Smite Turner, the third Turner brother, is a damaged man. Ordinarily, that makes for some great romance writing.
In the third outing by Courtney Milan in the world of the Brothers Turner, the spotlight shines on middle brother Smite. In my review of Turner #1, I made mention of “[glossing] over the implications of severe neglect and outright child abuse also visited upon her children by the mother. Because it is upsetting.” Smite appears to have borne the brunt of this abuse, and I won’t go into it, because it is upsetting.
Anyway, as an adult, he is a magistrate, known for actually doing his job properly in a time when magistrate was a notional title, and the scars (metaphysical) from his childhood make relationships or cohabiting out of the question.
Usually at this point, we are introduced to a lovely young woman who cures the knight of tarnished armour with the power of her love and devotion.
Instead, we have a young lady of (surprisingly) good repute who piques our hero’s interest by parading in his courtroom as a variety of witnesses, ordered there by a shadowy underworld figure (the novel stretches credulity on this matter). They fall in love, of course, but Smite stays broken.
I kind of admire him (and Milan) for that.
Smite is an interesting character, but his romance failed to hold my interest. Maybe I just want my damaged characters to be healed and live happily ever after, with lots of tastefully raunchy vanilla sex, none of this realism stuff.
My goodness but I disagree with you; in fact, my feelings are quite the opposite. Smite is one of my favourite heroes precisely because he isn’t fixed but embraced for the man his life has made him. I enjoyed the different take on healing a tortured hero in that he consciously chose not to heal, used it to better himself and his world, but and realised that maybe he could ease up a bit on that. I adore Miranda, darling as well.
That being said, I would marry Ash in heartbeat.
I tentatively agree with your take on Smite: his dedication to changing the world for the better was quite endearing. His relationship with Miranda was just so pale in comparison to his brothers’.
I like Smite because I find him to be a hero tortured by his principles, and not some vague cloud of angst. He is informed by his upbringing, sure, but a lot of heroes with crap parents in this genre turn to raking and general rogueishness; Smite is productive both with his life and with his anger.