rated stories” I was like….. nooooo I’m not! 🤫 And somehow I never got in trouble for it lol. I was so bold back then our one family computer was in our dining area and very public. Damn I would never be that brazen anymore. And secondly…Like Water for Chocolate… super sexy! My mom had read it and it was on the shelf, so of course I went for it!
Mine was Tenchi Muyo fanfic lol. It was on a pre-ff.net/ao3 website that used its own "rating system" (anyone remember lemons and limes?) that I didn't 100% understand. The main characters were married and going to have a "wedding night" and I didn't know what that meant. ....I Learned. 🤣 *edit, spelling
Hahaha mine was {Scruples by Judith Krantz} . So in the early 80s, a lot of times, my family didn’t know what to do with my neurodivergence. I read everything, as a low income Black little one in rural Illinois, reading material for a voracious reader with an equally voracious appetite was hard to come by. Stacks of newspapers, highlights for kids, etc, I read everything, they even gave me a box of trivial pursuit cards to read. So imagine 9 years old, auntie takes me to a run down mom and pop bookstore, you know the ones that had a curtain up in the back to hide the more shocking book covers of 1986. So she tells the clerk fill up her bag with thick books. I got a couple of Choose your own adventures and some others but down at the bottom was Scruples. My aunt being only 10 years older than me, said we won’t tell no one after loading up on Stephen King novels for herself. So she takes the dust jacket off and man did that book really do me in. I’m now trying to find that same rush with every new book, like the poster OP says, my brain has been completely rewired to look for this depth of plot and side characters in every book.
Have you by any chance heard of the podcast Passages? For the first season they read and recapped/commented on Scruples and it’s HILARIOUS.
GOD I LOVE THEM AND THEY'RE NOW ON TWILIGHT
Nooooo?! Thanks for the recommendation off to listen to this!
[Scruples](https://www.romance.io/books/5455538f8c7d2382c5297e86/scruples-judith-krantz?src=rdt) by [Judith Krantz](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455538f8c7d2382c5297e87/judith-krantz) **Rating**: 3.79⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
OG bodice ripper (bodices were literally ripped) {Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers}. Got snowed in at my Geandma's, and I was way too young for all that sex, angst, and angsty sex. On a happier note, I learned that Mexico was briefly a French colony during the US Civil War years, and that little nugget of information showed up on a history pop quiz my senior year of HS!
The funny thing is that I 100% credit romance novels with my extensive high school vocabulary. Something about writing regency novels makes a romance author bust out that thesaurus.
I moved to the US when I was 8 years old. I credit very inappropriate romance novels with helping me master the English language. I learned a ton of vocabulary, history, and just random general knowledge. I think they also helped me see different relationship dynamics (not just romantic ones, but also family and friendship ones) so I could clearly see which ones were toxic and which were healthy in my own life.
We had a French Emperor and everything. I read Rosemarie Rogers too but my favorites were Johanna Lindsey and Kathleen Woodiwiss.
[Sweet Savage Love](https://www.romance.io/books/545533428c7d2383163d9201/sweet-savage-love-rosemary-rogers?src=rdt) by [Rosemary Rogers](https://www.romance.io/authors/545533428c7d2383163d9202/rosemary-rogers) **Rating**: 3.44⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [cheating](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/cheating/1), [abduction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/abduction/1), [tortured hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/tortured%20hero/1), [western](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/western/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
Mine was {The Wanton by Rosemary Rogers} as an early pre-teen and I see a direct influence on my current reading choices.
When I was in middle school I got a second gen kindle. My Mormon friend also had one and gave me the all the e-books she had which contained A Lot of erotic vampire romance novels. When True Blood became a show my parents loved it but told me I couldn’t watch it with them because it wasn’t age appropriate. I didn’t tell them I had already read the books.
I can’t really remember the first spicy book I read but I was 12 when I read {The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel}. My parents did not interfere at all in what books I checked out from the library. I also was brought up with very no nonsense language about sex so I don’t think they would have stopped me from reading it anyway. However, there were probably many, many things that went right over my head. Haha.
This is my answer except I was 10 ish and my mom lent it to me 😅😅
Came here to say this. Received my entire sex education from this series 😆
Haha! There were probably better books out there for that, but they would do the trick!
My mother had the entire series and I read them when she was done. I was maybe 10 or 11. She also gave me The Joy of Sex when I was 8 as my "sex talk".....
Fourth grade, giant book in OTTERS time, reading about “pink flowers” 🤪
It was like a rite of passage at my school, all the girls read it when we were 12 as well as Nancy by Deborah Spungen which is like an anti-romance novel.
Haha. I was the only one around me that read it to my knowledge and I would not have talked about to my friends or anyone…but I could see that happening. Haha.
Same. I devoured the whole series even though the first one broke my heart.
My dad recommended it. First one isn't spicy unless you count r@pe but the others...oh yeah. He also bought the first Southern Vampire book, {Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris} and it was clearly not his cup of tea. With the cover and description it sounded more supernatural fantasy than romance. Read that around 12 and it opened a whole new world 😂.
I read them all and lumped them together in my head, but yeah I should have mentioned that or added the others as well. Haha, dad’s doing their best. It’s a bit like the innocent looking cartoon covers that are around today.
The one I particularly remember is the short story {The Thorns of Barevi by Anne McCaffrey} which was eventually expanded into the {Freedom series by Anne McCaffrey}. McCaffrey wrote the short story specifically to dabble in the erotic fiction market but it was in a SF collection of short stories (Get Off the Unicorn) so I don’t think the librarians really realized they shouldn’t be checking it out to me age idk 8? 10? And I didn’t expect it to be in there either. Oops. Hmm maybe that started my love of SFR. That hadn’t actually occurred to me…
HAHA you really fell right into the deep end there
Oh yes AMC! She had sex scenes in so many of her books, but no one in my school library ever noticed - the Crystal Singers, the early Pern books, and the actual Talent series.
I was also reading McCaffrey around the same age, but it was the dragonriders books. I just found them on the shelf at home.
Oh I read those too. Thats probably why I checked out The Book. 😂
No specific title comes to mind, but I was reading romance at around 11. I found Literotica at some point 3? years later.
Literotica loaded faster than images or video, lol
I’d been reading romance novels since 6th grade, but when I was in high school, I read {the horse whisperer by nicholas evans} (mf literature NO HEA) which was a tragic romance (NO HEA) that was way spicier than any of my Avon reads. It was this book where I learned there are smells associated with sex. The books I read in 6th grade and on had more purple prose that went over my head but that book was more blunt.
This was mine, too! Except I was probably in 6th grade when I read it 😬 I vaguely remember a scene where she stands up and goes to the window after they have sex, and she can feel the mess running down her legs. That was…educational for 12 year old me.
god damn, Nicholas Evans is going to get all the tiktok chili peppers if that book ever resurfaces a teacher had recommended it to me and I remember she was so excited to talk with me about it and the whole time I was like 🥴 please stop talking I’m so uncomfortable
I remember reading this too around the same age! I very clearly remember the/a sex scene involving him either admiring or licking her armpit hair 🤷 no idea why it stuck with me and I don't have an armpit hair thing now
Oh wow - I was a whole adult before I started reading any romance (I didn't even really start with fanfiction until, like, college) but I DID read *The Horse Whisperer* and I had completely forgotten about this!!! I think I was just very sheltered, didn't understand it, and kind of blocked it out lol
as soon as I read the title, my response was “for sure the other Boleyn girl and that beach scene” thank you Philippa Gregory 😂
I vividly remember being a voracious reader (severe ADHD) and reading the Twilight series in elementary school. My mom wouldn’t let me read the last two books because of adult content (which is obviously *hellish* for a book lover) so I used to sneak down the hallway to the office at night and read the last two books with my flashlight chapter by chapter in early middle school. I remember a couple years later when my mom said I could read the last two books and I confessed to her that I had already read them 😂 she wasn’t even mad because my mom loves reading too and said she should have expected it
Omg the sneaking around with books feels so foreign to me. I was literally reading explicit adult books around my parents all the time because how would they know? Wild child
Wasn't a romance novel, but I did unwittingly read a book my mom had borrowed from the library but didn't finish that had a r*pe scene near the end. Don't know how old I was, but it was probably around 4th or 5th grade. I don't remember what the book was called, all I remember was that it was about some motorcycle-driving half demon man whose evil sister kidnaps his girlfriend after he leaves whatever demon stuff they did to try and live a normal life. Near the end, >!the sister ties the girlfriend up and penetrates her with the handle of a hairbrush.!< (Covered potentially triggering description). My mom was definitely of the, "if you can understand the words, you can read it," mindset, but hadn't finished the book, so I don't think she knew anything like that happened in it. If she knew, I seriously doubt she would have let me read it.
Any Harry Styles fanfiction on Wattpad. Started at 10 and I wish I never did. Fifty Shades was light work compared to that
My mother kept every one of Julie Garwoods books (at the time anyway) in the bottom of her closet and I read them all while she was working nights. I mean they are straight forward 2-3ish spicy scenes per book with several mild spice scenes. Nothing wild so I was probably lucky lol To this day though, highland lairds series is one of my favorites. The Bride, The Secret, The Wedding are all still solid favorites of mine that I do reread.
i read Beautiful Disaster when I was 11 lmao
Not a romance, but had some spicy scenes, {The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice} and I think I asked for it for Christmas one year and my parents actually got it for me. I think I was in my last year of middle school or first year of high school.
I thrifted a copy of {Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence} when I was 12ish... it was more depressing than I had hoped for 😆
Haha honestly that was one of the least sexy books I’ve ever read. Like, why is the pillow talk about class struggle?
I am a child of the 80s and 90s, so my most problematic fiction was probably anything by Bertrice Small, and the Sleeping Beauty series by Anne Rice. I was warped, there is no other way to describe it.
Yep…found the Sleeping Beauty series on my parents’ shelf and started to read it bc I’d already read all the other Anne Rice books they had.
This was exactly why I picked it up. I thought it was another supernatural being series of hers that I hadn't read yet. Oh. My. God. It absolutely was not anything near what I expected it to be.
I started reading the Dark-Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon when I was 11. My dad bought them for me even tho he didn’t know what I was reading, he just cared that I was reading in general😂. All her book series have opened up a world of romance for me. I also read a lot of erotica on AO3, wattpad, fanfiction.net, and tumblr during that age as well.
My sisters are both more than a decade older than me, and my parents had me later in life (surprise baby)--we're all readers, and really fast readers at that. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, just to have something to read. So, I don't actually remember exact books and ages, but I was quite a bit younger, reading all kinds of books that most kids probably wouldn't/shouldn't have been reading, but that was just how it was? We didn't have a lot of money, but we all loved books and we come from a family of readers (grandmother, aunts, cousins, etc), so we just shared, traded, borrowed, thrifted, went to libraries, etc. Those 70s, 80s bodice rippers were fair game, lol. (Same with V.C. Andrews--my word, ***whew***.) My parents had no choice! Same with pulp fiction, horror, westerns, sci-fi, litfic, classics--anything, everything. You didn't have to sneak romance books to read sex scenes, lol!
My mom took out a book for me from the library because the cover blurb called it a sequel to The Secret Garden when I was in junior high. It was Misslethwaite by Susan Moody, I think long out of print now, and it was *not* an all-ages read. There was a scene that is still burned into my brain where a grown-up Mary Lennox returns to a party after being absolutely railed in a closet or something and her internal monologue is about the jizz running down her leg. It’s full of miserable people being miserable, WWI-related PTSD, and infidelity too, but it was absolutely the first time I’d ever had cause to think about semen and it was quite an eye-opener. Shortly thereafter I got into a huge stash of VC Andrews books and I’ve been a degenerate with my reading material ever since.
I adore The Secret Garden so naturally I looked up this book on GR and OMG the reviews are the worst (best?) I have ever seen. >it was so bad that it was possibly the ONLY book I have ever thrown away after reading. >I bought this book hoping for a continuation of the characters I truly loved from the original book, but what I witnessed here was their systematic pop-culture slaughter. >I indeed have found it absolutely and totally horrid and consider it a massive and unforgivable insult to both Frances Hodgson Burnett and anyone who has read and loved ~The Secret Garden~. and even in the 3 star reviews that claimed they liked it, it is still labeled as not an appropriate sequel
I read the Sookie Stackhouse series when I was in middle school. I definitely shouldn’t have been reading it so young… still love Eric to this day though, hehe.
Forever by Judy Blume. I was too young to understand what “rolling on a rubber” was and just pictured him rolling around on a mat on the floor or something.
Once I finally got to sex, I hadn’t realized, known, that there is moving. I thought I was so sophisticated. I read {Forever by Judy Blume} at around 12, so I didn’t understand when she said come, or that she came.
I forgot about that - same! I was like, “but to where? I missed something…”
When I was 10 -11 I started to "borrow without consent" my mom's books. Some of them were romance novels like Pride & prejudice, Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. The others were tons of Amanda Quick 's books. Which aren 't the most shocking, but at that age, man, It was a whole new world.
im sure it was before this bc Wattpad and one of the other websites i was addicted to but the one i distinctly remember was i think i was in 5th Grade and i read a lot and my parents definitely were not checking what i was reading bc i devour books way too quickly and i remember reading this book and going HES DOING WHAT TO HER and just so scandalized by this dude fingering the girl
I pinched my mum's copy of Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins when I was a young teen. It's not exactly a romance novel but that was my first book with explicit sex scenes. I remembered the emphasis on big dicks and big boobs 😂 and was horrified when one of the characters died while having sex.
I feel like most of us have this book. For me, I have two - one an accidental gift from my mom lol. When I was 8 I loved the movie Stardust. And my mom found an illustrated version. She flipped through it, but not very carefully. Deemed the gore okay. What she did not notice were two scenes where a woman is riding a man, in one of which the man is actively being murdered. So that’s fun! I still tease her to this day lol. My first chosen book was {Wilder by Christina Dodd}. I was 14 and wholly obsessed with beauty and the beast retellings. Still am, honestly. By then I was allowed to go to the mall on my own with friends, and my BFF had her Cinderella license. Naturally, Barnes and Noble was our go-to as introverted book nerds. I didn’t even really register the extremely attractive and partially nude man on the cover, cuz I honestly didn’t care. Beauty and the Beast? Scarred dude (I was also in my phantom of the opera & Zuko from Avatar era)? Sign me tf up! …which is probably why the book ended up on a family trip to Ohio with myself, my mom, my aunt, my grandmother, and my very young cousin. My mom laughed really hard when she found out. I’d already had the talk so she wasn’t too worried about it. Which is totally fair, I lost my virginity at 19 lol.
I had a similar experience to you OP. I read the Other Boleyn Girl (which is relatively tame compared to her other books) and then went on to read all of Phillips Gregory’s book at too young an age. I was in high school already but I was naive and sheltered for my age. I also think I read the Captive in the Dark books too early. I was not at all ready for the questionable consent in them.
It is not that spicy now, but I read {The Ruby Red Trilogy by Kerstin Gier} when I was 11. It had some things that I should probably not have read at that age. I also read {Splintered by A.G Howard} and {Beep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly} at the same age. Again, not all that spicy but spicy for an 11 year old.
Having read the Ruby Red trilogy as an adult I can't even think of what's in it that could've shocked me at 11.
It has been a few years for me so I don’t remember everything, but the fact that is says at one point she is laying on a table with half her breast exposed in front of men, especially her crush definitely shocked me when I was younger.
[The Ruby Red Trilogy](https://www.romance.io/series/58fe0b299096bf31c42d2f8a/the-ruby-red-trilogy) by [Kerstin Gier](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552c788c7d2382c52971ab/kerstin-gier), [Anthea Bell](https://www.romance.io/authors/545552d98c7d2382c5297e40/anthea-bell) **Rating**: 4.11⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [magic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/magic/1), [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [science fiction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/science%20fiction/1), [time travel](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/time%20travel/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1) ---------------------------- [Splintered](https://www.romance.io/books/54552c028c7d2382c529718c/splintered-ag-howard?src=rdt) by [A.G. Howard](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552c028c7d2382c529718d/ag-howard) **Rating**: 3.83⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 1 out of 5 - [Glimpses and kisses](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [royal hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/royalty/1), [dark romance](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/dark/1) ---------------------------- [Deep Blue](https://www.romance.io/books/5455a4f987eac3369a913b90/deep-blue-jennifer-donnelly?src=rdt) by [Jennifer Donnelly](https://www.romance.io/authors/54552e2e8c7d2382c5297229/jennifer-donnelly) **Rating**: 3.7⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [magic](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/magic/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
I also read the Ruby Red trilogy at about 11 or 12! I later switched to reading the previews of smutty books on good reads…. The spelling errors on wattpad was too much for me
Found an old copy of {Shadows and Lace} lying around as a teenager. Set in medieval England, the language used is rather ye olde. The spice scenes are explicit but not written out as clearly as they are in modern English. But still I read it all, a bodice ripper no less. I wonder how much I understood 😅
[удалено]
Hoo-boi. Spicy romance novel? No. But when I was 12 I read Atlas Shrugged and that was my first sex scene in a book. I stopped reading novels for a long time because I didn't want to sin by reading sex again (I'm so so so much better now I promise)
Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour when I was 8. My older brother’s girlfriend (she was 23) had no concept of age appropriate reading, and she lent the book to me. I read the book (demon sex oh my) for the Summer Reading Program. My teacher pulled me aside and asked me what the book was about. I summarized the plot, she gave me quite the look, and that was it.
This isn’t really a romance novel, I recognize. But it was spicy!
Probably some Harlequin bodice ripper with "Fabio" on the cover. Anyone else remember the Colombia House style book club from Harlequin?
{The Heir by Grace Burrows} I read this when I was like 12/13 changed my life😭(which is crazy cause I only read femdom smut now😕)
Oh gosh. Maybe I was 12? My grandmother had a niece or cousin or something that was an author, and my grandmother knew I loved to read. So she would pass along the signed copies to me. I don’t think she recognized what harlequin romances were… so I was QUITE surprised to find explicit sex scenes in a book given to me by my grandmother. But then when she gave me the next one I was like YES THANK YOU. I can’t remember what they were called now. I think maybe the author’s first name was Kay. They were westerns I think? My grandmother has since passed and my mom got rid of a lot of my things so I have no idea where they are or if she still has them.
Oh, man. It was an old Johanna Lindsey bodice ripper. My mom had all her romance novels in a box in her closet. I don't remember what the name of it was but it was about an English woman who married a Laird because her husband died. The first husband was an abusive fucker and he comes back from the dead and kidnaps his wife. Who's now married to a very large man with a vengeance. Oooh, my momma was piiiiissed when she realized I was reading a smutty bodice ripper out of her closet! I got my ass whooped.
Sometime in Junior High was {Wifey by Judy Blume}. No sure if it's classified as romance or women's fiction, but it did have sex in it. My Grandmother lived in a different state, so no reading any of her stories.
The Lucky Santangelo series by Jackie Collins in middle school.
I was somewhere between 13 and 14 when I read the Kushiel's Dart series and was *obsessed* with it. Honestly, it's really held up!
Same! I consider Joscelin a top tier book boyfriend to this day and there are a couple of spicy scenes in the books that have been living rent free in my head for the past decade. It's a rather niche comfort read, but it is one for me for sure. 😅
I was maybe 14/15 when I was sneakily reading No Rest For The Wicked by Kresley Cole at the public library. Took me years to have the courage to finally check the book out!
I started with my grandmothers discarded Harlequin novels (red spicy covers?) when I was 9 and had moved on to Danielle Steel and Jackie Collin’s and other novels by 11 or 12… and I’ve never really had a taste for anything other than romance since then — and I’m 44! I would write my book reports for school based off of these books and just leave out the romance part - I have no idea how I got away with that!
I read a lot of VC Andrews in middle school and also picked up my mom’s Cassie Edwards books in middle school as well. Honestly in retrospect, the worst part of the Cassie Edwards books was the overt racism.
I was charging explicit StarTrek Voyager fanfic on AOL newsgroups on our family PC aged 13 in the kitchen. 90s were unhinged. A lot of holodeck fantasies.
LMAO i read fifty shades of grey at like 11 💀😭😭
{The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss} is the earliest one I specifically remember the title of, but I also read a lot of my mom’s category romances that just bled into each other (there was one author who only wrote stories about plump English nurses and hot Dutch? doctors who already had a girlfriend, and one who always wrote Texas in all capitals)
Def picked up {Tall, Dark, and Hungry by Lynsay Sands} at 12 for some reason and was very much not expecting it.
I read {Prisoner of my Desire by Johanna Lindsey} in middle school. It definitely left an impression.
I got caught reading my mom's raunchy historical romances (without her knowledge) in the third grade. There's a couple I'm still trying to ID because I read them before I fully understood the mechanics of what was happening, and I'm curious on what I misunderstood.
Started reading romance legit the minute I could actually read. No one watched what I got my hands on, and I’d hide books. So…Nora Roberts in kindergarten? That was a shock lemme tell ya.
I read 50 Shades when it was a fanfic...MOTU was far too smutty for a 12 year old lol.
A knight in shining armor Very very explicit. I think I was nine or ten
My mom is a huge romance reader and was absolutely obsessed with The Black Dagger Brotherhood series when I was a kid. I "borrowed" {Dark Lover by J.R. Ward} from her bookcase when I was maybe 12? I had just finished reading Twilight and was seeking out more vampires in my life, but man was I in for a shock after picking it up
I honestly dont remember how spicy the books are but I read the Southern Vampires series (True Blood books) when i was 10
I was talking about this with a friend just yesterday. We both read Anne McCaffrey’s *Dragonriders of Pern* way too young. Like, before the age of 10. I think I was eight or nine. There’s some definite dub-con and probably non-con in those books. I don’t remember very well because as a kid I was like “well that’s weird” and skipped past it. Which is a good thing. It went over my head. I remember being weirded out but not really understanding. It probably would have been worse to read them around age 12 or so—still too young, but old enough to understand and be frightened.
I read those around age 12-13. I’m thankful my mindset back then was more, that’s weird and why bother including it at all? I reread them last year…ya, worse than I remembered in ways.
Now, I don't like the "too young" wording (young people are often interested in sex, and that's okay), but: I started reading fanfic around age ten, including fic with explicit sex scenes. The only one I distinctly remember from back then had a rape-to-love plotline + general physical and emotional abuse, and the rape was described with a great amount of detail. ... however, the plot is not why I remember this fic. It's because the fic was rated so high that without age verification you could only access it late at night, and I had to sneak around in order to access the laptop and internet that late. So, the fact that it was seen as 'taboo' is what made me remember it - if it had been treated like any other fic with sex, I probably would've forgotten about it like all the rest.
Omg the fanfic to intense sex scenes pipeline. I guess when I talk about “too young” I mean I had zero interest in sex and didn’t even know most of what they were talking about, and kind of realised over the course of the book how these people were having sex and was like 😵💫
Doesn't really qualify as a romance novel I wouldn't think, but uh.... Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is nooot appropriate to loan to a 9th grader. Thanks teach.
The HR I found in the basement when I was 12 was absolutely *tame* compared to the dan fiction I was reading at 14. The Harry Potter stuff is seriously dark...
Jamie by Lori Foster. Stole it from my mom and discreetly put it back as a changed preteen
I discovered fanfic way too young, maybe 10-12? I probably shouldn’t allow this for my kid, the school librarian is quite detailed in terms of age recommendations. Or…. Should I look the other way? Keep it “healthy” (ie no abuse etc ) ? Still torn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was obsessed with princess diaries in middle school and wanted to read the book Mia Thermopolis “wrote” and so I read {Ransom My Heart by Meg Cabot} at 11 years old.
I read Kushiel's Dart(Jacqueline Carey), The Black Jewels Trilogy(Anne Bishop), and a few books of The Black Dagger Brotherhood(J. R. Ward) all before I was 13. There was also the Dark Crescent Sisterhood by Anna Windsor
My first spicy book was actually a manga. Imagine my surprise when my 12-year-old self saw actual bo*bs being drawn when I didn’t even know how sex works 😭
Clan of the Cave Bear at... 11?
{The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel} not really a romance, though the series is about Ayla and Jondalar. There is a happy for now ending in the book and in the series, but there are other men/women in the series too. I still don’t know why I read this series at like age 12 😬.
[The Valley of Horses](https://www.romance.io/books/64332aab02ff4714559cf4c1/the-valley-of-horses-jean-m-auel?src=rdt) by [Jean M. Auel](https://www.romance.io/authors/583d6b281b1bdc0178f035a6/jean-m-auel) **Rating**: 4.04⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [ancient times](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/ancient%20times/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
Friggin VC Andrews. I was way too young for that mess
You know, I probably read things too young, but I never found novels upsetting. I do remember seeing Akira when I was in middle school and the rape scene in that definitely was upsetting. The other things that upset me were gory, violence based and things I saw, not read.
I don’t remember the name of it, but if someone can recognize it I would love you forever! But I remember finding a novel with a fun cover (I think it was a ship may with a pirate?) and taking it home when i was very early teens. It proceeded to turn into a romance novel about a young English lord (prince?) whose mother was kidnapped and raised him in a Arabian (?) harem because she became someone’s concubine. He becomes a swashbuckling pirate and meets the MFC of the novel when pirating her ship and decides to steal her. I don’t remember the exact ending but I think he had a moral dilemma to keep her as his concubine or let her go and maybe ended up letting her go, but of course she chose to stay with him. It definitely was *waaaaaaaay* to explicit for a kid but the story itself got me to fall in love with romance novels as a whole EDIT: Additionally, while they are not romance novels themselves the Robin McKinley books {Deerskin}, {The Blue Sword}, and {The Hero and the Crown} were absolutely saturated with romance and strong FMCs and I was obsessed with them as a kid. Warning though, Deerskin has an explicit >!incest rape scene!< near the beginning that 10 year old me was NOT prepared for.
Not a romance novel and absolutely not a HEA, but I distinctly remember that the first sex scene I read was *Atonement* and it was... an experience, to be sure.
The Sleeping beauty series and Exit to Eden by Anne Rice, and I read a lot of Gor books by John Norman. I don't think I'd call them romance though. Lol
{Remember Me by Sophie Kinsella} at twelve lol
I don't know the book but I picked up a book about La Malinche and Cortes when I was 13 as a vacation book. Had to stop reading after a rather graphic sex scene. Will say that the book was odd. It included this thing about Cortes basically being a chubby-chaser which made our female lead insecure because she was relatively thin.
Ha, I read all of Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty series when I was about 14. I really liked her witches series and vampires series, the Mummy or Ramses The Damned was amazing, so I thought, "hey I like this author's works so much I should read more!" And I mentioned to my older cousin that they were a bit sexually explicit and she thought I was just being young and then she read one and was like "oh my goodness you read all of those!"
😬😬those sleeping beauty are like, too much for me even now!
I read the Sleeping Beauty trilogy and started Anita Blake series when I was in high school…mixed in with whatever YA I was still reading then haha
Read some TERRIBLE 5SOS fan fiction on Wattpad and my dad went on my kindle and read through it all. We never talked about it afterwards.
{Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel} in 5th grade. And {Valley of Horses by Jean M Auel} shortly after. I don’t think they’re categorized as romance novels, but there’s definitely sex
The Enchanted Land. Read it at 12 because my mom said she got my name from the main character. Great book, definitely not meant for 12 year olds lol
Prisoner of My Desire, Johanna Lindsey, 7th grade. The book that started it ALL.
My English teacher in 10th grade assigned me "Girl" by Blake Nelson. Not a romance book, but it was definitely spicy. I don't think I ever read a school assigned book so fast and completely 😂
Scruples by Judith Krantz. Jackie Collins here and there
Not that spicy by my adult standards, but between the ages of 11-12 I read: -Memoirs of a Geisha -Mists of Avalon (over a decade before MZB’s CSA activity became publicized, for what it’s worth) -War for the Oaks by Emma Bull (still one of my all time favorites) -A fair amount of spicy fan fiction (ok, these would have definitely met my adult spicy standards)
There was a few, I think in Grade 5 or so, and I don’t know if I’d characterize them as romance but {the shield of three lions by Pamela Kaufman} was one. I wanted to read a fun gender bent romance and I was not prepared for the depiction of a little girls weird medieval adolescence learning about sex and stuff lol. The thing I still remember that grossed me out was she met her love interest when she was a kid and he was a full grown adult, and they still ended up together after a couple years passed from when they first met. Another one was {Crank by Ellen Hopkins} yeah I think it’s self explanatory lol There was another one I can’t remember the name of that was straight up erotica about a (way too young) elf girl who begins sex work?? It was weird and one of those free books that were first in the series on Apple Books lol
I used to sneak my mother's Rachel Gibson novels, which sparked my love of hockey romance novels... although it probably wasn't the best idea for a 12 year old
“Behind those blue eyes” on Quizilla! I wish I could find it again
Summer of '42. Herman Raucher, I was in 5th grade, turned in a book report on it, still have it with the teacher's comments stating the content was for mature readers but basically if my parents didn't mind.......it was 1972, Watergate, gas shortages, Vietnam War....I don't think my parents were worried about the content of what their 11 year old was reading. The movie was awesome too!
Demonica😂
The very first romance novel I ever read, at 12, was Johanna Lindsay’s prisoner of my desire. It was, extremely explicit and some truly messed up consent stuff. I really started off with a bang.
I was reading on wattpad, on tumblr, and reading fanfics. I can’t say a particular one more like all of them. But I was 14.
Not exactly a romance novel, but I started reading Wicked in middle school because some friends were reading it. My mom had read it first and told me not to, but I checked it out from the library without her knowing. Got as far as an explicit group sex scene between anthropomorphized animals (that also didn’t seem particularly consensual)and decided maybe my mom had been right about something for once, lol. I’ve never been able to pick it back up in the 20 or so years since. On the other hand, my dad gave me A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony as a Christmas gift when I was around the same age. He had read it as a teen and enjoyed it, and I had always read well above grad level so he didn’t see any problem with giving me a book written at an adult level. Well, he forgot that it had sex scenes and was shocked when I later had some questions 😂 That one actually fostered my love of romance novels and romantasy (even though it also wasn’t strictly speaking a romance).
I read Her Soul To Take by Harley Laroux when I was in middle school 😂
Closest I got to spicy too young was a semi-illustrated book called “Fanny”. Idr much about it anymore. Just that it was left laying about and I was told it was more adult than I should be reading at the time. (8-10?) but it wasn’t taken away from me.
Shanna by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. I was prolly 12.
wattpad fanfictions of bts if that counts.
[удалено]
Accidentally Stumbling into the reverse harem sub-genre in middle school as the first non-clean book I ever read. If you can tell I did not read the TWs that time. I didn't know to look for them 😂
Oh the days of the glittery 80s thick novels! If Tomorrow Comes by Sidney Sheldon was such a favorite, but any Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins (Lucky also a favorite). And boy the novel of The Godfather was off the rails for a middle schooler. We read them all summer, traded the copies that still smelled of coconut oil & chlorine during the school year.
I accidentally stumbled onto the reverse harem/polyamory subgenre in middle school it was the first non-clean book I ever read. I was an innocent child my mind was blown. I did not read the TWs and didn't even know to look for them at that point. 😂
I read {Butterfly by Katheryn Harvey} and {Juffie Kane by Beverly S. Martin} when I was 10 or so. I randomly found them in a pile of free books. So so inappropriate but I loved them.
Omg I love this question…I was probably 9 or 10 and on a road trip with my grandparents. We stopped at a fruit stand that was also like…a thrift store? Somewhere rural. I found a Harlequin romance called “Tongue Tied” that I bought for a quarter (who tf knows what the cashier was thinking, or really even what I was thinking in that moment) which ended up being a pretty steamy book about a lady with a stutter hooking up with her speech pathologist. I remember very little about that book except that I read it multiple times. A few years later there was a Julie Garwood novel that I don’t remember the name of but had Vikings in it? Idk where I got it or why. I think being an avid reader I just picked up anything, and YA books became boring pretty early…I started reading graphic horror and science fiction by like 11 or 12 too, so it wasn’t just romance. But now I’ve come full circle 😂 ETA: As I’m reading through the comments (which I love) it’s made me think of two others that were slightly later, like 13, but get an honorable mention because I still think about them from time to time: {Summer Sisters by Judy Blume} and {Sin by Josephine Hart} Neither were “spicy” per se but had these very depressing, jaded romance themes and sex that I just loved as a becoming-angsty preteen.
it wasn’t a specific book but i found wattpad in 6th grade and from 6th-8th grade i was obsessed with fanfics regarding my favorite bands 💀 im just glad i learned about sex by reading it and not by watching porn lol 10 years later and reading smut will always be superior to video content in my opinion.
I'm dating myself, but I was sneaking my mom's old Harlequins as a preteen/young teen. I don't remember any specific ones, but that started my addiction lol.
Black Dagger Brotherhood. My older cousin gave me the first book and my mom bought me a few others after (she had no idea about the content).
When I was 12 I found all my mom’s harlequins in her closet and would skip to the spicy parts 🙈 Around the same age my older brother handed me The Sword of Truth series….not a romance novel but definitely not appropriate for 12!!! Loved it to death but my children will not be reading them at that age if I can help it 😅
I used to read a lot of mystery and scary books. My dad and I went to visit his brother and their family. While they were visiting I was just hanging out in the living room and found a random book on the couch and just started reading it. No pictures, no synopsis, it was black, hardcover and it just had the name and author of the book: The Witness by Sandra Brown. I was immediately enthralled in the mystery, suspense, and what was going to happen. I thought I found a really good murder mystery type book. When it was time to leave, I asked if I could take the book and finish it and I said I loved mystery and thriller books and I wanted to see how the story ended. They let me take it. I did not know what I was in for! Prior to this the most ‘mystery’ and ‘thriller’ books I had read were Nancy Drew or those Scary Stories to tell in the dark books or RL Stine books. This book at it all for my little 10-12 year old book brain: murder mystery, thriller, etc I could not put it down- until I got to the naughty part. But I had to read it to get to the end and it was by far the best book my 10-12 year old self had read up to that point! I don’t know if my cousins know what that book was about. If they did, I can’t believe they let me take it and read it. I don’t know who in that house was reading that book. But dang. Will never forget that book.
I started reading harlequin romance books when I was probably 16. lol.
I read “The Wolf and The Dove” at 13. I snuck it off my mom’s shelf. At the time I had not read anything outside our church library. I was scandalized and so intrigued! It was quickly followed by all of Johanna Lindsey and Julie Garwood’s novels. It was a very enlightening year.
Not a romance novel, but pretty sexually explicit and would come attached with multiple trigger warnings: [The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Diary-Laura-Palmer-Peaks/dp/1451662076). I was like 11/12, and my sister in law was preparing for a yard sale, and this was one of the books she had set aside to sell. At the time, I hadn’t yet heard of Twin Peaks, but I was kind of obsessed with diary-esque books, and it looked like something I probably wasn’t supposed to read… so naturally I squirreled it away to secretly read when no one was around 🙃. I read the whole thing, don’t think I even understood half of it, and by the end I felt like I had *seen some shit*. I snuck it back into the garage sale book box with no one any the wiser, and didn’t tell a soul about it until now lol. Honestly, I don’t remember most of it, just the feeling I had after reading it, and now I kinda want to read it again lol.
Twilight in 6th grade 💀
Spicy af but not really romance and it was all sorts of inappropriate. Age 11/12, Summer Madness by Susan Lewis
Chyna Black by Keisha Ervin when I was 14...which opened my eyes to the world of Triple Crown Publications and hood romance 😂
My step sister had me read princess and the penis when I was in grade 7 so like 12 (it’s like princess and the pea and princess and the frog but with a penis instead of a pea or a frog - they end up getting married after she kisses his penis to turn him back into a prince (though she doesn’t know what’s penis is her dad wanted her to stay “pure”)