Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Christina Dodd’s “Candle in the Window” has a blind heroine. It has been a long time since I read it (had to do a little google research to find it), so I can’t really say what I thought about it. It was one of her early books and I know with some authors that can make a difference in how much I enjoy a book.

Sandra Brown’s Adam’s Fall was a favourite of mine during my teenage romance-devouring years. The hero, Adam, gets in an accident where he is severely injured and temporarily paralyzed. His PT is conned into working with him by her sister, who worked with Adam, and though they never got along, she agrees. Of course they end up overcoming their dislike of each other and falling in love as he recovers.

I enjoy it when authors handle illness in a realistic way and not with “miracle” cures.
Since my significant other is wheelchair bound along with the accompanying difficulties, I think I’ll check a couple of these reccomendations out!

In the Blink of an Eye by Julie Miller has a blind hero.  He does recover his vision in one eye (he was blinded in a bomb blast~he’s a cop) but not the other.  I really enjoyed the book.  Julie Miller also has a book with a heroine with hearing loss~ Police Business  The cover for this book is HOT!!!

Frisco’s Kid by Suzanne Brockmann. Frisco injured his leg.  He has to use crutches on his bad days.  No miraculous recovery. Needs to learn what he can and cannot do.

Dakota Home by Debbie Macomber. The hero, Jeb, has a prosthetic leg.

I also found this list at AAR with lists of different disabilities showing up in romance.

http://www.likesbooks.com/disabled.html

Kinsale’s Prince of Midnight.  The hero had an inner ear disorder—Meniere’s disease?  That would incapacitate him at times with vertigo. 

Nancy Martin wrote a Superromance where the hero had migraines.  This was pre-imitrex and I seem to remember it was pretty realistic.

Christie Ridgway’s Must Love Mistletoe has a hero with a glass eye, which is handled pretty well.

Dark Symphony by Christine Feehan, has a heroine who is blind although she does recover her sight partially when she is turned into a Carpathian. 

In Lover Eternal, JR Ward’s heroine Mary has cancer.  She is dealing with a recurrence of her disease and it directly influences the romance because she doesn’t want to be a burden as her disease overtakes her. 

I may be mistaken, but I was thinking Katie MacAlister had a heroine who was partially paralyzed on one side, can’t remember the name of that one.

Sharon Sala’s Always a Lady has a heroine who has been injured by a drunk driver.  As the story opens up her face has been disfigured in the accident and her ebil fiance dumps her while she is still in the hospital.  While it isn’t a “life” threatening condition, she is damaged in many ways and the story shows how she manages to recover. 

I forgot about Frisco’s Kid, Tracy.  That one is good.

Maggie Osborne’s book “The Best Man” features three sisters, and the oldest sister is missing a leg from a carriage accident and is in a wheelchair. If you like Osborne’s books in general (which I do) I think this is a good one.

Here’s a list of “imperfect heroes” compiled by Romantic Times.

Re Catherine Anderson: I think her novels are okay on their own. But as a whole, they are a little unrealistic. In her Coulter/Kendrick saga, the daughter is paraplegic, another daughter-in-law has mild brain damage and yet another is blind. So much trauma for one family!

Liz Fielding won the 2006 Short contemporary RITA for The Marriage Miracle (Harlequin Romance). It was a sympathetic protrayal of a wheel chair heroine. And no, the miracle mentioned in the title had nothing to do with her health issues.

It seems to me that far fewer heroines have serious health issues that heroes. But there again, it could be just the books I have read.

Useless of me, I can’t remember the author or even the proper title, but I remember reading an amazing book called something like “the midnight garden” where the heroine is older with grown children. She has had a stroke and is partially paralyzed on one half of her body and finds herself saying swear-words a lot. It sounds weird, but it was really great. She was a totally kick-ass woman, and he was a landscape designer. The love scenes and the attraction between them was handled really realistically and sensitively and it was an amazing book. I have always kicked myself that I didn’t write down the authors name, and I have never found the book again. I wonder if anyone else has read it?

DorothyL mystery list is doing the same thing with mysteries - main character with a physical problem or disease.

Good to know that no matter what is wrong with us - we can still be hero or heroines in our own right.

The Katie MacAlister book is Sex and the Single Vampire—the heroine was in a car accident and her abusive ex didn’t seek treatment for her, so she is indeed partially paralysed on one side.  When the hero makes her his Beloved, and therefore immortal, she’s disappointed that her disabilities aren’t cured.

I do remember an Eloisa James book called The Taming of the Duke where the hero is an alcoholic and goes through some nasty withdrawal.  And I’m sure someone must have mentioned JR Ward’s Dark Lover where the hero is blind (and apparently afflicted with dyslexia, since he can’t spell anyone’s name very well).

I do recall a Maeve Binchy I read years and years ago where one character was paralysed halfway through the book.  I want to say it was Firefly Summer but I could be wrong.

Do all those heroines afflicted with crippling stupidity, or heroes blinded by brutal arrogance count?

Jilly Cooper has done plenty of characters with ailments.  Ricky, in Riders, has an ongoing problem with a trapped nerve in his arm; the heroine of Appasionata is recovering from a suicide attempt that left her without the use of one hand (slight problem for a violinist).  A large portion of her characters are alcoholics or on drugs.

I know I’ve read plenty of war heroes with some injury that gives them occasional trouble.  I’m actually writing a book where the heroine calls herself a cripple after a bad injury to her leg.  She’s still walking though.

No one’s mentioned the classic of the “genre” yet - Jane Eyre? It’s not till Rochester is blinded (and is incidentally free of the MWITA) that they get their HEA.

I can’t believe I get to be the one to mention Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm! I just went last week to read it because so many people here had raved about Kinsale—and may I just say, thank you all so much.

The hero of this book has a couple of strokes and loses the ability to communicate for much of the book.

Oh, I remember the Catherine Andersons.  The girl in the wheelchair and the rancher.  Actually what I remember best about that book is their mutual obession with John Michael Montgomery.

Eloisa Jame’s “Fool for Love” has a heroine with an unidentified hip condition that causes a limp and (she thinks) makes getting pregnant a really bad idea. 

And in “The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown”, Mia Ryan’s hero has a speech condition from a brain injury suffered in battle.

Gayle Wilson has written a few Harlequin Intrigues with heroes who are disfigured/amputated/injured in some way.  My favorite is Only a Whisper.  It kind of surprised me because it wasn’t your typical Intrigue… as if a non-formula book had accidentally been folded into the pile. The hero has limited mobility below the waist (not THAT limited) and is horrifically scarred and he’s kind of a bastard in a way (though, really, who can blame him?) and I really loved it.

And, of course, in Sandra Schwab’s Castle of the Wolf, the hero’s missing a leg, but I did notice a lot of points in the narrative where that was glossed over, only to be mentioned again a few pages later.

Justine Davis had a couple of SIMs - in Left at the Altar the hero was an amputee, and in Morning Side of Dawn the hero was a double amputee.

Two of my old faves from the 90s are by Janis Reams Hudson in her Colton family series of westerns. Forgive the titles. Apache Heartsong features a hero who has recurrent malaria that fells him quite badly, and Apache Fire features that rarest of all heroes….... an impotent one. And of course, lots of ways to try and get him past that tricky condition. Malaria = not cured. Impotence = yeah, cured.

When I was writing my blind heroine, I received a lot of advice about how I could make the plotline stronger by putting her eyesight as the high stakes. Maybe the black moment is when the hero has to choose between X and helping her regain her sight. But it’s a medieval, not a contemporary. And I really didn’t feel like cheapening the character I’d created. 350 pages of hardship and understanding because of her illness…. 10 pages of happy ending when she miraculously gets her sight back. Crap on that.

There is the hero in TIME TRAVELERS WIFE who has a genetic diseas that makes him wink back and forth through time. He’s trying deserately to find a cure and ultimately fails.

There there is a Danielle Steele book PALOMINO were the heroine gets paralyzed halfway through the book from a horseback ride. The hero eventually hunts her down and marries her for who she is.

My hero in MOON SHADOW is an alcoholic.

The hero of Pamela Morsi’s Simple Jess is mentally handicapped.  And while it’s usually not marketed as romance, so is the hero of Colleen McCullough’s Tim, which was made into a movie staring Mel Gibson.

In “Again the Magic” by Lisa Kleypas the herione’s legs are badly disfigured in a fire.  She can still walk, although a little stiffly, but her main problem with her injury is emotional.  She is afraid the hero will be horrified and disgusted by her legs if he sees them.  Hence the “Big Misunderstanding.”

Ooooo.  I can’t believe I forgot!  Another Kleypas novel and another disfiguring fire. In “Midnight Angel” the hero has a hook in place of one of his hands (can’t remember which) because he lost the hand to infection after he was injured saving his daughter from the fire that killed his first wife.  Or maybe he was trying to save the wife when he was injured.  It has been awhile since I read that one.  Anyway, the hook only adds to his fierce, dangerous hawtness and when he takes hook off, the herione knows it’s “Business Time.”

Also not on the list is Halfway To Heaven, by Susan Wiggs; The heroine there has a deformed foot which she hides with specially made boots.

Oh gosh, there was one I got at the library that I don’t remember: a historical, Regency-era, where the hero was blind and the heroine was hired as a nurse to help him deal with it.  I can’t remember a darned thing about the book other than that.

There’s always Eloisa James’s

, with Quill and his migraines from a horse-riding incident.  (There is a miraculous recovery, but the first large chunk of the book is spent trying to deal with it, rather than cure it.)

And regarding this:

In her Coulter/Kendrick saga, the daughter is paraplegic, another daughter-in-law has mild brain damage and yet another is blind. So much trauma for one family!

I knew a family in which two kids were brittle juvenile diabetics, a third had cerebral palsy, and the ‘normal’ brother had six toes on one foot.

Speaking of migranes, there’s now something bugging the hell out of me.  There’s a book coming out shortly in which the hero’s got physical problems.  Apparently repetative motion gets him all sorts of whacked out (I think with migraines), so therefore the younger son’s supposedly going to marry the fiance.  I think the hero’s name is Quinn?  And in book one of the series, his friends get fireworks done in his back yard, ‘cause at that point he couldn’t even leave the house.  Jesus, it’s like book three or so, and I’ve read all the others and I can’t remember a damn thing.

LoreleiLong, that’s Enchanting Pleasures by Julia Quinn—the hero is named Quill; it’s the 3rd book in a trilogy; he gets the fireworks in Potent Pleasures

.

In the US, those books have been around for a while (since ‘02), but I’m trying not to be rude and assume you’re here.

Not Julia Quinn.  Eloisa James.  I’m an idiot.

Dude, that’ll teach me to read an entire comment, not just fixate on one word.  And to compound the looking like a moron factor, I am in the States.  I’m waiting on so many soon-to-be released over the next few months, I guess I just got confused.

There’s a Carolyn Davidson -Sorry, forget the name- where the hero has lost both his legs.

I didn’t read it, but I had it from the library and checked up on it.

From the way-back machine, Binnie Syril wrote a couple of excellent Harlequin Temptations dealing with disabilities. The Color of Love dealt with a blind heroine who doesn’t miraculously regain her sight in the end, and Out of the Darkness deals with a hero with facial scarring/burns who is on crutches.

Also, a couple of great regencies to check out:

With This Ring by Carla Kelly deals beautifully and realistically with post-traumatic stress syndrome in soldiers returning from the Napoleanic wars.

Lord Endicott’s Appetite by Elizabeth Fairchild deals with a hero suffering from a deep depression—to the point where he is starving himself.

Margaret Johnson-Hodge wrote a duet, Butterscotch Blues and Second Sunday, about a couple facing HIV. Probably closer to WF than romance but there is romance.

It might be a little mean, but I just love this description:

“The Prince of Midnight (1990) by Laura Kinsale - Sophochles Trafalgar is deaf in one ear and suffers extreme vertigo, appearing drunk most of the time.”

Yeah, that’s my problem - vertigo. Totally vertigo, man.

One of my favorite books by Sandra Brown “Envy” has the hero in an wheel chair.  It was such a good book!

Someone already mentioned the two Justine Davis books (Left at the Altar and Morning Side of Dawn), both GREAT books, but there’s a book before both of those titled “Stevie’s Chase.” Seems to me the hero has scars on his legs from an accident. In any case, the heroine in that book is the sister of Sean, amputee hero in Left at the Altar. You get to see quite a bit of him and how he begins to start dealing with what happened to him. I think, too, Dar from MSOD is in it as well, but I could be wrong.

I think it’s time for a reread, as all three make me cry every time.

djh -

that is also my favorite Sandra Brown novel.  I just loved the hero.  He was so damn grumpy, but funny too.

There’s a quick cute one, Molly Meets Her Match where the hero is wheelchair bound due to a work related accident.

http://www.amazon.com/Molly-Meets-Match-Silhouette-Romance/dp/0373088906/ref=sr_1_1/103-8799744-1516635?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189453104&sr=8-1

Does alcoholism count? Is so, there’s Rafe from the “Taming of the duke” by Eloisa James. Laura Kinsale “My sweet Folly” where the hero sounded like he had paranoid schizophrenia and there’s also Mary Balogh where the guy has one hand and has half a face (made me think of two-face in Batman). Then there’s the guy in the Leopard Prince by Elizabeth Holt who had a finger missing but I guess his true disability was that he was a commoner :)

a few years ago, I submitted a manuscript to Avon for consideration.  When the editor responded, she told me she loved my voice, loved the hero, loved the interraction between the Hero and Heroine… but… she said no one would ever buy it.

Because the hero was deaf.

According to her, ‘women do not want to read a romance where the man is less than physically perfect’.  She said maybe if I made the heroine deaf…

Which, would have destroyed the entire book.

I released it a few years ago in ebook, and received a lot of positive reviews - from ‘formal’ review sites and from readers.  I had deaf readers who heard about it and sought it out - to test my approach to the condition.  Many of them emailed me to say I was bang on.

One even asked if I was deaf myself.  (I’m not, but my mom was near deaft).

The whole point is that I never could believe this editor had the audacity to say something like that.  It makes romance readers sound extremely shallow.  I personally prefer a slightly flawed hero - whether it be physically or emotionally or both.  And to say it’s okay for the woman to be weak - again - shallow.

I hate blanket statements.

That was audacious and very insulting, Gail, and I’m glad you kept your book in its original form and didn’t change it to meet the needs of a short-sighted editor.

But some writers (and apparently some editors) can’t accept a hero that is flawed unless the flaw can be corrected by the heroine’s love. Rochester in Jane Eyre is a perfect example, as are all the injured and ill heroes in historical romances “healed” by their devoted love interest’s knowledge of herbs (to return to my snarky comments in the last post). But deafness and blindness aren’t amenable to a quick cure, so how can the heroine prove she loves the hero by curing him?

Barefoot in the Grass, a Superromance by Judith Arnold, has a heroine who has had breast cancer and a mastectomy. I loved it, but it’s been more than 10 years since I read it. I mainly remember the way her cancer was introduced—iirc, it wasn’t mentioned in the cover copy, so when she’s obsessing a little over her bustline, you think she’s just neurotic. Then BAM! You find out why. It really made an impression on me.

Kathleen Korbel has a moving story called A Soldier’s Heart. The hero is a Vietnam vet who goes looking for the woman who was his nurse to thank her. Once he meets her, he realizes she has severe PTSD and is determined to help her out.

It’s a wonderfully told story about what these women went through and how they survived it all.

Gail, I’m glad you didn’t change your book. I have no problem with heroes that are less than “perfect”. If fact, they are usually the most interesting heroes!!

pkg- I found the book about the partially paralyzed older woman and the landscape designer:

Night Gardening by E.L. Swann

http://www.theromancereader.com/swann-night.html

I have a couple of books with heroes who have a serious illness that’s not going to go away with repeated topical application of Magic HooHaa (or for my heroes, Magic WhatWhat). Doesn’t seem to have stopped them getting good reviews, nor has it stopped readers asking me for sequels. The current work-not-in-progress has a hero with migraine, and I don’t really expect that to be an issue with my editor or readers either.

Does anyone remember a Loveswept about a woman who had been disfigured in an auto accident (lots of broken glass).  I think it was by Dorothy Garlock, but I can’t locate the title.

The heroine had emotional health issues because of her physical scarring.

The book by Carolyn Davidson is Redemption, I think

There’s also a newer Harlequin Super about a breast cancer survivor: His Perfect Woman, by Kay Stockham.

The Dorothy Garlock book with the scarred heroine is called A Love For All Time. While on my keeper shelf, I haven’t picked it up in a while.

One book that I have on my keeper shelf is has a heroine with MS. It was dealt with in a very realistic way. Both the hero and the heroine had to come to terms with exactly what they were getting into. I can’t remember the author but it has always stuck in my head.

One book that hasn’t been mentioned yet is The Crossroads Cafe, by Deborah Smith.  The heroine is a once-gorgeous moviestar/supermodel who has been severely burned over most of her body.  The hero is a man who is emotionally scarred when his wife and son died jumping from the towers on September 11th.

Regardless of what some may think of DS for her opinions on a previous SBTB thread (and please let’s not regurgitate it all again!!), this book is absolutely wonderful and life-affirming. A true heart-squeeze of a book that will resonate on all levels, and leave you absolutely satisfied by the ending. Delightful secondary characters too, as well as a few scenes that will make you bucksnort and laugh out loud… and possibly crave biscuits and gravy.

Seeing Stars is a Loveswept by Fran Baker about a doctor who was blinded and no longer practices medicine.

Torquere press put out Eternal Darkness last fall, an anthology of blind vampire stories.

One of my favorite books of all time Sandra Canfield’s Night into Day. Heroine has major R-arthritis.  There’s this touching scene where the hero has to find out how to make love to the heroine.  Wonderful book!

No one’s mentioned Miles Vorkosigan, and some of Bujold’s later books in the series (particularly “Komarr” and “A Civil Campaign”) definitely qualify as romance. Not only is Miles unusually short, he’s had most of his fragile bones replaced with synthetic bones (genetic defect caused by poison in utero); then he has massive scarring and a seizure disorder resulting from being killed, frozen, and revived.

Two more Bujold books with protagonists with some kind of disability:

Caz, the hero in “The Curse of Chalion” suffers from pretty bad post-traumatic stress syndrome, which he slowly gets over during the course of the novel.

Ista, the heroine of “Paladin of Souls” (where the romance is more central than in “Curse”) was mentally unbalanced for years. Now that she’s regained sanity and merely seems manic-depressive, getting those who knew her as a madwoman to let her determine her own actions is, well, maddening. Yet somehow she manages to end up with both a New Major Mental/Spiritual Challenge and True Lurv.