Ride Hard by Laura KayeMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
1.5 stars
I read romance because, typically, it's written by women for women. For every time I throw my fist in the air and yell "Preach!" while reading a Dahl heroine and for every time I become a sobbing mess feeling the pain of a Milan heroine, I'll keep coming back because in some way my issues and emotions are laid bare, acknowledged, and discussed.
I want to call this a New Adult but with a hero who is 37yrs old, can I? The heroine is 22yrs old and she was definitely not written for me. There's reason for her to be shy and guarded but the whole lost little girl thing did not play well with my 33yrs old self. Haven loves to cook, is so sweetly shy, but wait, also craves sex. Now, of course, a woman can have these traits but the way it is written here, kind of shallow character depth with just these traits front and center and maybe you could see why I feel like this heroine was written for some shitty ideal for what men want? She's an angel, so pure, and sweet but, without a lot of interaction, emotional depth, and relationship building becomes some sort of highly driven sexual being with the hero. It just doesn't work without depth, building blocks, and growth. I felt like I was reading a play where a dude takes a Barbie doll and a Ken doll and smashes them together over and over and declares it a romance.
Maybe I'm just getting too old for these types of romance but dang it, give me emotion and depth.
View all my reviews
I'm with you. I read romance because typically it is written by women for women, and targets to what women are looking for in a romance. When you can clearly tell that the heroine was written to target what men want in a woman, it becomes a less enjoyable experience for me.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, this is one of the reasons I'm not as infatuated with romance in a lot of YA books, because the heroines always seem to carry this special "All the men love me because this is what they want in a girl" type of personality trait.
It's just really jarring when the female heroine isn't written in a way you can relate with.
Yes! It completely jars me out of the story. I thought the whole manic pixie girl craze was over and had addressed this "she's not like all the other women" gross tropes.
DeleteI say I'm a hero centric reader but I'm still going to stick up and expect my heroine be afforded the respect to be a fully fleshed out character