Is It Wrong To Hate This Heroine?

So, I started reading this book that was billed as a deadly thriller of lust and attraction. Sounds awesome, right? The basic premise is there’s this female professor and psychologist who is having an affair with her much younger grad student. He becomes crazy and obsessed and she has to fight for life and sanity and blah, blah, blah. You know how it goes. Basic thriller stuff. The problem was I got to page eight, and I had to put the book aside. I will never pick it up again and here’s why…

So, sexy professor and psychologist—and allow me to stress that point, this woman is supposed to be a professor and psychologist, someone people are supposed to trust and learn from—invites grad student boy toy to her office to break up with him because she has decided to get married. She gives him the regretful speech and is annoyed when he basically shrugs and says, “Whatever.” Now, she has been sleeping with this boy for months, has worked with him for a couple years, and she knows him pretty well. She especially knows that he is dangerously claustrophobic due to unspecified childhood trauma and cannot sit in a closed room.

So, her reaction to his nonchalance is to make him get up, close the door to her office, and sit in the closed, windowless room with her while she explains once again why she can’t fuck him anymore. He begins to sweat, to lose some of his cool, and only then is she satisfied by his reaction.

Right in the moment, I hoped he’d kill her hard. And because I knew that the story was just not going to work that way, I put the book down.

But I have to wonder, am I being too hard on this woman? Maybe I am overrating. Was she right to purposefully and knowingly torture this boy to gain the reaction she deemed fitting for her breakup speech? Does that make her strong? Because I believe that is what the author was going for—to portray her as strong and capable, a take-no-shit woman.

What do you think?

Filed under: Ramblings Tagged: Heroines, Reading, Thriller