Outsider Heroines: the hidden prize

The fact that I love outsider heroines isn't something I've really thought about before. However, it struck me the other day as I read a review of Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs by Janine on Dear Author.

Janine is someone whose reviews I enjoy. Her reviews are clearly articulated and I've realised from reading them that we share certain reader preferences so I'm always interested in what she likes. The review I read the other day is actually a review of the third book in the series but it prompted me to buy the first one. Here is how Janine described the heroine:

Anna.... is an omega werewolf, which means that she is outside the pack structure. She cannot be commanded by anyone, but she also lacks the alphas’ aggressive tendencies. Instead, her presence has a calming influence on dominant wolves. Anna is a relatively young werewolf, only in her twenties. The pack Anna originally belonged to abused her and assaulted her sexually, and Anna’s recovery from those attacks is an ongoing process.

Immediately, I was interested.

Then Janine mentioned that she had read the first book seven times. Seven. Times. Oho!

Then I got to the end of the review where Janine's bio is. This reminded me that Janine's favourite romance is To Have And To Hold by Patricia Gaffney. Of course, I already knew this thanks to Jessica at RRR's very interesting posts about THATH and Janine's comments thereon but nevertheless, my eye drifted down over the bio and I noticed it.

At this point, my tiny brain went ::click:: Why? Because THATH has the ultimate outsider heroine. And here, a reviewer who cites THATH as her favourite romance, has directed my attention to a book with an outsider heroine whose description I find Immensely Appealing and which she considers to be so good that she has read it seven times.

Needless to say, I ordered it.

Having done that, I began, in my on-the-bus/while-making-tea/ in-the-shower way to muse over outsider heroines.

So what do I mean by outsider heroines? Well, to me, it is the heroine who does not belong to whatever society or norm prevails in the novel in question. She may simply exist outside this, but more often, she will actually be in some sort of sub-class. In the description above, Anna is not only a werewolf who exists outside the pack structure, she is one who has been mistreated. In THATH, Rachel is a convict who has recently been released from prison.

Another very common example of the outsider heroine is the servant. Governesses are common but I can also think of housekeepers and maids and - in contemporaries - office cleaners. It might be argued that secretaries/PAs can meet the definition, depending on execution/context. Prostitutes are another kind of outsider. As are heroines with disabilities and/ or gifts.

Some of my other favourite outsider heroines (this list reflects my historical bias) are:

- Emily from Silent Melody by Balogh (deaf mute)
- Lily from Lily by Gaffney (maid)
- Anne Jewel from Simply Love by Balogh (teacher and unmarried mother in regency times)
- Viola from No Man's Mistress by Balogh (prostitute)
- Fleur from The Secret Pearl (prostitute AND governess)

- Carrie Wiggins from Sweet Everlasting by Gaffney (mute)
- Emma from A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole (halfling vamp/valkyrie)

And of course I shouldn't omit the classics. I wouldn't count Austen's Mansfield Park or Jane Eyre as favourite books but they both feature classic blueprints of the outsider heroine in Fanny Price (poor relation) and Jane (governess).

There are plenty of books in which it is the hero who is the outsider, but interestingly, I tend to find they don't tend so often to inhabit a sub-class. They tend rather to be proud loners. Think of Wild at Heart by Gaffney (wild man) and The Proposition by Judith Ivory (self-emplyed rat-catcher). Broken Wing by James is something of an exception having a prostitute hero. I've really enjoyed these outsider hero books but must admit that the outsider hero doesn't resonate with me so forcefully as his female counterpart.

An absolutely key part of the outsider heroine storyline is that it usually up to the hero to restore (or assimilate) her into the society that she is excluded from. Is my preference for female outsiders related to this? Is it because I want the hero to rescue the heroine and I find heroines rescuing heroes less compelling? I don't think it's that. The best outsider stories usually subvert the idea of rescue anyway: in THATH, Rachel saves Sebastian from himself. No, I don't think it's that.

Here's an interesting thing though. How are outsider heroines restored? It's almost always through marriage. I don't mean, incidentally, that the outside heroine is not a strong character who can't cope without the hero, rather that she is only restored to her proper status in society through marriage to the hero. There's a fairytale tone to all of this, Cinderella, Donkeyskin. The prince discovering the true princess under the rags.

The outsider hero is quite different. In the three examples given above - Wild At Heart, The Proposition and Broken Wing - the hero restores his own status through a mixture of his own actions and some luck. Sometimes he will be supported in this by the heroine but he rarely seems to find it through her offices alone. In Wild At Heart, the heroine helps Michael the wild man to acclimatise to life in the world but it is the discovery of his true identity - a chance discovery - that restores him. Similarly with Mick in The Proposition. In Broken Wing, Gabriel makes his fortune at sea before returning to the heroine. I am not saying these heroes don't need the heroine, but their restoration of status is earned or inherited independently of her. Funnily enough, this also has a fairytale tone - all those enterprising lads who make their own fortunes and the win the princess.

And I think that's the story: women are prizes. Prizes hidden under rags to be discovered by princes. Prizes on thrones to be won by brave men doing brave deeds.

Tumperkin tips her hat to the Great Western Drive

Don't you just love Kristie J? The woman is a dynamo and she's so full great ideas. I particularly love her campaigns, and her latest is the Great Western Drive, a week long 'encouragement' to try to get more people to read the Western romance genre. She's got various others involved including Wendy the Superlibrarian (whose blog I have only recently discovered and love - yes I know: she has been around for years/ how can I not have visited her blog before etc. Colour me rubbish.)

Now, I have to start this post with a big caveat. Um - I don't really read Westerns. I have reviewed one Western romance (erotic) on this site - and I did enjoy it, albeit with a few minor reservations. It was Caine's Reckoning by Sarah McCarthy. But that is pretty much it. As I explained in my review of that book, I do have something of a prejudicial hurdle to get over with the Western in that my dad - when I was a child - was obsessed with Westerns and watched them/ listened to C&W music all the time. You may think this is odd for a Scottish man but in fact it is not. There is a certain breed of Scot that goes for this in a big way. It is a working-class, Central belt thing. (Think that old 80s BBC Scotland series My Cheatin' Heart featuring a very young Tilda Swinton. View a scene here.)

Anyhoo, the point is that having been subjected to this endlessly as a child, I have a reluctance to engage with the Western romance. Kristie's enthusings have, however, piqued my curiosity and I am determined to try one of her five recommendations. The one that appeals most is probably the Megan McKinney one. But any other suggestions would be most welcome....

For this post, however, I thought I would offer some thoughts (despite my total lack of knowledge about Western romance) on the Western hero. In my defence, I have (somewhat reluctantly) watched a lot of Western movies.

Kristie talked about the 'realness' of the characters and conflict (which Wendy echoed), the lack of class distinctions (as opposed to European historicals) and the fact that the heroes work for what they have (rather than just inheriting it). This seems to chime with the quote below which relates to silent movie Western heroes, and is taken from the University of Virginia website. It seemed apt to me :

The Western may be the perfect vehicle for silent narrative film, since it values action over language. The Western hero is the possessor of physical strength, stamina, and an innate sense of the right thing to do; he rejects eloquence, refinement, and superior intelligence as standards of measure. In the early twentieth century, he holds special appeal for audiences because he functions as the antithesis of Eastern, industrialized culture..... The Western hero is serious not only in his labor, but also in his outlook. According to Jane Tompkins the Western hero is marked by a sense of pragmatism, stoicism, and an acceptance of death.

And this is my sense of the hero too. In a word? Capable. This a hero who - and I have to refer back to that Sarah McCarthy review here, trusts and protects.

Having had that thought (on the bus today, on the way to work) I thought to myself: you know, that is a very different thing from the appeal of the classic Regency rake. Just look at that quote above again. The cowboy rejects all that elegance and refinement and forges a sort of brute virtue. Callouses and dirt are his badges. His verbal style is laconic; he is a man of few words, but each one meaningful. By contrast, the Regency hero is all about excess and glamour and langour. He is often a man who - far from being capable - feels totally useless. Usually is. He is a man in need of reform. He is a man who usually needs a capable woman.

In this light, the preference for Westerns or Regencies takes on a different complexion doesn't it? Not so much a question of chaps over breeches or Stetsons over curly brimmed beavers. More a question of essence.

I do appreciate that these are gross generalisations. For example, there seems to be a sub-set of Western hero - the gambler - who might be a bit more like the rake figure, and not every hero of a Regency is a sex-and-booze addled scoundrel (although whyever not, I can't imagine! *thrills*). But there is certainly enough a pattern to make it remarkable, in the most literal sense of the word.

So what does this say about me? I am a self-confessed Regency addict; a reader who usually avoids the Western (though I am going to try one, I promise. I can scarcely do less in the face of Kristie J's encouragement). Am I attracted to scoundrels? Or to stories in which capable heroines shine?

Or is it - as I suspect - more complex than that?

It's worth a ponder.

It seems appropriate to leave you with a cowboy and Clint is the ultimate cowboy isn't he? So sexy. I soooo would. Check this out. It's a trailer for Two Mules for Sister Sara and its totally built around the fact that Clint Eastwood is the male lead.











I haven't counted the number of times the voiceover says "Clint Eastwood" but it's a lot. Plus it really chimes with all the values above. The opening narration is "Clint Eastwood. Hero for Hire. Blazes his way across a land of injustice. (Pause) Mr Action himself." I particularly love the line "Clint is a one man suicide squad!"

Romance, food, and a review of Delicious by Sherry Thomas

It's particularly appropriate to do a post that brackets food and romance today. Last night me and Mr T were at our friends' wedding up North. It was a-maz-ing. It was on my pal's dad's farm. They put up a marquee and the food was extraordinary. Three spit roast hogs, potato dauphanoise, carrots straight out of the field. Then for pudding, each table got an enormous bowl of berries and a oozingly creamy lemon tart to share. Proper Scottish tablet with the coffee. Heaps of wine. A straining cheese table that I just couldn't handle. Fabulous wedding cake later. We danced till two in the morning then (a few of us) rolled into our tents which we'd pitched next to the marquee.


Everyone was ooohing and ahhhing over the food and imbibing the lovely wine and by the time the speeches came around the mood was really high. Then the speeches which were incredibly funny but also heartfelt and in the case of the groom, romantic. I had a tear in my eye.









So yes, it was a night of great food and high romance.

A good time to review Delicious by Sherry Thomas.

Amazing though it seems to me now, Delicious has been languishing in my TBR pile for literally months. I bought it not long after reading Thomas' debut Private Arrangements which I really liked. So you'd have thought I'd have jumped right into it. But no. Part of the reason for this is that Thomas' writing is really quite rich; her prose is very good and not to be rushed. So at first, Delicious was being saved by me for a real treat. And then one day I picked up and gave it a very quick skim over (standard Tumperkin-reading approach). I saw that it really did talk about food a lot. And somehow, at the time, that really didn't appeal. I'm not sure why. Maybe I wasn't hungry at the time? Maybe it's because I don't associate romance-reading with food. Whatever it was, Delicious went back on the pile, this time, a little lower down. And there it stayed. Until I was going on holiday to France last month.

When I try to think of food appearing in literature, I'm slightly surprised by how few examples I can come up with. I've not cheated and consulted either my own bookshelves or Googled this. So the following examples are the ones that genuinely occurred to me:-

• In my youth I read a lot of Enid Blyton. Both the school books (which must have been an inspiration to JK Rowling) and the mysteries. My favourites were the Malory Towers books (1946-1951). Every school book always had a midnight feast. These were written during or just after the second world war in food-rationed Britain and I can just imagine all those sweetie-deprived little girls reading about these feasts with great envy. There would usually be cans of peaches and evaporated milk, cakes sent by the girls' mothers (I was sooooo seduced by the idea of cake arriving by post) and always always 'lashings of ginger beer'. (Incidentally, the Famous Five books and Blyton's rather - ahem - un-PC views were hilariously sent up by The Comic Strip in the 1980s. See video here). In Blyton's books, food was always a treat and something to be celebrated.
• On a more literary note, there is a memorable food scene in Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. Oscar is a child in the scene. He is salivating over a tiny Christmas pudding that the housekeeper has made for him against the express instructions of Oscar's religious zealot father who is opposed to any sort of pleasure. Carey describes all the ingredients in great detail and relates the sights and smells beautifully to how the child-Oscar feels. It's a gorgeous piece of writing. But of course, Oscar never gets the pudding. I think he gets a beating instead.
• Finally - and this is the only romance novel I've been able to think of off the top of my head - is Riders by Jilly Cooper, one of those bonktastic blockbusters from the 1980s chock full of Cooper's standard eccentric bunch of characters and humour. If this book has a heroine, it is Tory, wife of Jake the gypsy. Kindly, a bit pudgy, she adores Jake but it's a long time before he finally comes to love her back. There's a great scene where poor Tory - always put upon domestically - has made Sunday lunch for heaps of people. It's been a miserable meal and then she has to clear all the plates away. She ends up in the kitchen alone and spots a leftover cold roast potato. She picks it up and eats it. And she's utterly miserable. She feels like this weak, bad person for having eaten a roast potato that she didn't even need or want and that's cold. It's a great illustration of her poor self-esteem and misery.

I will get on to Delicious presently, I promise.

Eating is a sensual experience: the smell of it cooking, the sight of being prepared and brought to table, the taste and texture in your mouth, the sound of it. This all has good writing potential. But the thing that strikes me about the examples given above is that in each case, the food was connected to some sort of emotion. It was that that made it memorable to me. I know that I've read food descriptions and references galore in other novels - but unless it's woven into the emotional heart of the story, I don't think it makes more than a passing impact on me.

In Delicious, Thomas uses food in both ways I've described above: to evoke the senses of the reader and as a way of showing emotion. And even beyond that. She goes further and uses it to actually draw the characters; aspects of their personalities that are demonstrated by how they relate to food in general and in relation to particular dishes. She also deals with the relationship between food and appetite and uses that as an anaolgy for other appetites: sexual appetite, zest for life in general. We see that appetite denied breeds a hunger that can be both positive and negative. Appetite indulged can bring joy - but over-indulged perhaps a certain flabbiness of character. And appetite suppressed is the most dangerous of all.

The heroine, Verity Durant is an unsurpassed cook with a colourful and somewhat secret past. There are various phases to Verity's life, all of which are important to how the story develops and the final denoument. However, the action of the novel is split between 'the present' and a decade earlier.

A decade earlier, Verity - having by this time already undergone a fair bit of turmoil in her life - was cook to Bertam Somerset. As well as his cook, she was his lover. She believed he would marry her. However, when she tells him a secret of her past and he decides to check it out, he brutally rejects her. Angry and hurt, she decides that she will seek out Bertie's arch-enemy who happens to be his half-brother, Stuart. At this point, Verity is acting in a rash and over-emotional manner - her core character flaw and the one that has led her into trouble in the past.

Stuart started life as Bertie's illegitimate brother. We are given to understand that their father brought Stuart into his household when he was a young boy, paid off his mother and ended up becoming so proud of Sturat's acheivements that he went so far as to have him legitimised by Act of Parliament. Bertie and Stuart initially got on very well but at some point, Bertie became jealous and we are told that matters deteriorated so much that the brothers ended up fighting bitterly through the courts till Bertie almost drove Stuart to bankruptcy. One of my (minor) quibbles with Delicious is that none of this is dealt with in detail. Bertie's character and the brothers' relationship is explained over the course of the novel but whilst this all made a sort of sense with the limited backstory provided, the lack of detail meant that it didn't ultimately satisfy me. I would really have liked a great deal more of this bit of the story.

Back to the plot: Verity tracks down Stuart. They share one magical night and fall in love. The next day she leaves and does not tell him who she was. Naturally there are noble reasons for this. She goes back to Bertie - but this time just as his cook. The remainder of the novel is set a decade later when Bertie unexpectedly dies. Stuart inherits everything, including his brother's staff. By this stage he is wealthy, a successful politician and has just become engaged to a suitable woman. However, his appetite - for life, for food, for sex - is deadened and he is living a colourless existence.

One of the book's central conceits is that Stuart does not know who his cook is for much of the book. By coincidence and design, Verity manages to conduct all of their conversations and even a sexual liaison anonymously. Without actually stating that this is her preference, she somehow (I wasn't sure how) manages to convey this to Stuart to the extent that at one stage he presents her (via dumb waiter) with a blindfold to wear when they next meet. For me, this was unconvincing. It gave the book an interesting angle and drove the rather complex plot, but I struggled with why Verity would keep the secret as assiduously as she did, and why Stuart was neither suspicious of her strange obsession nor curious to discover the truth, particularly given his stated sexual interest in her.

I very much liked Verity's character and her mixture of strength, stoicism, frustration-induced rashness, zest for life, capacity for love and sheer competency. I also loved that she was a true lover of her art of cookery and she viewed her career with all the pride and professionalism of any modern professional woman. Not a typical romance heroine.

Stuart was a little bloodless for my taste. At the start of the book he seemed to be so entirely lacking in any kind of spark and to take so little enjoyment in anything, that he came across as something of a cypher. In my recent review of Meredith Duran's Bound By Your Touch over at RRR, I mused on the endless appeal of the excessive self-loathing scoundrel. Thinking about that in the context of Delicious, perhaps it is the fact that however destructive and self-obsessed they are, scoundrels are receptive to pleasure? Stuart was the very opposite of this - he was scared of pleasure. This was, admittedly, necessary to the theme of appetite and how Verity tantalises Stuart's deadened senses and wakes him up to joys of life again. And in fairness, I did greatly warm up to Stuart and was really quite fond of him by the denouement. However, he was not a hero I could fall in love with.

So did I enjoy Delicious? Oh, I assuredly did. Once I got going on this book, I was reluctant to put it down. The writing is beautiful and the story - despite my fairly minor quibbles - was cleverly structured with a satisfying resolution. The secondary characters are extremely well-realised and I very much enjoyed the secondary romance. The food descriptions are absolutely magnificent; really inventive and evocative. I think my favourite food-related passage was a poignant discussion between Verity and Stuart when Verity describes a very sad day in her past when she had eaten some treacle rock but because she was miserable it was just ashes in her mouth, and then Stuart reciprocates with a story of his own. Lovely scene that.

Fittingly, Mr T has just delivered a mug of Earl Grey to me. After all the indulgence of yesterday I should resist any accompaniment but all this talk of food is making think of the ginger snaps in the cupboard.....

My weekend and my random brain

That was a good weekend.

This is where we were (see above). Keld in the Yorkshire Dales.

This is why Mr Tumperkin likes the Yorkshire Dales:

Real ale. Preferably accompanied by a packet of pork scratchings *retches*.

This why Mouse (le petit fils) likes the Yorkshire Dales:

Real ale and sheep collided on Saturday evening when we visited this pub - Britain's highest pub, the Tan Hill Inn.

When we arrived, there was a sheep trying to get in the pub. I shooed it off but as I opened the door to let the children in. It tried to rush past me, baaing looudly. Several times! Mouse wailed.

Much hilarity in the pub over this. And then all weekend, Mouse kept saying to us, "Sheep it try a come inna pub it was **screws up face to aggressive expression** BAAAAAAA! Like that mummy."

We were camping. First time I've camped in a few years. First night was hell. NO sleep. Hours of lying awake tossing and turning. Second night better: exhaustion-induced sleep. Other than that, it was tremendous fun. Last night we had a camp fire to keep off the midges (HA!). Once the kids had finally gone to bed, Mr T and I were crouched over the fire, chatting. I had a towel over my head and he had fashioned a rudimentary insect mask using a child's fishing net. When it got too ridiculous to bear, we retired to the car where he murdered a few hundred midges in cold blood and I tried to read Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. (Soooo enjoying it).

Isn't this cover fab? It's even nicer close up. Brings to mind those 40s babe posters. Is it the same as the US one?

Anyhoo, back to camping. Some of you may think that sitting around a camp fire being eaten (and not, as Mr T pointed out, in a good way) not to mention sleeping badly doesn't sound so great - but really, it was a fab weekend! I had those fleeting moments of pure happiness you get sometimes from just living in the moment.

But of course, even when I'm living in the moment, the old brain box has a tendancy to drift. And my random brain has been pondering on a great many odd things this weekend.

I took a notion a couple of weeks ago, to try some Harlequin manga and some yaoi. So, on a whim, I bought Idol Dreams, an adaptation of an old Charlotte Lamb (you know how I loves me my Lambs) and Caged Slave (title bears no relation to story BTW - it's in fact a sweetish M/M romance).

I'm not going to bore you all with my comic book credentials. I don't really have any but I read a lot of comics from about 7-17 and I've never looked down on comic book art. My brother is really into comic books and is a good artist himself. He's never pursued it but he showed me a sort of autobiographical strip he did - it was amazing.

Anyway. I read these before my camping weekend and then sort of brooded on them during my spare moments.

They were both pretty slight but enjoyable and I was very aware that the art was at the forefront of my enjoyment. Idol Dreams was a proper comic book format whereas Caged Slave was an illustrated prose novel.

Although I suspect Idol Dreams was aimed squarely at a Western audience, both books seemed to me to have a Japanese soul. In both books, the 'heroine' is extremely shy with a tendancy to passive, self-effacing behavior that is nevertheless firmly rooted in pride.

I was surprised by how into the artwork I was. In Idol Dreams, the first picture of the hero was arresting. I kind of stared at it for a while and have since gone back to stare at it a few more times. Which kind of makes me feel about fifteen. He has an expression which I suspect is pretty characteristic of the genre. Haunted and poignant.

Ohmigod. I am so fifteen.

Caged Slave was even more interesting to me. I know I described it as a sweet M/M romance above. I suppose that sort of ignores the erotic content somewhat *coughs*. But really, compared to say, James Lear, it was very tame stuff.

If the 'heroine-hero', Tsukasa, was a woman, he would be slated by readers for his pathetic behaviour. If Tsukasa said "No! Please! We mustn't!" (and he did, frequently) he most assuredly meant "Oh yes, big boy! Do it to me, now." As I read this, I kept thinking, why am I reading this? To say it was slight is to massively overrate its heft. There was no conflict save for the weirdness going on in Tuskasa's own head. The constant reassurance and ready declarations of love that the hero Takeshima offered to the lame Tsukasa made my conflict-craving soul weep. But the pictures were weirdly mesmerising and I read this book quickly, unable to put it down.

I think I want to explore this further.

So if anyone has any Yaoi recommendations, I would be most interested to hear them.

Finally, I also spent some time thinking about the various pending posts outlined in my last post, and hopefully those will follow shortly.

Pending tray

It's probably a blogging sin to write a post about the posts you intend to write but have not yet written. One, it's not a real post, and two, it's setting yourself up for failure.

But a while ago, Nicola O set out her 'to be written' posts and invited views on what people were most interested in reading - which I thought was nicely interactive - so I thought I'd do the same.

So here are the posts that are percolating in my brain at the moment. What do you think?

1. One of favourite romances turns 30: a review of Frustration by Charlotte Lamb (1979)

2. Observations on food in romance and a long overdue review of Delicious by Sherry Thomas

3. Dipping my toe in The Pond: recent American contemporary reads (Crusie; Roberts and James - and will I like Evanovich?)

4. Favourite and least-favourite romance heroine archetypes

5. The Long And Winding Bedwyn Road: a review of Simply Perfect by Mary Balogh

What do you reckon?

Ethics in my Reading

I read a few books on holiday and I will be reviewing them. But first, I feel compelled to blog about something else.

And BTW, I am totally not trying to steal a march on Jessica here, who has promised to blog about 'the ethics of reading' at some point. In fact, I don't even know what she plans to talk about under that heading. Chick's a philosophiser, so it could be most anything. (I have a work-friend who did a first degree in philosophy and she's disturbingly clever. Not to mention having a penchant for big rings and prostitute-coats. But that's another story. Suffice to say those philosophisers are tricksy sorts.)

Recently, I have been musing (on the bus, walking to the office) about ethical/ moral issues in my reading. I think this was started by all those polls Dear Author have been running about stuff like whether adultery and abortion are 'acceptable' in romance.

My immediate reaction to that questions is What the Fuck? Like, such things could be unacceptable in fiction? These are just - part of life! But 43% of those who voted at Dear Author (who I imagine - accurately or not - to be the of a more broad-minded persuasion) felt adultery was NEVER acceptable in a romance.

Jeez.

As I've got older, I've found myself becoming more prudish about stuff like affairs. I recently found out that a friend was having an extra-marital affair and was so saddened. But still, I don't see something like that as a catastrophic moral failing. As far as books go, whether an author can have a character cheat and still retain my sympathy isn't in the fact of them being a cheater - it's in the execution.

Over the years I've read posts about all sorts of difficult issues: forced sex, BDSM, controlling heroes Stuff that raises issues over consent, abuse, self-worth. And for me, I'm cool with all of it. No matter how much something might offend 'normal' mores, if the author can make it explicable with reference to their characters, I can be cool with it. I'm disturbed by reader comments that say authors 'shouldn't' write this or that character or scene or event in a particular way. I'm hugely protective of freedom of expression and I resent the attitude (whether partriarchal or matriarchal) that readers don' t have the wit to make their own judgements.

And so, until recently, I've been patting myself on the back thinking that I'm this uber-liberal, all cool with the morally ambiguous and questionable. The trouble is, I've recently had to admit that I do have a sensitivity. One which I've alluded to before. And it's around killing/ punishment/ guns/ stuff like that.

I noticed it reading Michelle Hauf's The Highwayman, which CJ had been discussing on her blog vis-a-vis the feline heroine (a familiar). I liked the sound of it and bought it on impulse. However, I was very quickly scowling at the hero, who had a habit of killing familiars. He discussed this particular character trait of his in the way that someone might mention that they like Simon & Garfunkel songs; like it was well, No Biggie. You know, I kill. A lot. Just one of those little things about me. *shrugs*

I found this extremely off-putting. I disapproved of Max. I found my eyebrows drawing together in a Most Displeased Fashion whenever the topic came up.

I also hate vigilante justice and mob violence (see my review of Caressed by Ice linked to above). Even the fairly bland mob justice that is delivered in No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh (nice man beats up pimp in front of mob of their peers) bothered me.

Is this because I am a lawyer? Or British? A member of Amnesty International?

Does this explain whyI've found it difficult to get into paranormal/ UF romance and romantic suspense?

Whatever the answer to those questions, I think I have to face up to the fact that I do have ethical buttons that can be pushed. It's just that I never thought of them as anything more significant than preferences before.