A few weeks ago, I selected a book to review that admitted it was a novella, but pretended it was a stand-alone. When I opened it up, the book was fifty seven pages and was about the farthest thing from a stand-alone I could think of. Instead, I think it’s a few chapters the author cut from another book and just… embellished. There was no time to invest in the characters, and instead I was expected to believe they were obsessed enough with each other to go from dreaming of having sex with one another to marriage – in fifty seven pages.
My pet peeve radar went off.
I loathe this. First of all, fifty seven pages is not a novella. It isn’t even a short story. It’s a plot bunny that needs further unpacking. 13,000 words may sound like a lot, and writing that much is arduous, do not get me wrong, but it’s also not a story. It’s the start of one, the middle of one, or the end of one, but no. NO. I am not a crackpot, but novellas should be long enough that I at least remember the characters’ names by the time I reach the HEA. 120 pages sounds good. Shall we pass a Romancelandia law?
This got me thinking. I know this might not bother other folks like it bothers me, but I also know I’m not alone. I’m not talking about trope violations or overtly awful and offensive things. I’m more talking about the book equivalent of someone loading the dishwasher wrong. So, I’m curious, what are your pet peeves?!
Do you loathe when previews are stuffed into the back of a Kindle book and there’s no notice ahead of time? What about when the book tells you it’s a standalone, but then expects you to know an entire house-party-worth of people? Does your ire get up when a book calls itself Regency but then refers to Queen Victoria? How do you feel when people call things erotica that are actually just romance with a lot of sex? Let it allllllll out, folks. Vent away!
~ Kristen Donnelly
Oh man, I have so many of these! The ones that come to mind off the top of my head are both writer quirks:
1. When the author clearly believes that pronouns are death and therefore, instead of using them, she has to plop in an entire synonymous phrase, so you keep getting these jarringly overwritten collocations. The example that I always think of was actually originally called out by a reviewer on this site many years ago!, but unfortunately I can’t remember which reviewer or which book. But it was something like, the heroine is eating ice cream, but the author, instead of doing the sensible thing and using a pronoun, refers to it as “the cool creamy treat.” Which like seriously. This is LITERALLY WHAT PRONOUNS ARE FOR. I’m a professional syntactician and I swear to you, authors, this is literally what pronouns are for.
2. When the couple is having sexytimes, and someone’s body (usually the heroine’s) gets described in the wrong POV. It’s the sin of a POV character describing their own hair colour up a degree or two of magnitude. E.g., if we’re in the hero’s head, and there’s a description of the heroine’s perky breasts or silky skin or whatever, that’s cool, he’s interacting with her body at the moment, so that makes sense. But if we’re in the heroine’s head, and she describes her own body that way, it’s just like… who does that??? I mean, kudos for having a healthy body image! but anyone who has the brainspace to be musing about how great their boobs are in the middle of sex is either focusing on the wrong things or really bored or both.
There’s a super-popular author who seems allergic to personal pronouns. Instead, she uses a lot of “possessive-profession” constructs. “His librarian” “her rock-star.”
I hate it.
Some schools teach that as well, and I despair for the poor kids.
Oooooh! I could write my own novella of Pet Peeves but here are just a few:
I concur with Kristen about the novella that is just a brief short story where you are expected to know a whole contingent of characters being unacceptable. Often a DNF for me and I think it’s a prod to the reader to order and read a raft of the author’s books in a series to understand what the hell is going on. And I agree with the previews at the back of a Kindle book. It generally means I won’t be revisiting that author. A recent example of this was The Wallflower’s Wicked Wager (A Waltz with a Rogue Book 5) by Collette Cameron. I read the first three chapters and was so dismayed by the F- quality of the prose (at least three over-done adjectives for everything ad nauseum) that I skipped to the last chapter and skimmed it. Then I found at least 4 lengthy teasers of her other books. No way will I be back.
I guess my biggest peeve is one I’ve mentioned here many times over the many years I’ve been following AAR. And that is the bungling of English (and Scottish) aristocratic titles. It’s so simple to get right and I’ve never understood why an author would choose to have characters who have titles and then get it completely wrong. To me, it’s a completely avoidable error and so cringeworthy that it often puts me off an author. I like historical accuracy but appreciate that fiction often needs a little bend in the rules. But titles? It’s really silly. and some of the errors I’ve seen have been so ludicrous that you almost have to wonder where the editors are.
One final peeve. That’s the sneaky reprint with a new cover or, in the case of an anthology, using previously published material. One example I remember was a Christmas anthology where the publications dates of the various novellas was in the BACK of the wretched book! I always check the front where you would expect to find this information but I thought that was really out of line.
‘Historical’ romances that are completely anachronistic and that have absolutely no grounding in the era they are set in.
Yes…………
I HATE it when authors use similar names for characters that interact a lot. For example, a book that has a John and a James. Or Mary and Maureen. You get the idea. I cannot keep track of them!
Yeah, I recently read a ‘novella’ that was more like a plot summary. I felt so cheated!! Needless to say, I went on Amazon and gave it a blistering review.
Writers who do not invest in a professional proofread/copy edit drive me crazy! It takes me right out of the story when I encounter a passage that has clearly not been edited. Here are a few recent eyebrow-raisers:
“My life was moving at a world wind speed.”
“He gave me a rye smile.”
“I had been too kind to her. Too gentile.”
Writers—please don’t rely on your beta readers and Facebook groups to do your proofreading.
This 100 percent reminds me of Laurel K Hamilton deciding she didn’t need an editor and then her books going sideways.
Rye smile. Too much bourbon maybe. 🙂
Typos I’ve seen…
“She tried not to react to his fowl breath.”
“Resting his shin against her head…”
“He greeted her with a huge.”
“She looked young and innocent in the white muslim dress.”
“The guard had to go take a leek.”
“He looked deviantly at the little boy.”
“She titled her head.”
Rye Smile. That is awesome!
When a book has been published as a series of books but its really 1 book, The first ones have no real ending and trying to remember what happened in the previous is impossible and having to pay for is 2 or 3 times.
Somany.wav . Elaine S tackled a LOT of mine, but any lack of consistency annoys me. Research fails I don’t immediately pick up on, to my sorrow (Caz will point them out to me, causing a lightbulb moment!) but the big stuff I will.
Also any book being listed as 500 pages – then it turns out to be 300 pages with several excerpts padding it out. Don’t do this, publishers.
I also love nonlinear timelines, but I hate nonlinear timelines that are so confusing you cannot even attempt to follow along with them.
As a Brit, Most of my pet peeves concern historical novels. Calling a duke, my lord instead of your grace, and calling a lord your grace! If a gentleman is called Sir John Smith, he is called Sir John, NOT Sir Smith – this can really jar me out of being engrossed in a novel. Also, British people do not walk ‘blocks’ – we have no idea what a block is! We would say ‘he/she lives some streets away’.
YES!
Modern dialogue in a historical. I mean the kind of collquial expressions that had never been heard of when I was a kid, let alone 200 years ago. Also overtly sexual flirting involving an inexperienced historical heroine. I came across that in a Courtney Milan novel (the only one of hers I’ve read or am now likely to read) and it really jarred. How did she understand his innuendo and repond in kind when she lived a sheltered life in an English village where sex was never mentioned? The characters could have wandered out of an office or a bar in 2018, their conversation felt so modern.
YES!
Yes! I can remember posting an excerpt from a novel that everyone agreed had to be a contemporary but was actually from a historical novel. Ridiculous.
Oceanjasper: Yes, yes, yes!!!! I loathe 21st century stories purporting to be historical novels with the characters dressed in long skirts or sporting a neck cloth.. And they are often speaking in modern idiom (and getting it wrong – as Gillian Wheatley mentions – e.g. overtly obvious Americanisms in British-set stories). And I won’t even begin to go into the overlaying of modern morals on 18th century stories. Why do authors do this? Who do they think they are fooling? I wish one of the perps would explain it to us.
Modern morals in historicals drives me nuts. Sure, every age had outliers, but characters still need to feel like they belong to their own time.
Yes, this. I agree, there were always exceptions, but with the sheer volume of historicals being put out today, it seems like pretty much every single character is an exception.
The ongoing tradition of the baby epilogue is my longest source of ire with romance writing, especially historical romance writing. Not all couples could have children. Not all women want/wanted children, even in the past. I find myself shifting more toward contemporaries partly to escape the stereotype that babies equal marital bliss and that craving babies is in a woman’s DNA.
I’m probably in the minority but I do not generally even like epilogues. If a story does its job well, a peak into the future to ensure happiness abounds should be unnecessary. I always find myself speed reading the epilogues, as I find the vast majority tedious and unnecessary.
I hate this one, too. In the last historical I read, the heroine was infertile and had a job, along with the hero, that wouldn’t naturally kern toward parenthood. So naturally the author dropped a couple of orphans into the story for the two of them to adopt.
(also sadly this keeps cropping up in the contemps I read, though one refreshing example I read recently had a proudly childfree heroine).
I agree! I do consciously seek out authors who are a little more forward-thinking on the “maternal” issue, but I think the entire genre has a long way to go on this topic. I’m even happy if babies are just not mentioned at all in a book’s resolution. I’m not saying that all books need to promote a child-free version of happiness, but I would settle for a few now and again.
I’m tired of the trope where the heroine is convinced she’s barren, with angst ensuing as a result, only to discover that all she needs is the hero’s golden manhood (as opposed to the evil ex’s limp bizkit). This is now so predictable that I’m only going to read about such heroines if they stay barren and come to terms with it.
This drives me crazy too, and I think the part that bugs me the most is that if the author just left that part of the ending open, and didn’t say anything about children one way or another, everyone who read the book could fill in the version they wanted, children or no children, and everyone could be happy.
I also hate it when an author takes risks with a heroine but then softens the whole thing by having her entirely plotline revolving around how desperately she wants children, so as to make her more “acceptable..”
THIS I freaking loathe. LET HEROINES BE UNUSUAL AND PRICKLY.
I’m nodding along with a lot of these to do with HR – misuse of titles (seriously, it’s not hard to look it up these days), Americanisms (ditto)… the old chestnut of “we can get married because Reasons and then get an annulment/divorce” – er – NO! Just lack of research full-stop.
And I’m not a big fan of the “babylogue” either. IIRC, Juliana Gray sends the whole thing up rather nicely in How to School Your Scoundrel.
I’m also going with over the top first person personal descriptions; “as I combed through my wavy auburn locks” – who on earth describes themselves like that?
Speaking with my Editor’s Hat on – the number of books that don’t seem to have touched an editor’s desk, let alone have actually been edited staggers me. And I’m not necessarily talking about self-published books here; the traditional publishers can be guilty of just as many howlers.
I so agree with you about the marriage part. There seems to be this myth that unconsummated marriages were a reason for annulments! Also, there are historical romance novels where a man marries his brother’s widow. No-one could do this, legally in the UK until 1921!
The barren heroine who is cured by hero’s magic sperm by the end is really annoying. Or heroine who assumes she is barren because she didn’t get pregnant in her previous relationship. And the men who are more than happy to buy that.
I also hate it when detailed eye color is observed from too far a distance.
Retconning events and characters because the series became popular and was expanded beyond original contract and author caves to popular pressure.
Using too many brand names when characters would normally just use the generic word for a product.
My number one pet peeve is instant boners and tingling nipples every time the characters are in the same room. Especially the first time they meet.
YES!
THIS!
My pet peeve is when the author has a character (or the narrator) summarize what happened in the previous books. If that has to be done, it should all be in one book.
My second peeve is repeat explaining. I don’t need to be told every 3rd page why you are unworthy, that your past has something mysterious, or how much fun you are. Tell me once. Better yet, show me.
Re: the first one: it depends a bit on the nature of the thing for me (e.g. if it’s a doorstopper fantasy series and we’re on book twelve, it bothers me less), but one particular version of this that I really hate is when a couple’s story begins as a secondary plotline in earlier books of the series and then their book starts at what is clearly the middle of their story. I want to read their story from its beginning in their perspective, whether it technically has already been hinted at or not. So many authors do this and I hate it.
I’m not a historian, but I hate it when I read a historical and something very obviously anachronistic happens. For example, I recently read the first chapter of a Victorian-set book, in which the heroine was riding in a curricle with her father and her brother, and they came upon the hero, who was severely injured and lying by the roadside. Before getting out of the curricle and helping him, the heroine*s father and brother discussed if it would’nt be better to go to the next town and send an ambulance to the hero…
Also, descriptions of eyecolors. I just don’t think there are many real-life people who think that their lover’s eyes remind them of a cool brook burbling merrily through a mystical, sunlit forest or something like that.
Really, really, really bad (or non existent) editing (writing):
“….Those things were the devil, and it never failed that my cursive would end up looking like someone else’s name that wasn’t mine.”
Thanks for an entertaining post btw, this is my first visit to this site.
Welcome CindyC, look forward to seeing you here again
Anachronistic names. Mary Balogh and Eloisa James have some notable examples. A Duke and Duchess called Elijjah and Jemma? More like gunslinger meets cheerleader. Regency heroines called Lauren, Jennifer and Samantha? Way too modern.
I’ve noticed that eye colour at a distance thing, too. I read one book where the heroine was standing on top of the castle tower and looking down at the hero who was on the drawbridge, and noticing the colour of his eyes. I wish I had eyesight like that.
And the Everyone’s Pregnant ending. Louise Allen is usually one of my favourite authors, but she had the worst ever ending to a series of four books. One heroine had just given birth, and the other three were all pregnant. That’s two or three babies too many for me.
I think I’ve read that series, too, and agree – I’m a fan of LA’s as well, but that epilogue was waaay OTT.
This post made me laugh, and I agree that naming can be quite off-putting. I had trouble with Kerrigan Byrne’s heroine, Farah, from The Highwayman.
Historical authors are always stuck having to obey by the laws of the Tiffany Problem; Tiffany is actually a completely realistic and normal name for a medieval heroine, but it’s 100 percent unusable due to how our modern ears hear the name.
You can actually use Tiffany in a historical; you just need to spell it in such a way that it looks more like what it originally came from (e.g. Theophany, Teophany, Theophanie) and less like itself. That way it looks decidedly weird, but it doesn’t look anachronistic. Also, I’m not sure quite when the “Tiffany” spelling became the official spelling, but it has to be relatively recent anyway, so a spelling like Theophany (or something like Typhenie, which people wouldn’t accept either) would probably be more period-appropriate anyway.
One of the many advantages of m/m romance and fiction is pregnancy is not a factor although happily family can be. There is no horror of MCs being barren or only complete when pregnant.
I’ve heard of M/M romance where mpreg occurs…
Nothing drives me crazier than inept and incorrect use of foreign languages (usually French or Italian) by authors. How hard is it to find a native speaker who can check a phrase or sentence for accuracy these days??
I have several pet peeves actually. The one I hate the most is the undisclosed cliffhanger. Seriously, You drop 2 stars automatically for that little farce. Knowing in advance is a must. Also the full priced novella. I recently read a series of “books” that were 150 pages (about) each that were $9.99 each! Maybe this was because the author had won a Hugo recently but come on! The three books could easily have been one story…..but not $30 worth. Although excellent stories I cannot recommend them due to price. *cough* Murderbot *cough*.
Personally – like many others – I hate when a book shows no sign of being copy edited. Misspellings, misuse of words, words that were in an earlier draft but didn’t get deleted from the final version – I’ve seen all these. My special pet peeve is when a word is used to mean its exact opposite – the most frequent one I’ve seen is using “descendant” to mean “ancestor”. One book I read had someone choosing his predecessor. I’ve also seen the phrase “hoi polloi” (from the Greek meaning “the many” and meaning the masses) used to mean an elite.
My recent (and not so recent) pet peeve: an independent woman who always maintained her senses around men and suddenly starts having an out of nowhere attraction for a guy she has hardly spoken to. It breaks my reader’s connection with her… and I’m pretty much done with the story then.
Agreed!
When this happens, where is the consistency of that character?
I hate it when, especially in contemporaries, the sex happens too soon. For me the fun of the romance is the sexual tension, it’s the path towards a relationship, it’s the personal thoughts that go into it and the mutual recognition that the other is “the one”.
There’s this saying that men think about sex every whatever minutes. But according to many contemporary romances, women do as well… of course they can if they want but it’s annoying!
Plus, it annoys me too that publishers ruin my chances of having well organized shelves by releasing books in series with different formats/sizes/fonts/layouts..!
I just thought of two more things that really bug me. Waiting a year for the next installment and lack of justice or revenge against villains, especially in historicals. To many times the heroine has been the victim of horrible violence or terrible injustices and the author just blows it off. The most common outcome is the bad guy is shipped to the Continent or America. I need to feel vindication for the heroine and I have no problem with killing the perpetrator in a historical. Leaving town just doesn’t do it for me.
YES THIS. You just know that once the villain’s off in America or wherever, he’s going to commit further atrocities against other women. How is that a happy ending?
Omg, the amount of red heads in books!!!!Ahhhhhhh
Yes! Also the thing where a trilogy’s heroines are a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. So many trilogies do this! Why????
I can’t stand overuse of words like mayhap(s) and nay. Once or twice in a book is my limit. And why do so many people have green or grey eyes? Even silver?
I do appreciate all the extra large “equipment”, however!
I believe it was Josephine Tey who called that “writing forsoothly”. I think of it as tis-twas-twere – if a book’s TTT factor is too high it’s out. Likewise with the dinna-doona count.
To Kristen – Many thanks for opening a wonderful can of worms for us to share and drool over. What a great list of posts on this topic which I am convinced is one we have all been itching to have a say about!! I can only hope that the authors who no doubt look at but don’t post on this site are paying attention. And to Suzanna – thanks for mentioning completely anachronistic names for characters. I crave a Kylie dressed up in a hooped 18th century court dress or a Kyle duelling with a Jayden early one morning in Hyde Park. 😉
Watched by Devon, Devyn, Raven and Ravyn!
(My tablet doesn’t like them either. It made several attempts at changing Devyn to Refund).
In response to Suzanna – Josephine Tey also once cited a boy speaking in “clotted Perthshire” which was as hard to read as it was to listen to. Extensive use of spelled-out dialect (be it Scottish or some other) is annoying. Another thing that REALLY gets me is when someone finds it necessary to add a pronunciation guide (although this is more common in fantasy books).
I thik you have mentioned many things I don’t like (epilogues or everybody having children, books with cliffhangers). I don’t like them but they don’t make me angry. I think a pet peeve is something more, something so annoying that can take you out of the book.
In my case, I could easily stop reading because of things related with the text itself. Language is the tool you use, keep it clean, please.
I can stop reading a book because of bad editing, awful punctuation or spelling mistakes –specially if they are written in another language. For instance, whenever they use Spanish words, they always make mistakes in the spelling, The only book that I have found perfect is Iris After the Incident, by Mina V. Esguerra. Even Joanna Bourne made mistakes in Beauty Like the Night. There are 480 million native speakers of the Spanish language, can’t they fid just one to help them?
I don’t like anachronisms, either. Those American products that appear in Medieval settings are just hilarious. Recently, I have read an oldie but NOT goldie, Lie Down in Roses (1988) and the perfect medieval heroine had chocolate brought to her English bed!
I hate it when an author writes what was probably intended to be a stand-along book, but due to popularity turns it into a series. And then what was probably supposed to be a trilogy turns into 4 or 5 books because either A) the publisher/writer saw a money grab opportunity or B) the writer LURVES her characters so much she becomes indulgent and just keeps writing their never-ending stories. I like it when a writer tells a fully formed story, and if it requires more than one book, then each book should be crucial to the arc and not simply an indulgent exercise in playing Barbies with her characters.
Sorry – that should be “stand-alone” book. Don’t you hate it when posters spell things wrong!
I have some pet peeves, but some things make me stop reading a book immediately : crass mistakes in the use of titels and even more annoying when the author has absolutely no feeling for the then usual conduct of people in earlier centuries. Recently I came upon a so called regency where the heroine, daughter of an earl, newly married to a duke, proposeds to the butler in her husband’s house to call her by her given name!
You know, I am sympathetic to AAR Jenna’s hatred of a book that morphs into a series, but then I think of _The Outlander_. I generally don’t like series of one, long continuous plot because I forget who everybody is, etc. Clearly, when you are an author and it takes you months to write a book, these characters are people you really know, but we readers have lives and don’t remember characters, plots, and important details or clues. I think Loretta Chase does series well–very brief references to other, past characters and plot events. You can read them out of order or just individually.
My biggest objection are heroes (and they are usually heroes) who for whatever reason, mistreat the heroine. That’s okay with me, IF (and only if, as my geometry teacher used to say) he realizes what a total jerk he has been, he truly regrets it and NEVER excuses himself for his misunderstanding, assumptions, etc. He has to be totally sincere at his reformation and the author must show it. And a second objection is heroines who forgive (and presumably forget) at the drop of the hat. Her father who sold her into prostitution at 12? Doesn’t matter now that she sees him again, even though he never apologized, etc. The hero who told the world that she was a whore? How silly. They both now know the truth. It makes me grind my teeth. What are the authors thinking?
By the way, I love epilogues, babies included–or not. After wading thru sometimes hundreds of pages of separation, loss, misunderstanding, or the million problems in romances, I need more than a few pages of bliss. I love knowing that their happiness is total for years.
For me, the main problem with the predominance of babies in epilogues is that romance writing continues to “mommy track” women. In a genre written largely by women for a largely female audience, women are mommy tracking women. Men often get blamed for doing this, but women are doing it just as much. I don’t see much progress on this issue in the writing I pick up and that is disheartening. And for me, babies are not necessarily equated with bliss. Additionally, most studies I’ve read indicate that babies put strain on marriages and so to glamorize them seems a bit unrealistic to me. I’m not saying that babies don’t bring joy to many families, but all families? All women want them? This is more than a pet peeve for me because it feels regressive for women to keep perpetuating the problem.
At this point the birth rate in most western countries is below replacement (the large Italian family is already extinct) and those that are not e.g. France have large Muslim populations inflating the birth rate. Concurrently, abortion that was sold as “safe and rare” has become common (50 million in the US alone) and is now celebrated in many circles instead of being seen as a regrettable (and rare) necessity. This has carried over into an anti-child mentality, where children are seen as an unwelcome interruption or burden more than a source of joy. Romance epilogues with babies are a tiny drop of push back against a sea of female narcissism that is resulting in western societies extinguishing themselves. Societies that don’t value children, that value female autonomy over female uniqueness in the ability to bear and nurture children are on the down slide and literally have no future. No children, no future. So party on ladies who think childlessness is something to be encouraged by our culture, soon to be swamped by cultures with a high birth rate. The future belongs to those who show up.
Sorry for the moment of seriousness in what’s otherwise a light-hearted discussion but it was a bit depressing to see that approval of the me-me-me type of feminism has permeated even readers of romance novels!
I would not say that it’s anti-child for a women to want options other than to be mothers in life. The reality is that not all women want to have children of their own but still support women who do choose parenthood. The reality is that not all women want to be mothers, and there is no correlation between not wanting to be a mother and “devaluing children.” Not wanting children also does not make a woman a narcissist, or a freak of nature, or a person wishing for the end of humanity, or the apocalypse, etc.. Wanting women to have options other than motherhood is not about pushing an abortion agenda, a topic which I rarely encounter in romance writing, interestingly.
On the other hand, is there anxiety in this post above about “Muslims” taking over the world? Is your post really about white women needing to procreate in order to save the world from people of color? Good grief!
I make no comment about any individual’s choices, women included. For myself, I was glad to live in a time with a menu of options. I comment on what millions of individual choices add up to – the big societal picture and how those choices are both influenced by culture and incrementally change culture. The plunging birth rate in western societies is a FACT and the result of a culture that devalues child rearing, presenting them as burdens to be aborted for mere convenience. and a frustration to women’s power instead of a source..
Below replacement birth rates will have national and global repercussions long after we particular individuals are dead, affecting the children some of us have and worry about in a way childless people do not. No matter how nice or decent, most people childless by choice are not going to be invested in the future beyond their own lives because they have no skin in the game unlike parents. Having decided for whatever personal reason not to make the sacrifices that child rearing entails, what sacrifices are they likely to make as voters for future generations? As just one example,, we have bought ourselves niceties that we have not been willing to pay for in taxation, accruing massive national debts on the backs of youth and children not even born yet who will be stuck with the bill and an imploding economy meaning they themselves will never enjoy the same niceties. They will be on the hook for government spending for their parents and for people who did not make future taxpayers.
Now clearly, many shortsighted citizens are parents also voting for immediate gains, turning a blind eye to the government debt being loaded onto their children and grandchildren. But I submit that if you take 100 parents vs 100 childless people, as GROUPS they will diverge significantly. The parental group will be more likely to want to conserve a good life for their children whereas the childless group will be less motivated to put the brakes on debt or other harms for future generations. And the childless group is rising as the birth rate is falling.
To return to romance novel baby epilogues, they hark back to a time when babies were not seen as optional or undesirables by people well able to afford them. And sure enough, even inveterate romance readers seem to split on whether children constitute a “happily ever after” or a feminist frustration.. Individuals’ choices differ. However, a society lacking enough individuals choosing to have children to replace themselves is on its way out. You seem fine with that but as a parent I am not as sanguine about the world we’re leaving for the younger generation, inverting the pyramid with more and more long lived seniors supported by fewer and fewer work age taxpayers. It’s unsustainable and anyone’s guess when the crash will come.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on this or, indeed, anything else. However, if you have been raised by a mother who herself did not especially want children but was herself born (1926) before effective birth control and had a husband who said, “if you want to go out to work, I will quit my job”, then maybe that has a knock-on effect. My father’s attitude ruined my mother’s life aspirations and her life was unhappy and unfulfilled in many ways. She raised me to strive at school, get a good degree and then a good job and career. I don’t ever remember her saying: “finish high school, find a lovely boy and have loads of babies and be a stay-at-home mother”. I value children: other people’s and my husband and I pay taxes to support them, provide services for them and educate them, etc. I have just never wanted my own. Your views on this, Laine, are yours to share but I can’t agree with most of what you have said.
I respect your choice and can see how it was influenced by your upbringing as you described it. You don’t have to answer this but I’m curious whether your mother is/was happy that you had no child duties and she no grandmother duties? I also had a somewhat frustrated mother but made different decisions. It was not a dichotomy between having kids and having a profession. In fact my mother looked after my first born when I went back to work and I was reconciled for my stressful childhood by the beautiful care that my mother lavished on her grandson before she died before her time. My daughter who’s also planning a family is in a highly demanding job being mentored by a woman in her second pregnancy.
Respecting individual choice is also not mutually exclusive with recognizing how those individual choices aggregate to create the society in which we move. I’m sad that the cultural pendulum seems to have swung from limiting women to mothering and homemaking to the other extreme of treating these as inferior to careerism.. The unique abilities of women seem to be downplayed compared to what anyone can do, man or woman.. That has been one cause of the declining birth rate that has always signaled societal decline.
We are individuals with the right to make individual choices but can we also see the big picture and are we optimistic about it?
There is nothing narcissistic about not wanting children (though it’s an interesting choice of words to describe this as “female narcissism”, like men all want babies?).
There is, however, something judgemental and misogynistic about condemning women who don’t make what you consider is the right decision about their own bodies.
Female autonomy is here to stay, and I’m very glad I don’t live in a country where women are pressured into having children. The Handmaid’s Tale needs to stay fictional.
Female. Narcissism.
Did I take a wrong turn at Albuquerque and end up in redpill hell? The idea that to be female is to solely be unique because I can have children is cissexist, misogynist, transphobic and transforms every woman with a functioning uterus into nothing BUT.
Tell me: do women who have hysterectomies suddenly stop being ‘powerful’ when they lose the ability to push kids out into the universe? When they’re over sixty? If they can’t have children due to ovarian or uterine diseases? Am I suddenly not a woman then? Am I suddenly not powerful then?
I won’t even go into your racist dogwhistle nonsense about “non-western (AKA: white)” countries’ birth rates going down, which means those Scary People In Muslim Countries Are Gonna Outbreed Us And Change The Face Of Our Country And Cause Western Civilization To Decline Oh No (I see your dogwhistle with “Careerism’ as well).
To tackle your canard above about tax burdens: You do realize that the reason why many people in my generation have said no to having children is because we can’t afford it because of those economic woes you listed above, aren’t you? It’s not selfishness, or whatever else people who post pictures of blue-eyed, blonde haired kids being nursed by their saintly mothers on Twitter think it is. People are drowning in student loans. Baby boomers won’t retire, so people can’t advance at a reasonable speed. Property taxes and rent and food and everything else is going up while salaries are staying low.
In short, I believe that stay at home mothers should always be respected, and that it’s as valid and occupation as going into the workforce. I’m not going to go out and have kids I can’t afford to raise at the moment because of ‘the big picture’ and ‘selfishness’ (AKA Oh Noes Muh White Birthrates).
To Laine A: My mother was as good a mother as she was able to me and my siblings but her unhappiness turned her to alcohol before I was 10 and, frankly, had I had children, I would not have trusted her with them. Her alcoholism meant that, like the children of many alcoholics, as the eldest I became “mother” to my younger siblings by the age of 10 as by this time my father had left, My siblings have not had children either. So, for the childless, you don’t always know what factors in their early years led them to make this choice.
For me, I leave the earth as I entered it: an individual. I read about ZPG (Zero Population Growth) at university and am sorry that more people don’t follow the concept of reproducing no more than themselves. The fact that climate change is seeming related to population growth seems to me a good enough reason to follow ZPG but, sadly, most do not across our globe. So, please, a round of applause for those who do not contribute to what may be future climate issues, over-population issues and over-exploitation of our planet’s natural resources.
When you have no children, and maybe not by your own choice, then the ongoing implication that a happy end must include babies is sad. Love is about a couple, and the love can be complete without children.
I would like to see a more even distribution, with lots of couples having babies (as this was the norm) but some not. The automatic inclusion of multiple babies in nearly every sweet soft romance book can hurt.
Tall men (like Dukes) grow on trees in romance. It seems like at least 3 out of 4 men in romances are 6 ft 4 in, which even today in the US is not common (something like 14 percent of the male population is over 6 ft tall, and in historicals that percentage would be even less). I once threw down a book because the hero was almost 7 ft tall for no other reason that I could tell than to make him a bit taller than your average romance hero. I have nothing against tall men, but this is getting really, really old!
Romance heroines on the other hand come in all sizes from diminutive and doll-like to strapping women taller than most men – also from buxom to boyish. Undoubtedly this allows the mostly female readership to find their own body type somewhere, unlike Barbie world until recently, now presenting different body shapes (the somewhat chubbier Barbie is euphemistically called “curvy” Barbie LOL).
In real life, the vast majority of women prefer their male partners to be taller (ask any short man) so the tall romance hero is “one size fits all”. And although the majority of American women are now overweight and a large number qualify as obese, it will be the rare romance novelist who casts such a woman as their heroine. Most romance readers are aspirational and therefore enjoy reading about women who eventually have it all together including their physical appearance and when it comes to men, well, it’s that top 5% blessed by looks and wit readers fantasize about, not the ordinary looking guy they can have in real life.
@Laine – I disagree with your assessment that not having children means that humans have no skin in the game with respect to the future of the planet. Every study I have read indicates that planet Earth is *overpopulated* and there are not enough natural resources to sustain a growing life force. Humanity is not an endangered species due to lack of procreation. Drought, starvation climate change, nuclear weapons, etc. — yes, those are endangering us. Lack of babies – No. Your comment too that Muslims are over procreating reveals to me a hateful and racialized message here though that your concern is that white people are losing ground. That is about white supremacy and not about loving humanity and wanting it to thrive long after individual lives.
Relying on ideologies that women are selfish for not having babies creates a world where many women are pressured into having them despite not wanting them. That is selfish and creates unhappy parents left to raise babies in an unhappy environment. It is a good thing to have options in life and it is good for women, and men for that matter, to recognize what is healthy for themselves. I feel optimistic about where women are today, even knowing much more progress is needed. I anticipate romance novels catching up with these ideas.
Agreed, Blackjack. People can contribute to society and shape the future in ways that don’t involve having children, and the lack thereof doesn’t mean that a person is going to kick back and say, “oh well, it doesn’t matter if species go extinct or pollution is out of control, I don’t have kids of my own so I don’t care about anything that happens in the future!”
And as for this idea that parents are naturally invested in the future or unselfish or capable of making sacrifices, does that also apply to parents like Casey Anthony or Susan Smith? What about parents who have far more kids than they can raise or educate? What about parents who abuse or neglect their children?
It’s almost like she doesn’t realize that childless people have nieces, nephews, friends with kids, and neighbors, and every single person who isn’t having children isn’t somehow a kid-hating ogre.
You’re spot on with her anti-Muslim dogwhistles; she’s spouting a lot of redpill/white supremacist ideology, too.
Thanks Blackjack! Especially the last para really does me good – completely true!
The baby thing is complicated and studies on how people ultimately feel about not having children vs. having children are thin on the ground. We do know that the gap between how many children women who say they want kids want to have and how many they actually have is the greatest it’s been in 40 years. (2.7 vs. 1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years. We also know that the fertility rate for women over 40 is increasing. The infertility business is booming–Americans spent over 3.5 billion dollars on infertility treatments in 2013, the last year I could find stats for.
My sense at 57 is that if you decided you want kids–at any age–and didn’t have them, that often brings a great deal of sadness. If you never, at any age, wanted kids and didn’t have them, you’re happy you didn’t.
Yes, this is all true and yes, motherhood is as you have said very complex and even divisive. It more than most gender issues divides people, as it speaks directly to what roles women have in society or should have. Since I initially raised the issue way up thread, the point I was calling attention to is that romance novels are not representing what you have stated. The overwhelmingly vast majority of romance novels are creating a conflict-free resolution where nearly all women want babies or have babies in the end, usually in the epilogue. Such literary consensus is curious to me and even troubling because it does not allow for the complexity of the issue that I think most women see in their every day lives. Like most women, I have friends who want babies and friends who don’t want them, but when I read in the romance genre, I rarely see that reality playing out. If this qualifies as a pet peeve, I would like to see romance writing catch up with the times and at least acknowledge more often that motherhood is an issue that causes deep reflection for many women.
It’s interesting that we have expectations that genre fiction would represent our reality. In many ways, that’s great. But it’s also, from another angle, odd. Genre fiction has historically been freer than say, literary fiction, to represent worlds wildly different from the average human experience.
Well, I do actually think genre fiction or any pop cultural product is deeply intertwined with reality. The main problem I see with mommy tracking women is that it is a reality all too familiar to most women, and romance genre fiction is engaged very much with those conventions. I would posit instead that like the #MeToo Movement and the awareness authors have about diversity, motherhood will become a more complexly treated issue going forward. I do see signs of it.
I believe that the values and patterns of what love and family should be like are deeply influenced by what we see in films, read in books and what role models say. On the mommy issue, romance is not embracing diversity, yet. Or rarely. We have lots of books where heroines think a lot about when to have sex, how to structure the relationship with the hero, how to combine work and love, but we very rarely have heroines who do not want children. Maximum, they have some old trauma and as soon as that is resolved, they can embrace motherhood. it is tiring, and perpetuates a role model that does not fit any more. I would like a different emphasis.
I personally don’t have children, don’t want them, don’t plan on having them and in “real life” I don’t care if people make the choice/decision to not have them either.
In books I don’t mind characters having babies. I don’t look for books that only have that sort of content/epilogue but I don’t mind at all when they do! I suppose it’s just a matter of taste, some readers like, others don’t..I never thought of it, however, as being evidence we are supposed to only accept HEAs as valid if so. Again, it depends on how that is included in the plot.
I just wrote a book that has everything – sex, erotica, witchcraft, suspense, drama, biblical stories, women raping men, men raping women – the only thing it doesn’t have is babies. It even has math problems, but not babies. I know sex leads to babies, – I am not stupid, but somehow I don’t think sex can be mixed with babies in the same book, like you can’t mix milk and wine at the same meal. At least I can’t.
This is a fascinating (and brutally honest) thread. I’m enjoying it and I hesitate to pitch in my two cents but I’m interested in the baby part of this discussion. I write historical romance and I have on a few occasions had the heroine in a job type setting. Generally though, they are anticipating a family by the end of my books. In this thread there are readers who are taken out of a story because something is glaringly inaccurate for the period it is written, while others feel that a baby conclusion does not feel right for a variety of reasons. I’ll never please all readers and this reminds me of that fact, because it’s tricky to be historically and culturally correct in Virginia in 1873, if the characters think like me in Pennsylvania in 2018.
My setting is America in the latter half of the 1800s and while some women were attending college, rallying for the right to vote, and were innovators, the vast majority of women were still managing a household which was considerably more time consuming than today’s household. They were making clothes, sometimes the fabric for the clothes, and depending on the wealth of the family, still making soap, tending a large garden, canning foods and educating their children. Those working in commerce at that time were often domestics and unmarried. I am not saying that women did not have aspirations outside of the home, they certainly did, and some chose not to have children or were not able to conceive, but managing a household and children was challenging whether you were wealthy or poor.
The sewing machine is integral to one of my stories and that is because I’ve always believed that when they became available for household use, it changed the life of many women in a powerful way, and was maybe the earliest sign of women’s liberation. I am happy that I live in an era where I can be a doctor, a senator or a stay at home parent with vacuums and dishwashers and disposable diapers and cars and antibiotics but that was not the case in the year my books are set. Thankfully, there are books that suit each of us, and in the romance genre, tell a love story. My favorite kind.
I am reminded that in 1940 nearly half of houses in the US lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, or a flush toilet.
I struggle mightily with the expectation that books written in another era should represent the mores of today. I don’t envy authors trying to find a voice that is both contextually legitimate and in tune with today’s expectations.
Completely agree with that!
Just gone on a Roberta Gellis glom to cleanse the palate.
However, historically, many women took years to get pregnant, had multiple early pregnancy miscarriages and lost children early. So having historical romances like some Balogh epilogues (I love Balogh, I have just started to skim her epilogues) where every woman is either pregnant or has babies, in a series closing book, is a bit much.
I never took much notice until both the epilogue and the babies became so common that I just wondered whether there were some publisher’s rules somewhere.
Duets or trilogies based around one couple, when they would be better off resolved in one larger or pared down book. They are often filled with contrived drama or “filler” just to fill out the pages. I’ve stopped buying them. I’d rather read a stand alone, or an interconnected series of stand alone with a new couple per book.
Another pet peeve: Boner led romance. Or gushing pussies or tingling nipples at first meet-cute. (Eye roll).
The alpha hero, I think has had its day, hasn’t it? Pushy, jealous assholery? Over them. I’ve just finished a Nora Robert’s book with a fierce female leader, and the beta male who encouraged her in all the things – sublime. And a Victoria Dahl book with a male (beta) librarian who was a bit of a nerd, sexiest thing ever.
I just came about another petpeeve: the ubiquitous Duke. They live like Barons or in the best of cases like Earls, sometimes even like commoners. Mostly they are rich, they never give you the feel of a real duke, not like Wulfric Bedwyn, the Duke of Bewcastle by Mary Balogh . The reason I was reminded was an older book by Louise Allen, written as Francesca Shaw in 1997. The old title was The Unconventional Miss Dane. The hero was a ‘simple’ Marcus Lord Allington. The new release from 2018 now has the title Miss Dane and the Duke. Now the hero is Marcus Renshaw, Duke of Allington.
Are we readers truly so stupid to need a duke in a book? I’ve read books with dukes in the title sell better. But have the publishers not tried if readers would buy them without the dukes after so many years of dukes everywhere? I myself meanwhile try to steer cleer of them.
I know of authors who have pretty much been instructed to make their heroes dukes because they sell. It’s ridiculous – many of these ducal heroes don’t need to be dukes at all; I could reel off loads of titles – as I’m sure you could, too – citing examples where the hero doesn’t need to be such an exalted figure, where actually, the story would work better if he wasn’t – and yet someone, somewhere has a bee in their bonnet that the majority of HR heroes have to be dukes. *shakes fist*
I once queried an agent with a historical romance where the hero worked as an architect, and the agent asked if I could make him the heir to a fortune (which didn’t really fit my plot, where it was important that he had only a limited amount of money).
I was just surprised I wasn’t asked to make him a duke. Now that might have sold the book.
Switching gears from the “baby or not baby” question, one of my pet peeves is when a character–typically male–is delightfully obnoxious/arrogant/rakish/priggish/ in the initial books in a series, so that you positively cannot wait until he gets his own book (in which he will surely get taken down a peg or two, one way or the other).
And then the character gets his book, and within the first chapter or two, the obnoxiousness/insufferable arrogance or priggishness/rakish behavior seem to be resolved or at least toned way down–if it even makes an appearance to begin with. And we have a rather different character instead, often someone a little more sympathetic or understandable or likable.
This is why I loved Hoyt’s Duke of Sin. I felt the author gave us the same unscrupulous, rather morals-free Valentine that we’d seen in the books leading up to DoS. IMO, Hoyt didn’t suddenly turn Val into a kinder, gentler person to make him more palatable in his own story. I appreciated that.
Other peeve: Stop using “proscribed” when you mean “prescribed”. Seriously, they are not synonyms.