Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

*applause!* I’ve blogged about this exact thing many times. It makes me absolutely furious when the death of a child is used as a cheap plot point or shortcut to emotional response. For a while it seemed like almost every book I picked up had a female MC who’d lost a child. I wanted to scream. Especially as a mother...I just can’t take it. It’s lazy and it’s mean. If you can’t make me care about your character because of the way you’ve written her/him instead of using a crappy device like that...I don’t want to read your book.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had a hard time with stories involving bad thing happening to children before, but now that I have young children of my own, I CANNOT deal with it!  I don’t know how many suspense and romantic suspense novels I have decided not to buy because the plot involves some horrible thing inflicted on a child.  This also goes for “young people/children perpetrating horrific crimes.” Which explains why I hated Elizabeth George’s treatment of Lynley and Lady Helen’s baby, and did not read What Came Before He Shot her. I skimmed through The Suspicions of Mr. Wicher and got rid of my copy of The Devil in the White City. I’m not stupid; I know these things happen--my mom works for Child Protective Services, after all, and one of my sisters works for CASA.  Several of my friends were abused as children, as were two younger sisters whom my parents adopted. So it’s not like I stick my head in the sand.  But when it comes to entertainment--books, TV, movies, I am not going to choose work that’s going to make me sob through the whole thing.  Case in point:  the movie Vantage Point.  Did they really need to put that little girl in there?  I know she ended up being ok, but I still bawled just about every time she was onscreen.  Obviously there are plenty of people who either like or don’t mind this kind of thing, but count me out.

YES. I’m almost obsessively careful about what I read most of the time, because I can be hyper-sensitive and honestly don’t need to be thrown off-kilter for days because of a novel I read for fun, so I’m not sure I’ve encountered this recently, but when I have...UGH. Something like your example would absolutely gut me--and yeah, there’s no way you can get a satisfying HEA if that’s revealed at the end of the friggin’ book. At least if it was a significant part of the backstory that he dealt with throughout, you could ALMOST justify its use. (But why? Why do that? Why that crying baby? That’s disgusting.)

I feel the same way, often, about rape or sexual abuse as a plot device. It’s often just shoved in there to make the character more vulnerable, or to give him/her an “interesting” (that is, traumatic) past. It can be done well, but when it’s just thrown in there for no reason other than to manipulate the audience’s emotions, I find it reprehensible. (And I find tv drama is particularly bad about that.)

Jennifer Weiner ruined Certain Girls for me by killing off a character at the end.  (Not a kid.) She ruined my weekend, too.  I won’t be reading the sequel.

So does the same thing bother you if it’s revealed halfway through the book, and the rest of the book is spent cleaning up the aftermath of the revelation?  In other words, is it the cheap-trickness of the emotional tug that you hate, or is it the brushing over of consequences in a fairly unrealistic way?

I think I feel the same way about the books that end with the nice-guy hero shooting the villain to protect his girl.  Any reasonably well-adjusted person is not going to just walk away from killing someone else--no matter how little choice they had in the matter--and blithely go pick out china sets.

Actions and backstory should have consequences, and admitting the problem is really only supposed to be the *first* step, not the last one.

I am currently slogging my way through Brenda Joyce’s awful to my mind The Perfect Bride.  (That Publishers Weekly raved about it gives me pause, not as to my own sanity but to the reviewer’s.) Sure enough, the heroine is deeeeeeply traumatized by having witnessed as a child the brutal pitchforky death of her mother, complete with flashbacks that leave her, our damaged protagonist, writhing on the floor in anguish in front of her two hundred twenty-eight suitors.

Sound like something you want to read?  Yeah.  It’s exactly that excellent.

Brava on the rant, because, damn, that shit is wack.

I agree with you if it’s something that’s sprung on the reader close to the end of a story and left hanging there unresolved for the reader.

I don’t have an issue with it, if it’s part of the backstory like in Rachel Lee’s Miss Emmaline and the Archangel and several of Paula Detmer Riggs’ books.

Gah! I’m right there with you on this one, Sarah! Rant on!

For some reason, I have blank white space instead of the spoiler...hrm… So I went to the link and read the reviews. Damn but this book sounds rather blah. I like the one review that kept saying, “And then nothing happens...They meet..and nothing happens...They get married..and nothing happens...” I shan’t be wasting my time or money on this tome of unyielding...nothing.

Once again, well said. I cannot stomach books using that type of horrific, thoughtless pathos involving children. As parents, when our children experience the “little hurts”, we internalize that hurt. It feels like “arrow to the soul”. There is no need to capitalized on what we all feel for our children by dramatizing some horrible thing done to a child in a romance story.

I try and research the nature of a book carefully before purchasing and reading, because the type of emotional response provoked through the types of narrative you have described just leaves me feeling traumatized instead of uplifted. It really turns me away from ever reading the author’s work again.

I have to preface this by saying, that I think if the heroine in the main storyline is a physician, for example, who saves a sick child as part of the backstory in a well written romance then it can be satisfying and uplifting.

my spam filter is: son28 - interesting eh?

Thank you.
Recently on Lehrer’s News Hour, there was a long recap of the Rwanda Massacre with interviews of survivors and the hell they went through. I had to turn it off, but I heard enough to know exactly why I read romances with those lovely happy endings. There is plenty in life to prove otherwise, but I want a HEA for all.

I’d be interested in how you feel about Linda Howard’s ‘Cry No More’, as the premise of the book is pretty dark.  I absolutely loved this book, but my co-worker wouldn’t even finish the 3rd chapter; she found it pretty disturbing.  I think for me it was that the heroine was triumphant and expressed her pain for all and sundry, or just that I love Linda Howard :)

For me the problem is using the pain of children as a shortcut to a true emotional connection to the story and characters. 

I think it can be done really well in the right context, like in Laura Kinsale’s the Shadow and the Star, in which the hero survives child prostitution, Susan ELizabeth Phillips’s Dream a Little Dream, in which the hero has lost his 5 year old son and wife to a drunk driver and cannot bond with the heroine’s 5 year old son as a result, and Lydia Joyce’s Voices of the Night, in which the heroine, poverty stricken in Victorian London, has survived child abuse and neglect and is trying—not always successfully—to prevent the little family she has cobbled together from suffering the same.

I hate those exploitative books and TV shows which feature child harm for shock value. They end up diminishing the real harms done to kids and desensitizing the viewers to all kinds of violence.

I’d be interested in readers’ examples of romances in which the author used harm to children in this cheap way, because I can’t actually think of any at the moment.

Great rant!

I don’t understand why the outrage is stronger when children are involved.  Isn’t it equally aggravating when that manipulative yank on the heartstrings comes from the *heroine* being traumatized, or from violence or fear?

I think female characters are routinely treated that way in fiction; the occasional baby doesn’t particularly increase my ire.  But I’ve stated essentially the same disagreement here before, so I won’t argue it into the ground.

Stop using the unresolved and shabbily revealed death, injury, and irrevocable harm of children for dramatic impact in your stories.

If the child’s death/injury/harm motivates the character in some meaningful way, I have no problem with it.  To me, deft and effective technique on the part of the writer is key to not feeling emotionally manipulated.

My strongest aversion comes with unmotivated and gratuitous cruelty to or killing animals.  Not sure how often that comes up in romance, but I know I’ve seen it elsewhere.

I remember Marilyn Robinson at the Writers’ Workshop saying that hurting or killing animals within a story or novel is a cheap means of getting a visceral reation from readers, and I concur.

When I read Coetze’s Disgrace, I felt as though the author was trying to engender a response that he didn’t earn.  It seemed nakedly manipulative, and so I have avoided reading any further works by him.

For some reason, I have blank white space instead of the spoiler.

Just highlight the blank area & you’ll be able to see the spoiler.  “Spoiler font” keeps people from reading the spoiler by accident since you have to deliberately highlight the area to see it.

In terms of the Cheap Pathos, it’s the cheapness & bad writing that bother me.  I hate it when it feels like there should just be a note in the margin that says “Cry Here”.  I really hate feeling like I’m being manipulated and I think using a child is just a common way to do that.  I tend to agree with RfP that I notice it as much or more when a woman is used that way. 

There’s a long tradition in action stories (books, TV, movies) that I refer to as The Dead Girlfriend.  The story starts with the hero having the perfect girlfriend/wife.  She’s beautiful, smart, kind--the whole package, but she exists for the sole purpose of dying horribly so that the hero has the proper motivation to go off on his epic Lone Wolf righteous vengeance spree.  I have a whole rant about how much I hate this.

I’m with Beth, I don’t like the use of the pain of children as a shortcut, but it can be done really well. I have very mixed emotions about this, I don’t mind it as much if it’s revealed slowly, so that I have the time to heal too, but using the pain of children to shock and anger, I just can’t stand it.

I have the same feelings about rape and violence against women in romance, I can’t stand really explicit rape scenes. I can’t say I like rape in books, but it can be done really well, and easy on the reader too, so you, as a reader have time to absorb and heal.

I know both child abuse and rape happens, and more often than what you would like to think, but when I read, I like to be entertained, not shocked and angry and hurt. I like my HEA, or the HFN.

I bought The Passion of Simon Blackwell before a trip and read it, but the book seemed unwarrantedly emotionally shallow. I’m not a mother, so I wasn’t reacting to precisely the same things you were, SB Sarah, but yeah, I can understand it. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Eloisa James handled it fairly well in one of her early books, I think; but then again, she had actual experience about that which she was writing. That may be the difference; it’s hard to treat the injury/death of a child lightly if you’ve experienced it first-hand.

This is why I won’t watch CSI Miami. They seem to have a kid kill quota.

Oh come on, we read them for the vicarious thrill and the sex. It’s not like you can get that from your husband all the time. Husbands are imperfect creatures, fantasy romance novel guys are not. What did Andy Warhol say about sex?

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol

and…

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
Andy Warhol

If we are looking for a moral story, there’s always Dickens, or for a more emotional romp, Austen. Or if you want flowery speech, Garcia Marquez.

The trick, I think, to making romance also readable and also have a story line is to invest heavily in characters and their conflicts.

It’s not the hurting of the child that bothers me, as much as it’s the clumsy handling of it.  Which is not to say that I enjoy it when children get hurt.

I expect and even want my fictional friends to suffer great pain and anguish so that I can come along for the ride as they recover from it.

But one of the reasons I choose to read Romance is that I know I’ll end up feeling hopeful or uplifted or contented.

I do NOT want to finish a book and feel like my heart’s been ripped out and stomped on, and then wander around in black depression for an unreasonable length of time afterwards.

Say what you like about the HEA, but I absolutely require a positive, emotionally satisfying end to a Romance.

I think it depends how well the book is written.  If the death of a child is used as an easy explanation for the hero/ine being screwed up, it ranks right up there with the dead wife everyone thinks the hero adored having been an evil slut.  Been there, read that.  On the other hand, I thought Cheryl’s St John’s PRAIRIE WIFE deals with the aftermath of the death of a child in a realistic manner.  Both parents are devestated, and both have a hard time getting on with their lives.  The fact that they love each other doesn’t help much. Spamword gave96; well, I’d give it an 80.

Just fixin’ the old italics problem.

Agree on the Heartstring things.  Even when it’s done well I can be just too disturbed over it.  I stopped watching Cold Case (which I thought was an excellent show) because I was just so very disturbed—I think haunted wouldn’t be too strong a word—over an episode where a desperate mother jumped out of a window with her child.  Kudos to them in that it got me good, it got me /grieving/, which certainly was a response.  It just wasn’t a response I was willing to have wrung out of me over weeknight tv.

I read the Elantra series recently (not romance, so I had less expectations).  The level of destruction to lives and characters over the deaths in there to me rang more true than the “ooops, dead kid, sniff sniff, ok lets go get married now” level of treatment.

If you are going to kill someone trusting and vulnerable, as a writer, at least make it mean something to everyone concerned.  Otherwise, have your heroine break a nail, or total the car or something instead.  That said, not all of us will come back for more after you rip our guts out.

You are singing my song, missy! We lost our 16-year-old son, our only child, 5 years ago. Until then, I had not noticed how often the death of a child is used as a shorthand device in books and movies. Need a simple reason for angst? Dead child! Need a dramatic moment? Dead child! Hey, let’s kill the mom/dad/sister/brother! Heaven forbid that character development or original plotting occur instead. Lazy writing, IMO. I won’t include my rant on “so-called literary fiction” here. I’ve learned to ask “who dies?” when someone wants to lend me a “good” book or recommend a dramatic movie.
I can’t effectively analyze when, as part of the whole, it works. Sometimes it does. Maybe it is just the difference between good writing and lazy writing.
As for Linda Howard’s Cry No More, the portrayal of the heroine’s grief was spot on. It made me wonder what loss the author had suffered in her own life--which is a sign of good writing!

There are a couple of tv shows, particularly the crime dramas, that I have lost patience with because the writers were relying on cheap and easy methods to demand an emotional response from the viewer, methods I could not tolerate because they were weak and easy, and because they, if I could indulge in a moment of presuming the writers’ motivations, demonstrated little respect for my intelligence, my sensitivity, and my ability to care about the plight of adults.

I felt the same way about the movie, Pay It Forward.  Oh, how I hate that movie!  I watched for 2 hours or so--watching the kid be all precocious and sweet, watching his harried mother and his emotionally-stifled teacher began to find and heal each other, watching various people helping other people and feeling good.  Yeah, it was kind of sappy, but the acting was pretty good and it was warm and sweet.  And what do they do (because warm and sweet isn’t good drama, I guess)?  They KILL the kid!  For no reason--it’s completely random!  It was at the end of the movie, for chrissake, so it didn’t even move the plot forward in any way!  It was just some writer and/or director deciding that 1) it was so much more dramatic to have a tragic ending instead of a happy ending, and; 2) it was time to rip the viewers guts out and make them feel.  Wow--just look at that!  Bet you didn’t expect that twist, didja?  Now you know it’s great art, because everyone is miserable at the end, despite the feel-good message of the other 9/10’s of the film!  Don’t you feel all sad and, yet, edified in some way??  Balls!  All it made me feel was angry that they tried to manipulate my feelings in such a cheap and tawdry way and pissed that I’d ever invested so much time in the movie.  I turned off the movie right then, with maybe only 10 or 15 minutes left, and I’ve never watched it again.  Just thinking about it makes me a bit pissed, even now.

I must be very well adjusted-- or extremely shallow-- because I don’t take on Churchill’s black dog of depression when something bad happens in a book.  I can’t imagine having a weekend ruined-- or even an hour-- because of fictional trauma-- specially bad fictional trauma. 

The TV trope that used to be endemic in network action television-- a female character brings the hero a problem and they develop an attraction.  Then she is disposed of one way or another to make way for the next week’s lovely guest star.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now you know it’s great art, because everyone is miserable at the end

I may have posted this before, because it’s a favourite mini-rant of mine, but here it is again.

I had a conversation (about theatre) with a man who considers himself a patron of the arts.  According to him, dramatic plays are art, comedic plays are not.

He couldn’t justify his stance, but he stuck to it.  If it makes you sad or depressed or think deep thoughts, it’s quality.  If it makes you laugh or feel happy, it’s commercial schlock.

Grrr.

play56!  How does it know?

I stopped reading horror fiction when I had children.  There were too many real life horror scenarios now running through my head for me to read some author’s idea of “horror” for entertainment. 

I too loved CRY NO MORE.  The heroine’s strength in the face of overwhelming despair, and how she dealt with it, was well crafted and this remains one of my favorite Linda Howard’s, as well as one of my favorite heroes.  How can you not love a dangerous guy who buckles his seat belt and votes in every election?  That’s my kind of hero!

I agree, I stopped watching Without A Trace when they did the episode about the child predator who gets the child by convincing him that his parents didn’t want him because he wanted a $20 shirt. I’ve worked social services and that one hit too close to home. Since my own child was born I had to let all those type shows go.

I blogged about SEP and miscarriages when she used it as a plot device in This Heart of Mine. The loss scene is so painful, so evocative and the heroine does something that I myself actually did when I lost my baby that I knew either SEP has been through it, or knows someone close who has.

I don’t recall reading any books that have used child death and abuse as a ‘reveal.’ That would be strange. Both of my books have characters who were abused as children, but you know that from the beginning. Yeah, I think I’d be annoyed as well.

Bad things happen to good people every day, and a lot of it is seemingly quite random.  Accidents and killings happen more often than anyone is comfortable thinking about.  {{{PDXJane}}}}

But one of the reasons this is device is trotted out so often is that it WORKS.  Is there anything scarier than the death of a loved one which can’t be predicted, can’t be prevented?  Anything more visceral than having to admit that you have no control over certain events, that all you have control of his how you deal with the aftermath? 

These stories are part of the human condition.  I for one appreciate when an author exposes me to emotions, to situations, I never hope to deal with in real life - if it is done with skill and depth, and if I know what I’m getting into when I read the book.  I read and learn.  YMMV.

I’ve hated this cheap ploy for so long that I have a term for it:  Gratuitous Child Endangerment.  It usually rings so false that you know the screenwriters (usually male) have never actually had or had to care for a child.

I stopped reading Mary Higgins Clark because the Endangered / Killed Child ploy seemed to be at the heart of *all* her stories.

I’ve given this some more thought. I think, perhaps, that my reaction to using a child’s death as a plot device has more to do with how “true” it feels. If it doesn’t ring true, and it for me it usually doesn’t, it appears to me to reduce it to the level of “insert chase scene here.” In this case, for me, it trivializes a life-altering experience. And for any bereaved parent, the loss is the pivot point in life. An understatement of titanic proportions.  If I look at it dispassionately, such an experience, of course, is worthy of exploring. It is probably unlikely that I will see many movies or read many books that handle it well, because I simply wouldn’t be able to watch/read it.

This circles back to reading for pleasure/comfort. I’ve settled in with my cup of tea/glass of wine, the cat is in my lap, the phone is quiet, and my husband isn’t bugging me. My version of heaven. My heroine can overcome difficulties and withstand trauma--but please don’t rip out my heart out in the process. If I wanted that experience, I would have picked up one of Oprah’s picks.

Anything more visceral than having to admit that you have no control over certain events, that all you have control of his how you deal with the aftermath?

These stories are part of the human condition.  I for one appreciate when an author exposes me to emotions, to situations, I never hope to deal with in real life - if it is done with skill and depth, and if I know what I’m getting into when I read the book.

I think the problem is when this agonizing situation is tacked onto the story to give it a gloss of emotional depth, instead of making it a significant and well-developed part of story so that dealing with the aftermath is actually addressed in the story.

I can handle just about any kind of vile trauma in a story if I can ride along with the HEALING aftermath and if I’m left with a sense of hope for the future at the end of it all.

Getting smacked in the face with it in the last 20 pages (or in the last 10 minutes of the show in the case of television) is NOT a well-developed story.  It’s not even a well-done surprise twist.

One of the rules of storytelling is that you have to give clues as to what’s coming up.  They can be sneaky clues, but the reader should be able to pick up on them on the second read-through.  The big denouement should explain the actions and reactions of the character throughout the story.

If it just comes out and swacks you in the face, it’s a cheap shot.

problems51--this is starting to creep me out.

I stopped watching “ER” about 113 years ago when I noticed that every single week had a child-in-danger/mother-in-danger story. Then I noticed that every other drama seemed to do the same thing: knock it off already! I don’t watch a lot of episodic drama for this very reason. Since having children I can’t stand that trope on TV or in books, so most serial-killer/thriller/suspense books are Right Out for that reason.

I hate the Child in Peril plots.  They are cheap and easy and so obviously designed to draw some type of emotion.

The Dead Mother plot that seems to pervade all Disney kid films is another of my pet peeves.  Why must the mother be killed?  Why must the father be killed?  But, if Disney lets the parents live, then they are really Too Stupid and Irresponsible to be parents and should be replaced immediately.

Awful as this is… I am the exact opposite in most urban fantasy.  If an author DOES NOT kill off some character with a big emotional wound to everyone else I am displeased.  I WANT that protagonist to get through everything and wind up on the other side just like normal people.  If there winds up to be a cast of characters larger than a packed football stadium I just don’t care.

Even if it’s a child I want some kind of culling.  I don’t want a magical giant hand to reach down and make things “all right” in my stories.

Although if you think about it… if you read that the “hero” was wangsting because he had a BO problem and was afraid the heroine would dislike him for it then you wouldn’t be as enamored of him.  The biggest pain you can inflict on a big manly man to turn him soft and sensitive seems to be the death of a child.  Frankly I wish it would be he’s having a bad hair day.  Or maybe he’s constipated.  No one ever reads about people going to a ball and having to take a shit.  WHY NOT?  It would be funny. :(

As so many have said here, there are moments when this plot moment rings true, and when it feels like a practiced, calloused hand on our heartstrings, yanking away for the fuck of it.  If I figure out at the beginning of the book that, blah blah blah blah rape, blah blah blah blah pain, blah blah blah blah child endangerment--I’m pissed too. 

These things HURT.  They hurt to read, they hurt to write about they hurt just because they exist and because they ACTUALLY HAPPEN to living, breathing human beings. 

If these moments of human pain are not in the book as an integral part of who the people are, if they didn’t HURT the author to write, they don’t belong there.  I’m in the middle of writing an emotional trainwreck of an end of a book.  I’ll be sitting at my laptop, sobbing, and the family will be going, “Mom, what’s wrong?” “sob sob sob...writing...”

It’s exhausting.  I’m DYING for this book to end, so I can get to the part where I’m happy.  If we’re reading a book with all sorts of horrible shit in it, if it didn’t rip the writer up as much as it’s killing us (and somehow we know, don’t we?) then it’s a cheap tactic to eviscerate us as we sit.  It’s not fair.  It’s not real, and these horrible things about children are all too real to exploit like that.

(and btw?  I stopped watching Law & Order & SVU for all of the above mentioned reasons.)

I stopped watching Law & Order & SVU for all of the above mentioned reasons

I stopped watching it because it started to suck hardcore. And also b/c I developed a serious sensitivity to storylines involving rape. But mostly the former.

Awful as this is… I am the exact opposite in most urban fantasy.

I sort of agree with you, but I think it’s a different set of expectations. A lot of fantasy--urban or otherwise--is really about warfare. Our “adventure” heroes are out to save the world, and when you set out to do that, people die. If you save the world and lose nothing, it rings false. (And this is why Joss Whedon owns my soul--he rips out my heart, stomps on it, and still has me begging for more.) In a romance, there’s less at stake, so you can get through the novel without any death at all.

Even in fantasy, though, some deaths can seem gratuitous. (JK Rowling, I’m looking at you. Still mad over that Hedwig thing, you know.)

I can handle just about any kind of vile trauma in a story if I can ride along with the HEALING aftermath and if I’m left with a sense of hope for the future at the end of it all.

Oh, totally.

Please don’t do the child death thing in Romance /Romantic suspense novels -especially at the end.It’s not necessarily bad writing, but it breaks the promise of romance that there will be a HEA.
A non-romance book left me absolutely distraught and I swore nothing but HEA’s from now on in. I know I’m not the only one who was devastated by Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper,and I know for a fact that many women have thrown it hard enough to take out plaster. Actually all her books are about children’s death, suicide, suicide -by- cop,etc. She is a wonderful writer - but I can’t handle it. As a mother, a former caretaker of profoundly retarded children for many years, and as a teacher - I don’t need to read about misery to know it exists

PDX Jane: I too am so very sorry for you loss.

All this child torture/murder is just getting overdone.  It’s sad when it is thrown in there gratuitiously to amp up a book.  Some authors have done it well, and I thank them for it.  They are able to make me feel along with the fictional characters.  I think SE Phillips, Mary Balogh, Loretta Chase, Eloisa James, and Julia Quinn are very good at this type of emotionally impacting authorship (although not all of them use this child suffering trope). 

But some authors just don’t have the ability to write something with enough emotional depth to make it worthwhile.

It’s not only kids, either.  I personally stopped reading and buying Nora Roberts a few years ago when she a little too gleefully described the serial killers’ point-of-view as he tortured and murdered an elderly woman.  I felt “dirty” after reading it.  It totally turned me off.  I haven’t read one of her books since.

The post about “Pay It Forward” (now I’ll never rent that one!) reminded me of the movie “Phenomenon” w/ John Travolta.  That was a fun movie for awhile, while we were all wondering, “wow, how is he a genius now--is it aliens, is it God....) and then....it’s a *&^&%%$ brain tumour??!!!!  Give me a *(^^$## break!  My father died of a brain tumour and it was a long, ugly death.  He wasted away in a coma until it shut off every organ he had (this was in 1983--they can do a lot more now).  He sure as heck didn’t invent stuff and solve complex problems.  I don’t know why brain tumours show up in movies (wasn’t there one in PS I Love You, and the one where Michael Keaton does this diary for his son?), as if they’re somehow the more romantic forms of cancer.  They suck.  Cancer sucks.  They take you and your family down to the dirty, gritty realities of human existence.  And another thing.....terminal illnesses are scary things--it’s unfair and unrealistic to depict people who are experiencing them as automatically heroic, or loving, or virtuous, or brave, or angelic or wise. 

OK, off the soapbox.  Thanks for indulging my rant.

I read and actually quite liked Brenda Joyce’s The Perfect Bride. The Very Traumatic Trauma storyline was handled well enough for me to buy it, and not go, “Oh, come ON! What a cheap ploy!”

I will chime in as another reader who hates the cheap, tacked-on, manipulative, pandering shortcut cop-out that is the horrible child death. And I hate animal torture as a shortcut to a villain’s evilness. JUST STOP THAT!!!

Still, as the Perfect Bride thing shows, one reader’s cheap and irritating ploy is another reader’s emotional candy.

I hate the angst being revealed at the end (Pay it Forward is a perfect example.... we are supposed to be happy that all these people end up “happy” when the kid dies?). But I am not against it being done well sometime during the story in a way that explains and advances a characters actions (Across the Universe is an example of this for me… If the heart breaking scene with the little boy dying in the Detroit riots never happened, then a major part of his older brother’s development would have been missing from the story).

I absolutely agree. Another thing that bothers me is when the writer is crafting a villain and makes him a terrorist but then the terrorism plot isn’t developed at all so I can only assume she was counting on my knee jerk reaction ( terrorist, grr) to make up for the lack of character development. Or when the hero is a SEAL and apparently nothing else because SEALS are all the same and have no personalities of their own. End rant.

PS: I have never been able to watch Law and Order SVU because sexual assault presses all of my buttons. There used to be an ad spot on television for UNICEF where they would talk about the plight of women and children in South America (complete with really upsetting stats about the precentage of rape victims under 4 yrs old!) and even though it was to raise awareness it got to the point that when it came on tv I’d have to leave the room or end up being mad for the rest of the night.

I personally stopped reading and buying Nora Roberts a few years ago when she a little too gleefully described the serial killers’ point-of-view as he tortured and murdered an elderly woman.

That scene in Blue Smoke is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read. Normally, I steal my mom’s Roberts books, b/c she doesn’t like to reread books. That one, I left on the shelf, and it was strictly b/c of that scene. I still haven’t read High Noon, because I’ve been warned that if I’m easily triggered by assault (and I really, really am), I should stay away from it.

That said, however, I usually feel like she has a reason for including the violence or assaults in her book. That scene ruined Blue Smoke for me, but from a more objective standpoint, I think it’s actually fairly brilliant writing.

(The story that has haunted me more than any other, and which I have frequently wished to erase from my brain (something I wish I could do with that scene in BS) was actually a fanfiction. Again, from an objective standpoint, the story was completely brilliant--the emotional impact wasn’t cheap, but it was gut-wrenching. Subjectively? The story left me unable to sleep, and it was literally all I could think about for several days. I couldn’t get past it, or past feeling sick, until I mentally wrote a sequel dealing with the aftermath. But even now, thinking about it, and thinking about Blue Smoke, I feel really uneasy.

But I think this problem is a different one from what Sarah’s talking about. While the BS scene might’ve been gratuitous, it wasn’t put in there just to fuck with our emotions. It was an actual part of the story, and the dude was a sociopath, so the scene was meant, I imagine, to give us a sense of how far he was willing and able to go.

The example Sarah gave of the kid dying--that’s just lazy story-telling. The author can’t be arsed to build a realistic emotional narrative, so she resorts to the last-second “oh, his kid died horribly.” Like everyone else, I think Pay It Forward is the best example. (Or Cruel Intentions, with its painfully stupid ending.)

After just listing my many Reading Issues, I have to say--I hate being a fragile reader. I’ve taken to censoring my reading quite strictly because I can’t afford to lose the time it takes me to work through the aftermath of a devastating book or story, and it’s quite irritating, on the whole, to have to tell people, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t read Lolita. It will damage my mental health.” (I really did have to have that conversation.)

I don’t know why brain tumours show up in movies (wasn’t there one in PS I Love You, and the one where Michael Keaton does this diary for his son?), as if they’re somehow the more romantic forms of cancer. 

I was the one that wrote about hating Pay It Forward and I’ve seen PS, I Love You, too.  Unlike the first movie, I really (and quite unexpectedly) loved that movie.  Yes, the husband dies, but to be honest, I can’t really remember what he died of.  What I do remember was trying really hard to not be all girly-girl and sob in empathy with the sorrow that his wife felt after his death.  He arranged to have her receive letters from him each month with the intent of helping her move forward.  Throughout the movie, you see flashbacks to their relationship and how she is struggling to deal with losing someone she loved so much and to learn to live her life again.  Parts of the film are laugh-out-loud funny and parts just make you cry.  By the time she gets the last letter, I genuinely felt that she seemed ready to move on with her life.  I didn’t feel emotionally manipulated at all--I just felt that I had seen woman who had been deeply in love learn to live with her loss and realize that she could love someone else again if she opened herself to the possibilities.

So, um, I guess that’s a recommendation.

Going by the description, the Simon Blackwell book (which I haven’t read) seems to employ what I call an instant trauma generator. The protagonist lost his or her wife/husband/child/mother/father/brother/sister in a tragic way = voilá, instant trauma. The death of an instant trauma generator doesn’t bother me, because they are not real characters with an existence of their own, but only exist so their death can generate a trauma for the protagonist. They’re the redshirts of the twenty-first century, characters only existing to be killed off. I rarely feel for the death of these instant trauma generators, because the story rarely gives you a sense of who the characters were before they are killed off. And yes, TV sure uses a lot of instant trauma generators. Just think of all those cops and forensic specialists still upset about the unsolved death or disappearance of their mother/father/brother/sister/pet hamster twenty years ago.

Using children as instant trauma generators makes a cheap trick even cheaper. I don’t like children dying or being hurt in films or fiction but I don’t mind it either, as long as there is a damn good reason for it. Cheap instant trauma generation isn’t a good reason. Just as killing fictional children for shock value is wrong. The TV show House is particularly bad about this. House usually cures his patients. But whenever the patient is a baby, you can bet that the poor little baby will die, to prove that House is a daring show.

However, the one thing that really, really annoys me is when established characters are randomly killed off with no other reason than to prove that anything can happen and anyone can die. This is usually done not for a good dramatic reason but for pure shock value and sometimes to cull burgeoning cast lists. Nor does it really prove that anyone can die, because the characters who are randomly killed off are usually strictly secondary characters or characters who are not particularly popular with the readers/viewers, while the popular characters and the protagonists are safe nonetheless. Most of the characters deaths in Joss Whedon’s shows or George R.R. Martin’s books fall into that category for me. Comic books do that sort of thing, too.

A TV show I really loved (title not mentioned because of spoilers) just did something like that. In the latest season the characters started behaving differently from the characters I had come to know and love. Plus, the female main character was sidelined and subjected to all sorts of humiliations, which are apparently justified, because some vocal viewers thought she was a slut. And then, to top it off, they killed off my favourite character (played by the best actor, too) for no reason at all except for shock value (this in a show which had never killed off a prominent character permanently but always brought them back) and because that character was less popular with a certain segment of fandom than other characters. I was depressed for a long time, because not only did I lose my favourite show, but I cannot even rewatch the older episodes I did love, because I cannot forget how it all went to hell.

I think the outrage over the cheap dead kid trick has been well-expressed by those with a great deal more right to be livid about it than I do. I want to chime in on the HATE for unnecessary animal cruelty/death. I’m super-sensitive to animal death as it is, but if it’s done right and I can go along with the character as they grieve, it’s something I can stomach (the example that comes to mind is the deaths of FitzChivalry Farseer’s dogs in Robin Hobb’s books. Took my heart right out, but was beautifully handled and right for the story. I also think FitzChivalry and the Fool are the best non-traditional OTP anywhere outside of the romance genre, btw, but that’s just me). I might be a crazy cat lady, so little pushes my emotional buttons like the loss of a beloved pet, and done right it lets me connect with the character emotionally. When it’s a cheap trick it’s. . . inhumane. Not only will book meet wall, author and I will be done. Sorry. End of rant.

Spamword: series96. It sure feels like there are 96 books in the Farseer series.

No kidding!  When I read a romance, I read for a happy ending.  If I wanted to be sad, I’d read a different type of book.  There is enough crap to deal with in everyday life.  Reading romance is my escape!

Slight tangent here: I’ve noticed a lot of ‘shock value’ stuff going on in romance or so-called romance lately and it seems related to the general desensitization that sensationalist media coverage has wrought.  The more blood and gore the better the publishers seem to like it, which might also explain why some hardcore UF books somehow end up with romance labels on them.

I’ve also seen authors talk about how they want to shock readers, because they don’t want to be confined by the HEA.

I don’t get it.  If you don’t want to write romance, fine, write fiction, call it a love story, but I really don’t understand what the deal is with wanting to push the envelope and selling a non-HEA story as a romance genre book.  And I really disliked this ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality I detected in some of the authors’ attitude.  Like readers are the enemy for wanting romance authors to stick to the ‘formula’ and provide a HEA.

HEA is why I read romance.  Because I’m interested in the character’s story, how they get to where they are going, but I because I also know, however wrenching their journey is, there will be a happy resolution of some kind.  Dead kids/spouses/pets, separated h/h 20 pages from the end do not a Happy Ending make!  But HEA does not mean white picket fence, marriage, a bunch of rug rats either, it just means, we have a commitment from the main characters in the story.

I just want to chime in agreement with a few people making the point that we get bothered by deaths more when

a) We’re sensitised: just been bereaved, assaulted, become a new parent: something that temporarily or permanently breaks our “whatever” stance on the thing that now pushes our buttons

b) The author, genre or rest of the book does NOT set up the expectation (I expect K J Parker to rip out my heart and stomp on it, so I only read his stuff if I’m not feeling Delicate in some way. Same with Mary Gentle and other authors that have set up that expectation with me)

c) They can’t write well enough to do justice to the level of trauma.

Somewhat on a tangent, I read J R Ward’s Dark Lover the other day.  Not to trash the writing unduly, but I can say now there was a scene where a character cuts her wrist down to the bone to save her One True Love.  The intensity WAS NOT THERE: the emotional impact of it was that she was ripping off a bandaid.

Compare that to the anguish other authors can invest in what appears to be a fairly trivial event. It’s the feelings, it’s the sense you get that the character is suffering, and the author is telling you something about the suffering you didn’t know.

To go back to my earlier point: there are times in my life when I want my guts ripped out, to feel, to get that catharsis the Greeks so loved about tragedy.  I love tragedy as a form.

There are other times when the delivery’s not up to it and I’m just grumpy, rather than moved, or there’s a pull the rug out from under “TA DAH” reveal where you’re not set up for the pain or given enough time afterwards to feel anything came out of the ashes but misery.

I also loved CRY NO MORE and DREAM A LITTLE DREAM.  I think authors who have children of their own probably write them better, peril or no peril.  I remember that Simon Blackwell scene and I thought it worked.  I like having my heart ripped from my chest and handed back to me with a bow on it!  Tear-jerkers rule.

What I don’t like: precociousness.  Six year olds who speak like adults.  And unrealistic situations where I think “a normal kid wouldn’t say that,” or worse, “a mother with half a brain would never DO that.”

Cry No More left me feeling bitter and twisted for days after reading it and I have never looked at a Linda Howard book the same way again. I hated reading that book. Of course once I started I had to keep reading because ... this was romance and I would get a HEA and then I would be healed ... no. That was not the feeling I was left with. Great writing, but never, ever again. I also stopped reading quite a few of my previously favourite authors as they seemed to move more into suspense that had child harming as a major storyline. If I think there is a chance of a child being hurt I wont read the book. To spring one of those plots or descriptions at the end of a book with no lead up infuriates me too.

Yes, I am a mother and admit that, of course, this is probably a major part of my reaction.

I just read a book by Eloisa James where a child gets ‘rat bite fever’ and is so near death that the hero and heroine must spend so much time together to deal with it.  I think it wasted so much time in their story.  They eventually split because he can’t handle that she’s a duchess (because that is a great reason to break up with someone).  I think that was lazy story telling on the author’s part.  The use of near death illness that lasts for over a week is unecessary.  The plot was mving along at a perfectly good clip and then WHAM-O sick child to bring them even closer together even though they had already reached a deep intimacy.

Anything can be written well, including the death of a child. Even one at the end of a story or book.

Relying on a happy ending, though? That, seems to me, is lazy reading.

Relying on a happy ending, though? That, seems to me, is lazy reading.

Hm. That seems unnecessarily judgmental to me.

Say what you will about “formulaic” writing, the one thing we expect fairly consistently from romance is a happy ending. And it doesn’t mean that we’re lazy readers because we prefer that. I mean, the world is a fucking mess--why shouldn’t we seek some kind of hope in fiction?

A happy ending is only cheap if it’s not done well--and then it’s not really a happy ending at all, is it? Tragic endings are easier and more highly respected, but given how much we all face some kind of misery in our lives, how much harder is it to write happiness and convey it to others.

In short, the more I think about your comment, the more offended I am.

The Dead Mother plot that seems to pervade all Disney kid films is another of my pet peeves.  Why must the mother be killed?  Why must the father be killed?  But, if Disney lets the parents live, then they are really Too Stupid and Irresponsible to be parents and should be replaced immediately.

Disney’s puts out Fairly Tales & the absent parent is a standard trope in that genre.  It has to do with the child being independent and finding his/her own power, etc.  If the child has a caretaker that is present, competent & loving you have a totally different type of story.

Anything can be written well, including the death of a child. Even one at the end of a story or book.

Relying on a happy ending, though? That, seems to me, is lazy reading.

Anything can be well written, but some things almost never are.  As the saying goes, so many books so little time.  You have to have a method for choosing which books get your limited time and if you skip the ones that include things that are generally poorly done you may miss a few gems but you’ll miss way more crap. 

Also, it’s not necessarily lazy to know what you want/don’t want.  The HEA debate is old & doesn’t need to be revisited here, but sometimes I’m in the mood to branch out & experiment and sometimes I’m not.  I read romances when I need the HEA.  If the book doesn’t have one I want it to be called something else so that I know to read it some other time.

I agree with all those who said they were okay with well-written traumas.  I also agree that for many writers dead kids/rape/horrible murder of a loved one is a lazy device that allows the author to create a traumatized character without any work and forces the reader to feel sympathy for that character even if he/she is otherwise stupid, mean, irrational, etc. I think part of the problem for authors is that it is so difficult to explain emotional or psychological problems without a key trauma to point at.  Look at the real world—most people have some sort of issues or personal difficulties, and I think for most of us these cannot be explained away by pointing out one horrible event in our lives. We are effed up by various small factors in our upbringings, childhood experiences, little betrayals or disappointments. But how do you write that into a short novel?

We are effed up by various small factors in our upbringings, childhood experiences, little betrayals or disappointments. But how do you write that into a short novel?

The best works like this I’ve ever read don’t actually come out and identify the trauma. The character reveals the trauma through his/her actions, reactions, thought processes, decisions, etc.  The information emerges naturally and implicitly, and not in an infodump of telling.

“Fuck you, asshole!”

Hah, tell that to me and the other fans of House M.D. I loves me some formulaic House, baby!  Oh and, JP, while you’re patting yourself on the back - great flexibility by the way; I always seem to pull a tendon - consider why you’ve chosen to take time away your industrious reading, come to a romance blog, log in, and post a snide comment.  If you’re not here for the happy ending, then you’re in the wrong place, m’dear. 

As for the Tragic Child device, I must say that I require a little bit more than oh noez a CHILD died.  It seems that some people think that the fact that the person was a child should be enough to imbue the scene with the trauma that a person involved with the child would feel at losing a person so integral to their life.  At the risk of sounding heartless, it is not enough for me.  I want the kid to have a personality - even a sentence stating that he liked watermelon or that she dragged a dirty, stuffed aardvark around all the time and refused to have it washed.  I want to feel that a person was taken away, not a two-dimensional character that just happened to be under the legal drinking age.

Thank you, thank you, for bringing the subject of this trend to the forum!

Stop using the unresolved and shabbily revealed death, injury, and irrevocable harm of children for dramatic impact in your stories.

I totally agree this sickening manipulation is sadly becoming a predictable trend in many romance and paranormal novels - STOP THE MADNESS!

JP, I’m not sure we’re debating whether or not it can be written well. In fact, I would have said we were talking about situations where it’s not written well or unnecessary. Anything CAN be written well. But was it?

I can’t deal with stories where emotional trauma comes flinging out of the back-story to wallop me on the head. I like to know there’s an issue (better if I can’t guess the issue). You want to see it like Suze expressed above. But when all of a sudden you are throttled by a serious issue and then it disappears into the HEA…

not fun.