A Rant About Novels

I’m tired of reading novels about drippy pathetic women waiting for a man to rescue them.

There are the truly awful – Twilight, for example, “one woman’s difficult choice between beastiality and necrophilia”. Or the horrifying 50 Shades. By all means, let us have erotica, but what is sexy about a pathetic, spineless woman being degraded? The best thing about 50 Shades is that it bought us this hilarious review (for all the books – this reviewer suffered for her art).

Those ones are fairly easy to avoid, but then there are those that start out well but end up with the woman realising her dream job is not actually her dream, and her real ideal is about 75% less ambitious and handily convenient for the man in her life.

Don’t get me wrong, I like escapism, but is it really too much to want to get to the end of a novel and still respect the female protagonist?

Jennifer Weiner’s novel The Next Best Thing (Amazon), for once, did that. It’s about a woman, a real woman, and it’s a really great story.

Emily Griffin’s Where We Belong (Amazon) I didn’t love quite as much, but also, good. Depressingly realistic in the way that women are punished, punish ourselves.

And Marian Keyes is always amazing. I love her work, sadly not all of it is available on Kindle.

Always looking for new things to read so if you have recommendations of novels I’d love them!