Reading certain novels back to back, it's easy to see what you like and what you don't in a romance novel.  After reading Tiger's Curse, a YA fantasy romance by Colleen Houck that had be thoroughly annoyed with the heroine, I went straight to The Next Best Thing by Kristan Higgins.

I'd read only one of Kristan Higgins's books before -- Too Good to Be True -- but I'd absolutely loved it.  Higgins writes in first person with a witty, irreverent narrative style that I absolutely love.  It's not often that I laugh out loud while I'm reading, but Higgins's books are some of the few that will do it for me.

Once I was done, it occurred to me that Higgins and Houck both write heroines that are extremely flawed.  The difference is, one writes flaws that come across as whiny and grating, while the other writes turns serious flaws into opportunities for serious humor.

Tiger's Curse started off promisingly -- it was a great story, and while the editing left a lot to be desired (I really think all authors ought to understand the proper use of a comma, don't you?), I was enjoying it... at first.  About halfway through, the heroine suddenly started having second thoughts about her rapidly blossoming relationship with the hero of the story.  Obviously the author had decided to turn the book into a trilogy, and to prolong their happy ending for two more books.  The way she did this was to make Kelsey abruptly develop a bunch of insecurities that hadn't been there initially, pushing the hero away and whining about how she wasn't good enough for him.

GRRRRRR.

Now, I understand that flawed characters are more believable and more enjoyable than perfect characters, but flaws have to be endearing, or at least have to make the character's story more interesting.  In general, annoying your readers is a bad idea, and the whiny crap that the heroine was suddenly pulling was doing exactly that, at least for me.

In sharp contrast, the heroine in The Next Best Thing was downright neurotic.  Pretty much her whole family was nuts.  Nearly every woman in the family had been widowed young, so it was considered a family curse; when Lucy decided to remarry, this of course meant that she had to find a man whom she wouldn't love too much, because she didn't think she could survive the loss she'd experienced when her first husband died.  So instead of acknowledging the man who obviously loved her, the perfect mate who was right in front of her, she kept looking for someone who wasn't so perfect.

Told in a different manner, Lucy's neuroses might have been just as annoying as Kelsey's.  But told with Kristan Higgins's trademark sense of humor, it was instead an opportunity for lots of hilarious scenes.

The moral of the story: Flawed characters are good, as long as you can create something positive out of those flaws.  Annoying characters do not endear readers!