Friday, July 13, 2012

The unsympathetic heroine

I do love me some trashy romance. After reading a Lisa Kleypas novel in one afternoon last weekend, I've been reading a bunch lately. One book that I downloaded on my Nook was A Little Bit Wild, by Victoria Dahl. It's about a well-bred woman, Marissa, who gets caught in flagrante before she's married. To avoid scandal, she winds up getting betrothed (at least until she can confirm she's not knocked up) to Jude, a friend of her brother.

You will not be surprised to find out that they do, in fact, wind up falling in love.

For the first chunk of the book, I found myself wondering why I was reading it. I didn't like Marissa. She was a snob, thoughtless, spoiled, selfish. Jude had very few problems, other than he wasn't the pretty boy type preferred by Marissa.

But...something happened. Dahl managed to transform Marissa from the twit she was at the beginning to a genuinely nice person. I could sympathize with her at the beginning--she made a mistake. But she acted like a brat, so I couldn't deal with her. Dahl did a fantastic job showing this woman growing up and maturing. It was impressive.

And it called to mind Something Blue, by Emily Giffin. The sequel to Something Borrowed, it tells the story of Darcy, whose fiance Dex left her for her best friend. She gets pregnant and flees to England to force herself upon her friend Ethan--who was not a Darcy fan. The first book was the story of Dex and Rachel and Darcy at no point came across sympathetically. And her attitude in Something Blue is no different.

So. Also an unsympathetic leading lady. We see the story through her eyes. Partway through the book, she has this great epiphany that she's not a good person and is all, "I'll be good now!" The problem here is that Giffin continues to describe Darcy's thoughts...and really, nothing is different. She may act differently on the outside, but at no point do her thoughts progress to a mature woman.I almost feel bad for Ethan at the end, that he's duped by Darcy's actions when we know that her thoughts--who she actually is--hasn't changed at all.

There tends to be a stigma around reading romance novels, but in this case, the romance author far and away did a better job with characterization.