“Who is the hero of your book?” a prospective buyer asked
me at my first real book signing.
I was in a cozy bookshop in the small town of Palmer,
Alaska, wearing a warm sweater to protect against the November chill and a big
smile as I held up a copy of my first published novel, THE DAY BEFORE. “The
hero is Sam Rose, she’s an agent for-“
The buyer shook his head. “Not the heroine. The hero.”
“Protagonist?” I suggested, looking for a polite
compromise.
“I don’t really like books with girls. I want to read
about heroes.”
Dear Reader, I want to assure you that at this point I
stayed professional and did not have to dispose of a corpse on my drive home
through the mountains that night. I did recommend a copy of EVEN VILLAINS FALL IN
LOVE to him since it is told from the point of view of a male protagonist, but the
whole exchange nagged at me. It still does, year and miles removed from Alaska,
it bothers me that someone dismissed a truly wonderful protagonist with a sneer
and the word Heroine.
English is an odd language.
No, scratch that, English is a demon hobgoblin of a
language that likes to ransack other languages and steal words from them.
English likes to twist and torment words until they can mean the exact opposite
of what they were originally intended to mean, literally!
Hero is sometimes seen as a masculine word only. There
are people who want to read it as “the male hero” rather than “the protagonist”
and this presents a problem.
It’s exclusionary, forcing the binary idea of male/female
and hero/heroine.
It leads to the idea that being a hero means being
masculine in a traditionally masculine way.
It leaves me standing there going, “But… I want to be a
hero too!”
When we read there’s always some part of us that wants to
identify with the protagonist. At some level, we want to see ourself in the
story. That’s why we read some books and not others, isn’t it? Because some of
them resonate or speak to us while others don’t. It’s why we want diverse
fiction.
We want to see ourselves as the hero regardless of which
gender we identify with.
This is a big universe, and we’re all heroes in ways big
and small. The courage we show when facing challenges, the compassion we have
for others, is a result of our choices – not our genders.
Here’s to the heroes!
A few other novels by Liana:
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Liana Brooks is a SF/F and romance authors who loves
writing about the little choices we make and big chances we take that change
the universe for the better. You can find her online at www.LianaBrooks.com, on Twitter as
@LianaBrooks, and read her new stories on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/LianaBrooks.
She is currently working on her romantic space opera series, The Fleet of
Malik, that starts with BODIES IN
MOTION. The second book, CHANGE OF
MOMENTUM, will be available this fall.
