You know who I’m talking about. She refers to her daughters or daughters-in-law routinely as “whores”, she refers to their children as “bastards”, she threatens continually to “ruin them all”. She has no sense of humor (unless an evil cackle counts), no personal history, and no apparent interest in anything other than showing up when the plot requires it and insulting our heroine or hero. She’s unbelievable on paper, and we would laugh in her face in real life, yet she makes our favorite characters quake in their boots, controlling their lives with but a sharp word or the crook of a finger.

I’ve recently read two books in which a family matriarch is hell on wheels. In my review of Nora Roberts‘ Born in Fire, I noted that the heroine’s miserable mother was the one part of the book that didn’t work for me. In Susan Mallery’s Irresistable, it’s the evil grandmother (the Buchanan brothers lost their parents as children). Another recent evil matriarch appears in Julia Quinn’s The Lost Duke of Wyndham, who enters the pantheon when she calls the heroine a “grasping little whore”.

Here are some other examples that really bug me: Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me, probably the worst offender, features a mother that belittles and demeans her “size 12″ daughter; Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation has the hero’s mom talking trash to the heroine. The heroine’s mom in Megan Hart’s Dirty blames her for everything that has gone wrong in her own life, but I can’t tell you exactly what makes this so especially horrific without spoiling the plot completely. Sascha’s mother in Nalini Singh’s Slave to Sensation is as evil as a mom can be without having any actual feelings.

Of course, sometimes it’s evil dads: In Judith McNaught’s Paradise, the father is the controlling one, and I felt he was owed a much bigger comeuppance than he eventually got. But I can also think of a lot more examples of benign dads in romance, in which heroines have adoring relationships with their fathers (for example, in The Serpent Prince, which I am reading now), than I can of heroines and their mothers.

Maybe it’s because I have a healthy relationship with my own mother, but I hate it when this stereotype shows up in otherwise good or great books. I’ve read probably hundreds of romances in the past year or so. Why can’t I think of one that features a close, loving relationship between the heroine and her mother? Can you?

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