Any time he shows up, the reader just knows everything is going to be okay, often with just the lifting of his quizzing glass. Mary Balogh does this with Wulfric Bedwyn. While I appreciate the romance heroes who make everything okay by virtue of their very presence, they’re not the ones that get my heart pumping. Even the worst put-together people who make the most horrible mistakes in the most fraught situations can still be dreamy objects of someone’s affection.

They eventually get their acts together with the help of the heroine and everyone gets their happily ever after. In romance, this works partly because no matter how much characters screw up, there is redemption and healing in the end.

Self-possessed, omnipotent alphas these are not. For those keeping score, that gives us a three out of three on “avoiding his life,” a hero who keeps falling down, a hero who can’t actually speak for a good part of the novel and a hero whose profound issues I won’t reveal because I know someone who reads this blog hasn’t read it yet. Maitland from Laura Kinsale’s Prince of Midnight and 3) Rob from Cara McKenna’s Unbound. My top three heroes ever are 1) the Duke of Jervaulx from Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, 2) S.T. I adored it.Īs much as I would like to say that it’s fun for me when both the characters are a mess, what I love is screwed up heroes. And it doesn’t get better until about 95% of the way through the novel. Then everything falls apart in a bunch of really bad ways. The context was Jackie Ashenden’s Having Her, in which a hero with a schizophrenic mother and a heroine with a struggling business and virginity issues tumble into a fairly surprising relationship for a “best friend’s older brother” trope book. The other day, my proclivity for loving really, really broken characters and gleefully watching as an author puts them through the wringer came up in a conversation on Twitter.

Illumination by Rowan Speedwell