Christina here and today I’m going to have a little rant. A while back, I read a trilogy with a hero I absolutely adored, but at the same time I couldn’t stand the heroine. I found her intensely annoying, not in any way worthy of the hero’s love and devotion, and so immature I wanted to slap her! I carried on reading the entire series because I wanted to know how things ended for the hero, and whether the heroine would redeem herself in the end, but I almost had to force myself. That’s not how it should be, is it?
A heroine ought to be someone we like and empathise with. Sure, she can be naïve or immature at the beginning of a story (or a series in this case), because we’ve all been there and lessons need to be learned before we grow up and understand certain things. She doesn’t have to be perfect – none of us are, after all – but she does need to be likeable. At the very least, she should have some very good reasons for NOT being likeable, if that’s the way the author wants to play it.
What we absolutely don’t want is a heroine we dislike intensely.