*Flushed from the success of reading all the Old School Historicals set by those modern doyens of the Romance genre, Sarah and Jen from ‘Fated Mates’, Kelsey and I embark on Season 2 of our Besties Book Club: Current Chart-Toppers.

There were many avenues down which we could have taken this month’s book club selection: the enduring appeal of Celebrity Romance, the door the book opened to the glamourous and cutthroat world of Bollywood… oh, or why I gravitate towards Beauty and the Beast retellings despite their often troubling core message. This post really should be titled ‘Scarred Heroes and Why I Love Them. And Why Kelsey Is Seriously Unimpressed.’ But let’s back up.

For March, Kelsey and I read Suleikha Snyder’s Bollywood and the Beast.* We wanted a selection that was set outside Europe or North America and, yeah, I was excited about the prospect of a scarred, recluse hero shut up in a crumbling mansion outside Kolkata. That man in question is Taj Ali Khan, one-time action hero who has spent the past decade licking his wounds after a horrific accident. Not literally; he has paid retainers to do that. As the heroine of the novel, Rocky Varma, is the new Bollywood It Girl, I did try to buff up on the film culture that forms the backdrop for the ‘Bollywood Confidential’ series. I watched Hasee toh Phasee because it’s on Neflix, and has the totally mad premise of a hero falling for his fiancée’s sister. During the week of his wedding! It is unrelentingly strange but I’m going to have to recommend this film with its handsome, chancer hero and driven, autistic heroine. I totally believed these two were destined lovebirds (albeit ones with a rough ride ahead of them).

Back to Bollywood and the Beast. It’s not going super well. While I was immediately attracted to the scarred man rolling around his immaculate rose garden in his wheelchair, Kelsey has already dubbed Taj an ‘Old School romance hero.’ Not a compliment when it comes from her! Central to her criticism is the question: is Taj’s assholerly – and he is a dick to absolutely everyone – a symptom of his career-ending accident? Or are his injuries an excuse for him to be an asshole? She brings up the concept of ‘Baseline Happiness’. I’ve heard of this idea. Basically, these studies claim, dramatic life-altering events affect our happiness less than we imagine. Get in a car accident and can’t walk anymore? After some obvious readjustment, your existing world views and natural coping skills reassert themselves and you are roughly as happy, or unhappy, as you were before. Win the lottery? Same deal. So Taj? For Kelsey ‘he was always a selfish, sadist misogynist, and now he feels like he has an excuse!’

‘You are burning these two to the ground faster than that crumbling old family manor would go up in flames.’ I message Kelsey. I’m spending an afternoon in an Oxford hospital waiting room for a friend – she’s fine, thanks – and furiously messaging Kelsey about whether the Beast archetype just romanticizes partner abuse. I’ve already finished the book and, missing content warning aside (see below), I’ve liked it just fine. The heroine wasn’t the take-no-shit firebrand I would have liked, but Scarred Hero? Check. However, as Kelsey copies and pastes some of Taj and Rocky’s exchanges, I start to shrivel up like the roses at the end of Beauty and the Beast.

‘You wouldn’t bloom with me, Rakhee. You would die on the vine.’ She had to prove him wrong. She had to show him she could flourish, no matter what he threw at her. She had to be strong for him.

Nonononono, protests Kelsey. ‘An absolute nightmare of a message.’ Yeah… fair. She’s right to be concerned about the idea that it might be a woman’s job to be abused because that’s what a man needs to heal. ‘Eeeeee yeah okay you are totally RIGHT,’ I reply, ‘which is why I want to unpick the trope and see if it can be told in a way that doesn’t prime girls for abuse.’ The Scarred Hero invariably is marked inside and out, and that trope constant isn’t an inherently bad thing. Because isn’t part of the joy of Romance that the MCs triumph against external and internal odds? But, as Kelsey points out, there are no quick-fix options for serious trauma. Either the Scarred Hero’s healing arc has to start before the love interest arrives on the scene, or they need to know each other for a really long time while he does the difficult emotional labour, both on himself and with her, to get their relationship on a solid and healthy footing.

So, what is it, Kelsey asks, that you like about this pairing? Uh, Taj and Rocky? Not that much honestly. I just want to climb Taj like a trellis in his rose garden. What is my deal? I read the quickie Harlequin Historical Cinderella and the Scarred Viscount – you’ve got to love category romance’s ability to get straight to the point! – to see whether my Scarred Hero fascination can transcend the whole ‘trapped in a crumbling castle’ thing. Confession? Yes. The Scarred Hero here is unfailingly polite to the pseudo-dowdy heroine, except when he’s having one of his PTSD attacks. And, okay, there’s an implication that the nightmares get better when you’re sleeping with your love, which is bullshit. Look, fine, I clearly like a bit of self-loathing from my heroes about their looks. It puts these rich dudes into parity with their humbler love interests. Their love interests’ own insecurities often stem from their appearance because of, you know, patriarchy. Scars level the playing field.

On reflection, I still love the Scarred Hero in His Castle stories, but I prefer it when the intruding love interest is less of a blushing rose and more plain and prickly. I want the Castle Intruder to be like a nettle blossom which is ignored in the ditch until the Scarred Hero tumbles into said ditch and discovers a) it hurts and b) it is really quite beautiful up close. This is of course the Jane Eyre storyline to a T, and how smart Charlotte Bronte was to serve up those scars as an integral part of the happily ever after. I love historical romances that rework this invasion, from Tessa Dare’s unremarkable, muddy-haired heroine in Romancing the Duke, to the plain and plump convent-raised heroine of my favourite Old School Historical of all time, Anne Stuart’s Lord of Danger. I’m also very much okay with a full-on Beast in the Castle if the intruder is, say, a middle-aged country parson like in Aster Glenn Gray’s perfect novella Briarley.

As for the unreconstructed Scarred Hero? Yeah, sorry fans, I’m going to let Kelsey have the final word on this one: ‘I’m just waiting for the heroine who has been through a terrible disfiguring trauma, spends a decade feeling sorry for herself and taking it out on everyone, and then some super-hot dude comes around and finds her particular brand of sadistic self-loathing deeply attractive.’

Actually, I am waiting for that one too…

Next month (which is technically this month):  We’re getting into the bareknuckle boxing ring with Sarah MacLean and ‘Wicked and the Wallflower’.

*Content warning for Bollywood and the Beast. There is an on-page, POV suicide attempt in this novel, and an off-page grooming relationship is discussed at length. Take care of yourself out there, Romance readers.