Johanna Ledger

Jasmine sat cross-legged on the window seat, bent over a book, with a massive fleece blanket pooled around her.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” she chanted and smacked her knee as the story reached its glorious, devastating climax. She grabbed handfuls of the blanket and let out a stifled shriek as she whizzed through the final pages and stared at the last one, refusing to believe what was written there.

“No!” she wailed and slumped against the cold glass with the book splayed on her chest as she stared into the abyss, distraught and shaken to the core.

Johanna Ledger’s latest book was everything Sarai promised it would be and more. Actually, it was more, way more than she anticipated. Ballad of Deception, the second chance, forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers’ triangle with slow burn and angst left her emotionally depleted and numb. Sarai had gushed about the book on the plane and said it was the best thing that Johanna had written in years, but she took that with a grain of salt. But now that she read it, she had to agree with Sarai. She hadn’t been taken over by a story like that in years.

Johanna Ledger was a dark romance legend and had been publishing longer than she was alive. She stumbled across Johanna’s books when she was a teenager. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say Johanna changed her life. Not only had those stories introduced her to the darker aspects of the romance genre that molded her into the author she was today, Johanna’s books emboldened her to leap into the affair that permanently altered her course and planted the kinks that Roth later uncovered.

Johanna Ledger unknowingly taught her to embrace her faults and mistakes and gave her the courage to put them down on the page. Johanna was responsible for her success as Thalia. Up to that point, she had written pure fiction as Minnie Hess, never borrowing anything from her real life. Knowing that her family knew about her pen name, she made sure not to write anything too sexual, too negative, too evil. But when she started writing as Thalia, she let all of that go. She wrote unfiltered and showed her needs, dark desires, pain, fear… It poured out of her in an unstoppable flood that instantly connected with others because it was flawed and vulnerable and human.

It was inevitable that her work would be compared to Johanna’s. Not because their stories were similar, but they possessed the same raw, grittiness that readers gravitated toward. She didn’t deserve to be in the same sentence as Johanna Ledger, but she was nevertheless flattered when readers paired them on the same lists.

Johanna had been insanely prolific in her younger years, coming out with hit after hit. But when the political tide began to change and her work was criticized and censored, Johanna adapted, watering down her stories to make them more tolerable for the general public. Jasmine continued to read everything Johanna published, still intrigued with her storytelling abilities, but Ballad of Deception was a callback to her old work. No, it was better than that. It was the best thing Johanna had ever penned. Unapologetic, disturbing, uncompromising, and savage. What hell had Johanna been through to write such a brutal masterpiece?

**This is a raw draft of Bitter Confessions. Please do not share or distribute.

Do you have authors you read as teenagers that you're still reading now?? Mine are Julie Garwood, Stephanie Laurens, Linda Howard, Johanna Lindsey, Amanda Quick, Christine Feehan...