I read Marrying Daisy Bellamy early in the year, so by the time I finished Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart last week, I was getting desperate to find a book with a good mother.

Sophie and Daisy had their problems in other books, but in this one Sophie is a loving, supportive parent to Daisy and to the children of her second marriage. As balance, I had only the mother in Susan Wiggs’s Marrying Daisy Bellamy. MacLean gives her hero a bad mother too, a cold woman who values name and blood more than her children.

The heroines of My One and Only by Kristan Higgins and Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart by Sarah MacLean were abandoned by their mothers. The mother of the heroine of Anne Mallory’s One Night Is Never Enough is weak and useless to her daughters. The mothers of the heroines in Robyn Carr’s Promise Canyon and Wild Man Creek, Eloisa James’s When Beauty Tamed the Beast, Rachel Gibson’s Any Man of Mine, and Sabrina Jeffries’s How to Woo a Reluctant Lady are dead. Suddenly I seem to be reading an astonishing number of books with mothers who were dead, ineffectual, or self-centered. As I said, the good mother/bad mother ratio seemed reasonable to me.īut that changed with my late 2010, early 2011 reading. She is so beloved by romance readers that many of them have begged for her story, although they seem divided as to whether she should remain a widow devoted to her husband’s memory or have a second chance at love. Of course, I can’t forget Violet Bridgerton, mother of Julia Quinn’s alphabetically arranged Bridgertons. My favorite is Anna MacGregor, not only a loving mother and grandmother to the large MacGregor clan but also a strong and independent heroine in her own love story, For Now, Forever. But Roberts also created characters like the delightful Nadia Stanislaski, beloved by husband, children, and grandchildren and Stella Quinn, whose presence in the lives of the three lost boys she and her husband Ray adopted remains vivid and influential years after her death. There’s Maeve Concannon, mother of Maggie and Brianna in the Born in series, whose bitterness is a blight on her daughters’ lives, and the truly evil Gloria DeLauter of the Chesapeake Quartet, a selfish, sleazy bitch who sells her own son and later blackmails him.

Take the mothers in Nora Roberts’s books for example. One would expect no less than splendid examples of motherhood from protagonists.Ĭertainly I was aware of nightmare mothers, but it always seemed to me that they were balanced by some pretty terrific mothers as well. I’m speaking of mothers as secondary characters here. I’ve heard other people complain about the lack of good mothers in romance novels, but until quite recently I’ve never thought that the number of bad or missing mothers was disproportionate.

Susan mallery delicious series