The I Hate Sara Linton Club

I called the post that because I had a random memory of a kids' book called the I Hate Taffy Sinclair Club. Whoops, I double checked and it was actually called the Against Taffy Sinclair Club. I never actually read it. And I don't really hate Sara Linton. It would be weird if I hated her. She's just a poor, hard-working doctor widow. Also, she's fictional.

Sara Linton is the protagonist of half a dozen books by Karin Slaughter. I read a few of these books and then stopped reading them because I just didn't find them that compelling, and Sara Linton was a little sappy and too perfect, and therefore uninteresting.

Then Slaughter came out with a book about Will Trent, a former foster child who now works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. I read this book - Triptych - and was fairly blown away. It seemed like a breakout book, with characterization on a whole new level. Trent was appealingly flawed, and the book trended darker and what can I say, I'm a little twisted. This lasted for two blissful books and then who waltzed back onto the scene but Sara Goddamned Linton. My reading heart sank, and then I thought, well maybe Slaughter will put a bit more of an edge on her now. This is Will Trent's universe, after all.

Nope. 

After their first meeting, Faith Mitchell, Trent's appealingly messy partner, thinks "she had wanted to hate Sara Linton on sight for no other reason than that she was the type of woman you'd want to hate on sight: tall and thin with great posture, long auburn hair and that unusual kind of beauty that made men fall all over themselves when she entered a room. It didn't help matters that the woman was obviously smart and successful.." 

Barf. Barf barf barf. Look, I'm a grownup. I've met women who were beautiful and accomplished and I might feel a niggling envy, but I don't hate them. I also don't think they add much to a story. Give me a bipolar police detective with high blood pressure and.... wait, I'm nearly describing Faith Mitchell, who I adore. 

Will Trent is also a tv series now, two seasons in. They've made Will Hispanic, and Angie Polaski, who he grew up in foster care with, is played by Erika Christensen and is still flawed and traumatized, but not an outright damaging and destructive force in Will's life. In the books, it bothers me slightly that Will is allowed to be redeemable but Angie is not. She is the anti-Sara Linton, if you will, and it pisses me off doubly. Also, I love the tv show so much I probably should have just stopped trying to proceed with the books, but Sarah (who I actually love and revere) reminded me of them and for some dumb reason I thought I would forge on with them. Sarah sort of gets it about Sara, fortunately.

In the afterword to Undone, the first book where S.L. waltzes her perfect ass back into the room, Slaughter writes "I've spent the last seventeen years writing about Sara and other strong women, and one dynamic has not changed: it's incredibly difficult to write about an accomplished, smart woman without people hating her. As a society, we're wired to celebrate those characteristics in men, but we're incredibly suspect and critical of women who share the same qualities." No hon, I would be equally critical/nauseated by a male protagonist who was so unusually handsome he made woman swoon, and was unfalteringly brilliant and successful. I don't hate her because she's beautiful and strong. I dislike her as a character because she's obnoxiously perfect and dull, and therefore uninteresting. Moreover, I do not loathe any of Slaughter's other female characters, who are allowed actual flaws and foibles, so I have no idea why she clings so hard to Sara Linton. Slaughter herself is cute as fuck with a pointed chin, piercing blue eyes and short blonde hair, so I dunno, did she have a childhood idol with long red curls or something? 

Okay, now that I've gotten that off my (considerably droopier and less admirable than Sara Linton's) chest, I tried googling "Sara Linton Sucks", and the first hit was a post titled "I Hate Sara Linton Part Infinity" on a site called Cannonball Reads. There are numerous comments on the post joining in, but there's a long thread on Reddit where people are hopping all over themselves to cape for Linton. Fair enough. Slaughter is also a founder of the Save the Libraries Project, which supports library programming, so she is obviously awesome and I'm just an asshole with an unreasonable grudge against a pretty pediatrician. 

For real, though, she's a drip.