GS vs. STA is “Good Shit vs. Shit to Avoid,” and is all about books of a particular trope or type that you adore or think should be tossed out the window at the nearest opportunity, just as soon as the car slows down enough. M. is looking for books wherein the heroine, like Min of Bet Me, doesn’t want children.
Okay so I have been a long time lurker, occasional poster, but this Bitch
needs some help. Thanks to your lovely site, I have discovered that I LOVE
contemporaries. Like a lot. Before it was all historicals, but thanks to
Jennifer Cruise, Lisa Kleypas, and others, I’m in love.So my deal is, personally, I don’t want kids. Like at all. I respect people
who do, and those who don’t, but personally, having kids is just not what I
want. That is why I fell in love with Min from Bet Me. Finally! A heroine
who just wants a man, a dog ( and cat) and a house for the rest of her life.
A message that you can live fulfilled without kids. So I wanted to know if
the Bitchery knows of any more romances ( or fantasy or romantic fantasy or
fantastical romance or whatever) in which the heroine just doesn’t want kids.
No epilogue about how she is happily pregnant or adding to her family of 5.
(The books can be historicals, but I just thought it might be easier to find
contemps of this nature.)I have been craving books like this and realized that if anyone could help
me it was the Smart Bitches. ( Sorry in advance if this HABO subject has
already been hit up)
This topic comes up every now and again in romance, because there are some times when, as you read, it seems in every other romance there must be a baby-epilogue, or baby-logue, with pregnancy and glowing and 2.5 children in the future. Which books feature heroines and heroes who are not interested in having children, whether it’s a major topic point or not? Which ones did you like best?
@ Kalen, I’m so happy to see Victoria Dahl mentioned first. I’ve been devouring her contemporaries like sweet yummy candy. They are freaking hilarious and so far none have even really mentioned kids beyond the “put a bag on it!”
I also noticed Mary Janice Davidson has been mentioned, she’s got several series that feature characters who are anti-baby bumps or the subject is not hinted at.
Several Katie MacAllister novels (like Playing with Fire) fit and so do some of Nina Bang’s novels.
CAYENNE: That was exactly the major point in my story, Spinning Forward. My aunt had come from a family of 11, so frankly, I think she’d had her fill with children and wanted something different in her adult life. My character of Sybile had other plans for her life as well and that did not include a child and the main point that I hoped to get across to my readers was “not every woman is cut out to be a mother.” My aunt was one of these women….was she a bad person for this? Absolutely NOT! She put her love in other areas, lived her life on HER terms (as my Sybile did) and passed away at age 82 a few years ago, happy with the life she chose. I guess this topic is huge with me….because my second book in the series also has to do with this…..Sybile’s granddaughter, Monica, now questions IF she’s cut out to be a mom.
@Orangehands – Thanks.
I think what happened is I must’ve offended the ladies on the PCOS boards because I said I didn’t care about the fertility issues as I didn’t want children. (99% of the posts are about their struggles to have kids.) I’m just scared cause of the increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and uterine cancer, not to mention the embarrassment of the facial hair and the acne. (Every single day I’m there with tweezers, a mirror, and a flashlight doing a chin-hair sweep. More then once a day at that.) Because they don’t even acknowledge my existence now. I just wanted to find alternative treatments besides birth control as BC makes my blood pressure super high, gives me violent headaches, and a major personality change.
Wow, I’ve never heard of PCOS, but that makes me wonder about myself. I have problems with chin hair and adult acne. I’ve even had an ovary removed because of issues. That’s definitely something I’m going to look into.
And I don’t want kids, I’ve known that for more than 10 years. I love kids…just as long as I can hand them back to their parents. I even spend a fair amount of my time volunteering with kids aged 11 to 20.
I love this topic, I don’t mind the occasional book with a kid or the HEA having kids, but sometimes it feels like I’m somehow wrong for not wanting that myself. It’s like here is what happily ever after is, it’s been prepackaged for general consumption, and anything that deviates from it is, well, deviant.
Depends on the man. My best friend and her hubby are “child-free”, but when she had a scare a couple years back, he got all mushy and googly-eyed about it. She was so ticked (cause it’s not like they didn’t discuss the topic in-depth before they got married).
Wouldn’t it be nice if a few authors and publishers stumbled upon this conversation and realized that readers do not consider babies an essential component of the HEA? I wish there were more couples who were happy not to have children rather then a majority of the childless couples being of different species. I like when it’s a choice not to have children. I can really identify with that….
I agree with everyone who mentioned Victoria Dahl – at least her contemporaries aren’t searching for babies.
Love the furbabies idea! That is how we’ve chosen to live our lives with 2 furry kitties being our babies. And one is preventing me from checking to see if any of Rachel Gibson’s books end without babies. I seem to think they do or at least some of them do but some of the characters make cameos and that is often when you learn of the baby.
All but 2? of Crusie’s are without kids. It recently came up on her blog and I had thanked her for the childlessness of her heroines. There are 2 kids in the newest book, Maybe This Time, but they are 8 and 12 and not the heroine’s biological kids.
So, like everyone else who has chosen not to have kids – thanks for the topic! It really is nice learning of others like me since it seems to make me something of an outcast. There are those who think something is wrong with me because I don’t want or even like children. I’ve met maybe 6-10 kids that I wouldn’t mind spending more than a minute with.
@Maria – Yeah, defiantly look into it. It’s a lot more then just facial hair and acne, of course. There’s a lot of health issues involved. If you ask me, every single woman should be tested for it young so they can prevent the possible diabetes and heart disease a lot earlier.
JamiSings: Yeah, the first link I thought of is to a mommy blog who talks about her PCOS in relation to her fertility and not much else. Anyway, hope she can direct you to something that can help, and that you can find a better treatment.
@JamiSings: A little bit of google goes a long way. I don’t fit all the criteria, especially the one that seems the most important. My period is as regular as the sunrise, and has been for several years, even before I had the trouble with my ovary. Ok, sorry for the TMI. But it did bring up other questions for me to ask my Dr. about. Thanks Jami, and rock on with your childless self.
I always thought that Laura Kinsale’s The Shadow and the Star was interesting. It’s never stated explicitly, but neither the hero nor the heroine seem interested in having children. The heroine has a baby foisted upon her, but she’s more than happy to let the hero’s foster family take care of it.
To JamiSings: There’s a lot of conflicting information about what vampires can and can’t do, given all the different cultures that have vampire myths, so I’m fine with whatever the author chooses to do as long as it’s consistent in the work. I could do without the whole “vampire smugly explains that he’s not allergic to garlic” scene, though.
To cassie: Why were you offended by Smooth Talking Stranger as a vegan?
@Maria – Hey, my period is pretty regular too. BUT I did go for several years where I’d go as much as three months without a period. My family doctor said, “Oh, it’s because you’re so fat. Overweight women don’t menstruate regularly.” So I took that Estroven – that soy thing that’s for women who are going through menopause, half a regular dose – and my period became regular.
It pisses me off, actually. I had ALL the signs, including the bright purple stretch marks, and my doctor still didn’t recognize what I had. It took my dermatologist’s PA to realize something was seriously wrong with me. She put two and two together when she noticed how I had both stubborn acne and facial hair that did not response to laser treatments. Neither my GP nor my dermatologist got it. They just blamed everything solely on my weight and basically said I was just too lazy.
You don’t have to have all the signs to have PCOS, BTW. While it’s true most PCOS sufferers are overweight, for instance, some are actually of normal body weight or even too thin!
@Orange – I guess that’s what most women with PCOS are worried about. I mean, let’s take the currently most famous PCOS sufferer – Kate Goselin. (Yep, she has it too.) She obviously wanted kids more then anything.
@Maddie – Actually, with maybe the exception of Asian vampires, every single myth I read about them included that vampire males could have children with human women. Now there’s at least one Asian myth about a female vampire who falls in love with her would be victim, marries him, and has children. But none I saw about male vampire/human females having babies. So it’s pretty consistent that vampires can have children with humans. It’s usually how to kill/repel/become one that differs.
@Maddie Grove: Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but I felt the vegan boyfriend was shown to be cold and callous and more concerned with his ‘ideals’ than being a good person to the people around him. I felt that Kleypas was saying that his being vegan was symptomatic of that.
I was also just really squicked out by the ‘seduction with meat’ scene between the hero and the heroine—I had to skip that part entirely. I’m not usually grossed out be descriptions of meat as a meal, but that just . . . made my skin crawl.
Kleypas doesn’t have a good track record with portraying vegans and vegetarians (as far as I’m concerned). In Prince of Dreams her heroine is a vegetarian who happily eats pate on her wedding night. I was all . . . . “Okayyyy, she does know where that comes from, right? Is she not a vegetarian now?” But no, a few scenes later her husband’s admonishing her not to bring up her crazy vego ways when he has guests.
Maddie Grove: I’ll add to Cassie’s list that she did not want to be a vegan, but became one because her boyfriend wanted her to be one. She broke the rules all the time, and while yes, some vegans struggle with being vegan, they don’t pretend to be vegan when they continuously are not vegan.
And yeah, that “ply her with meat” scene was very obnoxious.
(The more I think about this book the more I dislike it.)
@orangehands I also got really ticked off with the hero’s whole “I’m a conservationist because I’m a hunter” stance, which is strange because I don’t bat an eyelid at Regency heroes going off grouse shooting.
Maybe I have different expectations of behaviour for contemporary and historical characters?
I’m mainly a lurker on this site, but I wanted to add my thanks to this list. I have no objection to the couple having a baby, but I have to gree to disliking the whole “must have a baby to be complete” thought process.
My hubby and I can’t have kids due to medication issues. My beef is the “well, you can always adopt” response I get all the time when I mention that. Really? Wanna loan me the $30,000 for the adoption agency and pay for the babysitter/daycare I’ll have to send my kid to because I sure can’t afford either. We chose to have our family be made of furbabies (3 cats, 2 dogs) and love them to death.
I love reading about childless couples, knowing that my family is perfect as it is.
I believe in Jane Father’s “The Least Likely Bride” the couple discusses how they don’t want children and they don’t even want to get married, which is very unusual for an historical romance. And in Kristine Cashore’s book “Fire” the main character takes an herb to sterilize herself. Both books I found refreshing.
JamiSings: That’s really interesting. Admittedly, I’d never heard anything about vampiric reproductive abilities before, save the rather horrifying things I’ve heard about Twilight. I’ve enjoyed stories with vampires in the past, but they’ve mostly been YA horror short stories (plus the classic Dracula) and they didn’t really address that aspect, so that’s probably why.
cassie: That makes sense. Kleypas does set up the boyfriend to be this sort of ineffectual, somewhat hypocritical stereotype of a liberal. Personally, I found the hero to be irritating. For one thing, he was very smug about money and politics. For another, I found it disturbing when he objected to the baby having a stuffed bunny because it wasn’t “masculine” enough. Yeah, it’s funny now, but what happens in ten years if it turns out that the kid’s more interested in cooking than football? Anyway, I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to expect different things from historical and contemporary heroes. People know things about the environment now that they didn’t know then.
orangehands: I just assumed that she wasn’t really supposed to be a vegan at all; she was just going along with it to please her boyfriend. Of course, it’s troubling that she only eats what she wants when a new man encourages her to do so. She doesn’t really change at all, which made me like the book less.
@Cassie – Actually most hunters and other outdoorsy types are all about conservation and the environment. My parents love to fish for instance and are religious about recycling and keeping “God’s planet clean for His creations.” (Heck, my dad is even a PhD chemist who specializes in making fuel more environmentally sound.) Because they know if they don’t take care of this planet, then they’ll have nothing left to hunt or fish or wild places to enjoy. Plus many of them are religious and believe God ordered us to take care of the earth and that to not recycle is really a sin.
Some hunters even specialize in just looking for sick and severely injured animals that aren’t going to make it anyway, or thinning out populations where there isn’t enough food to go around.
@Maddie – Like I said, I went through a vampire obsession when I was young after a friend died. So I read a LOT. There’s whole sections of vampire myths that deal strictly with vampires that feed solely on the energy people give off during sex.
Thinking back, it always struck me as weird – the male vampires could feed off of women’s sexual energy. But female vampires fed off the energy of men they were giving nightmares to rather then having sex with them.
(And yes, it was vampires, not succubuses and incubuses. The demons were a whole other category.)
Like I said, I realize that authors have artistic license and all that, but I do wish they would at least come up with a reasonable explanation for why that particular myth is wrong. Just because you don’t want your vampires to be able to have children isn’t good enough. Give a history to the dhampire myth that reasonably explains why humans had the whole vampire/human crossbreeding thing wrong and where it came from. Sort of like whomever said about a vampire “Smugly explaining why they’re not repelled by garlic.” Give a good reason for it. Don’t just dismiss a whole section of mythology out of hand.
JamiSings: Well, the funniest reason I heard is because male vampires can’t get it up since they’re dead and so the blood can’t flow down south.
Cassie: I definitely have different expectations for what a hero is allowed to do in contemporary vs historical, which is why it’s really hard for me to pick up a historical.
The conservationist/hunter stance doesn’t bother me (I’m not opposed to certain parts of it), but the bunny = not masculine sure did. (Especially funny since masculinity has a whole tie-in with virility and bunnies reproduce like no other.)
Maddie: Yeah, I read it that way too, and the vegan thing was just an example of the bigger problem; she kept claiming labels she was not (because her boyfriend told her to). And these labels start out as the “morally superior choice” (which is annoying on a different level) and then become – or are shown as – something nobody could or would want to every achieve. Vegan, feminist, open relationship, etc…she kept calling them the best choice (because her boyfriend told her so) and claiming them for herself, but she didn’t actually commit to any of them.
WyndSheer or West Wind by Charotte Boyo-Campo has a H/H who are both infertile. The start of the book is a bit creepy (sex with comatose woman!?). But it is OK despite.
Lillian Stewart Carl’s “Ashes to Ashes” and the subsequent “Dust to Dust” are two of my all-time favorites. Some ghost-flavored paranormal, a few dashes of Scottish history, several mysteries, a likable couple and blissfully kid-free other than brief mentions of larva belonging to secondary characters. Another favorite is an old Harlequin, “The Summer Wife” by Flora Kidd, and I don’t remember any kids at all in that one.
@JamiSings
You mentioned that you don’t want to be on the pill for your PCOS. Well I was diagnosed with PCOS about a month ago and my doctor has me on Metformin. Its a pretty extreme way of dealing with it and apparently not suggested in some other countries (I’m from Australia) because it can make you feel pretty sick for a while (Seriously – trust me). Basically it works by regulating your insulin levels which is supposed to in turn balance out the hormones (getting rid of facial hair, helping with weight-loss etc and blah).
And in other news there’s an Australian writer, Anita Heist who has heroines that choose to be “bleeders not breeders” (I cringed when I read that). I know a lot of people who love her books but I read her debute Not Meeting Mr. Right and felt personally insulted. On the surface it should have been the book for me. A contemporary romance/chick lit book about a 20-something Aboriginal woman from Metropolitian Sydney who doesn’t want kids but does want to find love? Hells yes! And then I actually read it and … and … I’m getting angry just thinking about it right now. So on the off chance that anyone else has ever heard of Anita Heist and/or read her books and thought “Well an Aboriginal woman wrote it that must be genuine look into that cultural identity” I’m calling STA. Now how do I get down from this soap box?
@Rudi – Already on the metformin because of the glucose intolerance caused by the PCOS. And it’s not that I don’t want to be on the pill – I’d LOVE to be on the pill, be able to control my period or not have it at all if I’m going away – it’s that I CAN’T take it. It makes my blood pressure shoot WAY up, causes massive mind-numbing headaches, and I’m told I turn into the world’s biggest bitch when on the pill. Everything makes me angry when I’m on the pill. Including the sound of my own breathing.
But I’d really love to read about women with PCOS finding love.
Hi,
My brother and sister-in-law are adopting a biracial (African American & Caucasian) baby in December. Since they are both Caucasian, I’m afraid that they will assume that washing his hair daily would be ok, but I know that’s not the case.So, do you know of any good books that would explain how caring for their child’s skin and hair will be different than caring for their own?
@Melasma – If you ask over here – http://thebeautybrains.com/ – in their forums you’ll get your answer.
@Melasma: http://www.naturallycurly.com/curltalk might be helpful, too.