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I recently got a rejection letter from an agent that I really like because whenever she rejects my books, she gives me feedback about why she’s rejecting it (which not all agents do).

This was a rejection of my current WIP To Woo A Wicked Widow, about a widow who

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wants to find passion in the bed of a notorious rake because she doesn’t want to get married again, but ends up falling for a man who will not bed her unless she will marry him.  So in the beginning chapter, the widow meets the hero then brushes him off  to go off  with the rake to have a hot and heavy encounter. The agent mentioned that one problem she feared the book would have is hero confusion.  That readers will not realize who the hero is supposed to be immediately and become confused about who they should be rooting for.

This criticism is actually not a surprise to me.  I had a CP early on say I needed to make it clear that the rake is not the hero of the piece.  So I had changed that early encounter between the widow and the rake that made it clear that she’s more attracted to the guy she’s just met than the rake she’s kissing. Perhaps there is still some confusion, at least on that agent’s part.  It’s hard for me to tell, being as close to the work as I am. I may see if there’s some way to tweak that scene even more.

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Have you ever had hero confusion in a book you were reading?  I don’t remember ever being uncertain about who the hero was supposed to be, never been surprised by the man the heroine ended up with.  That either means that editors catch this problem and persuade the authors to change potential false heroes (this happened to me in Only Scandal Will Do, when I had to drop the plot complication of the Bow Street Runner being  a rival love interest to Duncan) or I simply haven’t run across a romance in which this happens. (As a side note, I do think the character of Claire Randall has hero confusion early on in Outlander when she doesn’t know whether she wants to stay with Jamie or go back to Frank.  But that’s rather a different issue, I believe.)

So please weigh in:  Have you ever had hero confusion and if so, did it turn you off the book?