There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part when a hero is disabled, it is limited to something relatively minor, in terms of affecting his ability to live independently. When it comes to debilitating disabilities, Catherine Anderson deserves some serious praise for taking risks and writing about it: in Blue Skies, the heroine is formerly blind, and at risk for becoming blind again in Phantom Waltz, the heroine is paralyzed and perhaps the most challenging, My Sunshine, in which the heroine has brain damage, and Annie’s Song, in which the heroine is thought to be mentally handicapped but is in fact deaf.ĭo you notice a theme? There aren’t too many men who are disabled in these romance novels. The heroine in Jill Barnett’s Sentimental Journey is blind. Lily in Tessa Dare’s Three Nights With a Scoundrel is deaf, as are the heroines in Suzanne Brockman’s Into the Fire and Erin McCarthy’s Mouth To Mouth. In Virna DePaul’s upcoming book Shades of Desire, the heroine is coping with her recent loss of vision. However, when I asked the staff here at AAR to brainstorm, we came up with a much longer list than I had anticipated. When I first started writing this blog, I thought it was a rare occurrence in romance novels. “Disability” can mean a whole lot of things: blindness, paralysis, amputated limbs, deafness, a chronic illness, brain damage.
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