When is a Hero a Hero?

So, in order to take my mind off my back, I thought I’d tell you about a non-romance romance book I just read. Oh, you know the kind. They parade around as another genre, but really, at the heart of it all, it’s a romance.

When I was in the shower, I debated telling you the name of this very celebrated SF/Fantasy/Paranormal author. I’m big on throwing it out there and calling a spade a spade. But then I thought that sure as God made little apples, someone who reads this is her best friend, will forward the link to her and then I’ll end up on the receiving end of unpleasantness, no matter how true what I’m about to say is. So we’ll call her the Author and leave it at that.

Okay, so here’s the set up. It’s WWI. Evil witch step-monster (really, she’s a witch) has seduced the heroine’s father and sent him to his death in the trenches for his money. Only she’s made a boo-boo, since she forgot to have hubby change his will, so she must keep her step daughter alive to have access to the money. Using black magic, she traps the heroine to the house by cutting off her pinky finger and burying under the hearthstone. The heroine, it turns out, is also magically gifted. She is able to slip out and visit a nearby field, where she meets her old crush, injured in the war.

So far so good. Here’s where I started to get mildly annoyed.

The hero is a magical master of air (the heroine will become one of fire). When his plane is shot down, he is already in a bad mental place, killing people when his job has always been one of protecting human life. When the plane crashes, the earth collapses around him and he’s tortured by beasties. To save himself, he cuts off his magic, which was attracting the evil monsters.

Up to here, I was with her. When we’re in the hero’s point of view, I found him a bit whiny and a little too sorry for himself, but my gut reaction was – how bold! She’s really set up a hero who has a far way to go to be whole again! Fantastic.

But while the heroine grows, learning not from the hero (which would have made sense in my opinion since he’s another master) but from her dreams, the hero is a wreck and stays that way. He opens up his magic to save the heroine at the end, but the moment something goes wrong, he’s in a pathetic ball on the floor (literally) with the heroine having to save them both. Boo! Boo! Boo!

Well, it’s not a romance, you say huffily. He doesn’t have to grow!

And my answer is this – why in the heck would the heroine WANT him? I mean, he’s hot. Fine. But the heroine, who I’ve spent 500+ pages with tiny print getting to know, is this strong, rocking lady fighting against evil. What on earth attracts her to the hero?? I couldn’t figure it out and suspected the author was not going to have them be together in the end. They were, by the way. The author stuck her heroine with a useless wuss. I was saddened.

In my opinion, a hero is a guy who grows, overcomes his weaknesses and triumphs. He doesn’t have to save the heroine for me to like him, either. He just has to be lovable for both me and the heroine. Someone who can’t stop feeling sorry for himself isn’t heroic. You had a horrible thing happen to you – how terrible! Now get over it and help the save the heroine from certain death, dammit!!!!

This hero was stuck in limbo. There was page after page of nightmares all the way to the end of the book. Every time the heroine met him for another useless talk in the meadows, he jumps, totally startled. Come ON! She can sneak up on you once, but really! Put your big boy panties on and let’s start acting like a man.

I realize the author was carefully writing a romance that didn’t come off looking like a romance. I’m down with that. God knows, as an art form, romance writing is considered a joke. But as I read, I became convinced that by focusing so completely on the heroine and short changing the hero, she actually short changed her heroine as well. It was hard to be happy for a woman who is with a man solely because he’s hot and she’s had a years old crush on him. There must be more or the whole story falls apart and your reader gets to THE END calling bullshit.