You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is from Dani, who is searching for a new adult romance:
I’ve been trying to find a NA book I read years ago and am drawing a blank. Searching online with my keywords get me nowhere, and my ebook library is no help.
He’s a “manwhore” who is interested in the heroine, but still hooks up with strangers. He sees someone on campus, takes her back to his apartment and they have sex on the couch. All I remember clearly is he tells the heroine (who knows what he did) that his daughter would have better morals than to hook up with a guy like him. He judged the women he slept with for being so sexually liberated.
Please help! A friend of mine challenged me to find the least redemptive “hero” possible, and this guy fits the bill.
He sounds like a real peach.
Beautiful Disaster
by
Jamie McGuire
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Yuck. I don’t know the book, but yuck.
Don’t know that one (fortunately!?!)
But if you are looking for a completely irredeemable “hero,” you might consider To Love A Man by Karen Robards. Most despicable a*hole to ever disgrace the term “romantic hero” IMHO.
Wow, we are supposed to be rooting for this guy? No idea what book it is by the way.
This sounds like Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGurie
Ack. Jamie McGuire. I haven’t had enough coffee.
Reading this HABO made me think of a book I hardly remember, so I went through my Kindle to find it.
Not sure if it fits but the book I was looking for was A Perfect Ten (Forbidden Men #5) by Linda Kage.
For some reason this book has a great Goodreads rating (4.30) but I didn’t like it at all.
I haven’t read it myself, but based on a partial chapter by chapter hate read I’ve seen, this sounds kinda like Beautiful Disaster, by Jamie McGuire.
I don’t know this book (NA really isn’t my thing), but if (like moi) you read any dark/mafia/crime romance, you’ll find the harder thing to do is find a hero in that genre who IS redeemable!
Wow, I would not make it through this book without wanting to flat-out strangle the hero.
Definitely Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire. First thing that popped in my head.
Even if it’s not, Travis is definitely not redeemable.
Have no idea. But least redemptive hero? The Demon Lover by Victoria Holt. The “hero” rapes the heroine just to stick it to his cousin who she is engaged to. The heroine is pregnant and has a boy (this is important). The “hero” marries and has a son. Both die (don’t remember how). The “hero” comes back to the heroine and basically manipulates her to marry him by using her son. He tells the boy he is his father and has the boy all mad at his mother. It’s truly infuriating. No groveling. No redemption in any way. And you definitely get the feeling if the baby had been a girl, the “hero” wouldn’t be bothered. It’s abuse from beginning to end. Holt’s heroes were always alpha-holes but this was the book that broke me. I never read her again.
Don’t know the book, but I appreciate this thread and I am here for it. DRAG THEM, LADIES.
Another vote for beautiful disaster, also based off of what I am sure is the same chapter by chapter hate read
Yet another vote for Beautiful Disaster by Jamie Maguire. The heroine is staying in his room for reasons I don’t remember so he has sex on couch with someone.
I am 99% sure this is Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
Definitely remember this scene.
Nether the less I have downloaded a sample of beautiful disaster to see how bad it is:
Hope my kindle survives…
@Amanda C – she loses a bet with him. Her best friend is also dating his roommate/cousin…
The worst “hero” I ever read was in a Catherine Coulter Medieval historical (Fire Song) from the 1980s, though I read it as a reprint in the late 1990s. In Warrior Song, a knight tries to intimidate the heroine by threatening to rape her friend if she doesn’t tell him something. Then he does it! In front of lots of people! That’s bad enough but then the next book has this a-hole as the “hero” and he’s given a wife that he rapes, too. My standards were less strict back then, and I knew it was an early book, but I still hated that he got to be the “hero.” But the listed books above sound pretty awful and they’re current!
@Karen H near Tampa – OMG, Fire Song! Afaik Catherine Coulter’s heroes were all universally extremely rapey and horrible, but you’re right that Fire Song was the most egregious. Which is SAYING SOMETHING.
The first romance I ever read was a Catherine Coulter! It was by accident; I thought it was historical fiction when I picked it up. Rosehaven, I think it was called. It was in retrospect one of the less rapey things she seems to have written, so not nearly in the same league as Fire Song, but it was pretty rapey, and I was confused and concerned and alarmed, and so I started reading zillions of Catherine Coulters, which were all being conveniently reissued at the time. It was kind of a weird quest, because I wasn’t really enjoying them. I think I was hoping in vain for a hero who wasn’t rapey?, but in all her many books, I never never found one. So that’s the story of how I started reading romance ten+ years later than I might have done because Catherine Coulter singlehandedly scared me off the whole genre as a teenager.
I also vote for Beautiful Disaster. First thing that came to mind when I read “manwhore”.
@Star, Catherine Coulter ALSO put me off romance books for a long time! One of my first books was The Rebel Bride, which I read as a teenager. The heroine had been abused by a family member and as a result was nervous about intimacy with her husband. Because he is a creepy Catherine Coulter rapey hero, rather than ask about why she might be reticent, he disguises himself as someone else and kidnaps and brutally rapes her. I found this book terrifying and I can still remember how repulsive I found it nearly 20 years later.
I’m just going to casually add Catherine Coulter to the list of authors to never read, holy crap .
I will also never read Coulter after seeing these comments. Picture me shuddering in horror. Really glad the first romance I ever swiped from my mom was a Nora Roberts.
@Star – I also went on a weird reading quest to find heroes I didn’t hate with Judith McNaught historicals back in the day. I don’t remember them all being rapists but they were mostly prey to the Big Misunderstanding and acted like assholes to the heroines regularly. I think she liked writing groveling scenes. I like a good grovel, but the stuff it took to get there was not worth it.
As far as the worst heroes ever are concerned, does The Sheik by E.M. Hull count as a romance? Because he was a kidnapping rapist. And since it’s so old there’s the added cringing that comes with all the casually racist stereotypes of the time.
My personal Unredeemable asshole alpha (whom I hope to eventually do a long form review of ) is Night Storm by, you guessed it, Catherine Coulter. The heroine in this story is an awesome shipbuilder who doesn’t want to get married and just wants to design ships. Alphole hero slowly grinds her into the dirt until she wears dresses/cedes control of her shipbuilding empire to him. And yeah, the majority of the sex in the book was flat-out rape. I spent the majority of the book trying to set Alec’s dick on fire with my mind.
This HABO definitely sounds like “Beautiful Disaster” and it appears it’s being made into a movie of some sort. At least, there’s a trailer for it online.
My least redemptive hero was in Johanna Lindsey’s A Pirate’s Love. It’s literally all rape all the time. The hero even says to the heroine “I’m going to rape you.”
I did finish it, and that’s a testament to Lindsey’s writing. But… #NOPE
@Sydneysider – Oh man I remember that one! I salute you, fellow Coulter victim! Did you read it around the late nineties, too?
@Lisa F – …and I also remember that one!
Honestly I’m amazed that all the Coulters I read back then haven’t all blurred together in my mind, but while I’ve mostly-but-not-entirely forgotten the titles, somehow most of her books manage to stand out individually in their awfulness. Coulter has a gift I guess.
If the rape weren’t bad enough (and like IT WAS), she also had this horrifying idea that a dude being shit in bed was somehow flattering to the heroine because it demonstrated that he was just that in to her! I can remember one book where another character (hero of a later book so feel free to hate him already) finds out that the hero of the current book had been inflicting all this sexual horror on his poor wife and he LAUGHS and is like “damn bro, you’re not pleasing your wife? that’s hilarious, you’re usually so good in bed!” and it’s all because the “hero” finds his wife Just That Attractive, you see. I can’t remember another book where this was actually referenced in conversation, but it was another recurring theme.
Also: she was bizarrely obsessed with cat-racing? I swear cat-racing was at least mentioned in most of her Regency-era books.
As a self-appointed “Matriarchal Bitch” (aka, someone old enough to have read Rosemary Rogers’s SWEET SAVAGE LOVE when it was first published), I feel it’s my sad duty to inform our younger sisterhood that almost every bodice-ripping hero from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s was rapey (even though some of them, like the ones in Jennifer Blake’s books, expressed remorse after the fact), but Coulter’s heroes are almost in a class by themselves with their utterly unapologetic rapeyness. I can hear then muttering the historical equivalent of, “Hey dude, you’re harshing my buzz with all this rape talk. I’m having a good time here.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll undoubtedly say it again, it’s best to think of bodice-rippers the way we think of puberty: something we had to go through to get where we are today, but not something we’d necessarily want to revisit.
@Lostshadows, @MGW
Anybody have a source for that hate read? Sounds like fun.
I just wonder who is reading Ms Coulter’s books that they are re-issued as ebooks?
I wonder too if its she or he under a pseudonym …..
I honestly like Catherine Coulters modern thrillers, but have steered clear of her bodice rippers.
Those Coulter bodice rippers are truly awful, but I have enjoyed her FBI series with Sherlock and Savich. Some are pure crazy-sauce but a lot of fun to read.
I think the subject Redeemable/Irredeemable heroes word make a very good Rec League.
@Star, yes! I did read it in thr late 90s. Thankfully many years later I was given a copy of an Emilie Richards book and it got me back into romance. There was consensual sex! People respected each other! After that, I was all in.
@DiscoDollyDeb
I remember stealing my Mom’s copies of Rosemary Rogers ‘books. The Insiders really, REALLY messed up my interest in romances because the hero is a manwhore, hosts group sex/rape parties, rapes the heroine while high, cheats on her, knocks her up, confesses to a seriously sordid past, but is “redeemed” at the end when the heroine falls for him.
Woodiwiss, Rogers, and Coulter were all so groundbreaking at the time but man is it difficult to read them now.
While not on the same douche level as the heroes discussed here, the worst “hero” I ever read was in Against the Tide by Elizabeth Camden. It was an inspie that won a RITA a few years back, and he was a judgmental asshole, who mocked the heroine’s religion (she wasn’t a part of an organized religion—she prayed to the moon) and looked down on anyone who used pain relievers of any kind. I noped out less than half way through the book, but could already see the major conflict being the heroine’s headaches. I was fairly certain she was using opium to manage the pain, and I knew that guy wasn’t going to be supportive.
I´m guessing the hate read referenced is Jenny Trout´s Jealous Haters Book Club read? I loved her 50 shades hate read so I´m going to read this even though I haven´t read Beautiful Disaster (and never will – thanks SBTB for saving me from destroying my e-reader in a fit of rage)
I haven’t read the Jamie McGuire book but this set up also sounds a lot like what I remember of the beginning of The Score by Elle Kennedy. Definitely the heroine walks in on the hero. Not sure if the hero was quite such a judgmental prick, though he was unrepentantly promiscuous.
I kind of love The Score by Elle Kennedy. The hero is definitely not a judgmental prick, and while he is certainly a fan of casual sex, he’s supportive of the heroine from the beginning.
But I also grew up on Victoria Holt’s and Catherine Coulter’s books. I recently tried to read one of my old paperbacks, and it was pretty difficult. The only Coulter I know of that didn’t get rapey, or have the hero hate the heroine for his own attraction to her, is the Nightengale Legacy. He’s supposed to be dark and dangerous, but isn’t at all and the characters just fancy each other from page 1. Coulter did have a lot of plucky heroines. Maybe that’s why we liked them?
@Patsy – There’s actually one lovely (and non-rapey) Coulter out there: Night Fire. The Heroine DOES suffer abuse/degradation, but not from the hero, and in fact the hero is involved in helping her break free from her emotional/spiritual shackles and accept romantic and physical love again. If I remember right….
I think what I really want is for the eighties dramatic book covers to come back. Not the books, just the great covers. And like, the nineties Harlequin covers where it’s an illustrated scene but not cartoony? I really like those.