Sometimes Love Don’t Feel Like It Should…

Love Hurts- Nazareth

Love hurts, love scars,

Love wounds, and marks,

Any heart, not tough,

Or strong, enough

To take a lot of pain,

Take a lot of pain

Love is like a cloud

Holds a lot of rain

Love hurts, ooh ooh love hurts

Im young, I know,

But even soI know a thing, or two

I learned, from you

I really learned a lot,

Really learned a lot

Love is like a flame

It burns you when its hot

Love hurts, ooh ooh love hurts

One of the reasons I like to read, is to share and feel all the emotions the authors make characters feel in the the book. I like to laugh with them, get angry with them, hurt with them, and feel joy with them. If the author does her/his job well, then I get to run the gamut of emotions and I love, love, love it. But sometimes the author goes a little too far. I recently read a Harlequin Historical that had me feeling a lot of sad and a lot of mad.

Now, I understand when I read a historical, I have to remember that in those times, women were property and had little to no rights. I get that. I also know to expect some misogyny and male chauvinism. I can read and enjoy historical romance because I accept this as a part of historical accuracy, or whatever. That’s not the problem I had with this book. In fact, I have had this problem with other books that were contemporary romances, so by no means am I blaming this particular book simply because it was a historical. The genre really has no basis in how I reacted to this story.

It was the writing. Don’t get me wrong, the author was good. In fact, her writing was great. It made me feel. A lot. That feeling was sadness. Even at the end. I know when I read a romance, there are going to be a few bumps in the road to the HEA. There has to be or it would be so boring we would set our hair on fire. I like conflict between the protags. But I like it to be evenly distributed. I don’t want one protag having all the power over the other one throughout the whole book. Usually, authors do a good job of keeping it even and if not, they remedy that by having one of the protags doing teh big grovel. I love the grovel!

This book went way over the mountain of conflict and into verbal abuse land, and it camped there, planted crops there and had children there and stayed there for the rest of its fricken life until the last 3 pages.

The hero was a verbally abusive ass. I would have accepted his assholishness, if the heroine had got back some of her own at least once in the enitre story. But she never did. NEVER. NOT ONCE. And he never stopped. There were several times in the story that he was so cruel, I had tears in my eyes. It takes a lot for a book to make me cry, movies yes, books, no, but this was so unending and hurtful, it finally broke me. Again and again he said horrible things to her and again and again she took it and said nothing. This went on until the last THREE pages of the book when all of the sudden we are supposed to believe he loves her and they have their HEA. Bullshit. Because this happened in the book before. Sir Ass would be cruel, he would apologize and she would accept and then in the very next chapter, it would happen all over again. And now all of the sudden, I am supposed to believe that he loves her and won’t hurt her anymore just because it is the end of the fucking book? NO. Because it’s a romance and the rule is there has to be an HEA? NO. The author didn’t convince me. This book had no HEA.

So I guess I have a few rules when it comes to confict between the protags.

1) The protags can say something mean or act unkindly once or twice but then there has to be grovel.
2) The abused protag has to stand up for themselves at some point in the story.
3) The author has to make me believe that both of the protags have changed before the last three pages of the book.
4) The reader has to be happy at the end of the book, in order for it to be an HEA.

What rules would you add? How much abuse is too much abuse? Where do you draw the line?