I started reading Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost.

The first thing Cat does is stubbornly ignore the earnest advice of Bones and Mencheres.  This is not a spoiler, because that’s what Cat always does, in every book so far: whatever she thinks is best, regardless of what people with hundreds, even thousands, of years of experience are telling her.

I put down my Kindle, because I’ve got a cold and I’m just not in the mood for more “independent women who ignore good advice and get themselves in trouble.”  Again.  And then I started wondering why this is a stereotype.  I’ve seen it in many a book I’ve read this year.  Strong, experienced male tells inexperienced female not to do something.  She does it anyway.  Mayhem ensues, relationships get borked, sometimes people die (a likely outcome in a paranormal romance).

Now, I realize that if Inexperienced Heroine does what Strong Hero tells her to do, there goes the plot.  I also realize that it’s not Politically Correct for a woman to do what a man tells her to do.  But I’m left tearing my hair out in helpless frustration when I read yet another novel with a headstrong heroine doing as she pleases and leaving havoc in her wake.  My God, is this woman stupid???  Can’t she learn?  Didn’t she figure out the last 952 times she got in trouble that maybe, just maybe, Strong Hero knows what he’s talking about for once?  When did it become a sign of weakness to admit what you don’t know and try to learn from another person if that other person happens to be male?

So I tell ya — I’m not going to let Marianne go off and do something bizarrely stupid
that the Sural (or one of his advisers) told her not to do, because a)
she’s not that stupid, and b) I don’t want to hate myself.  There are fights Marianne Woolsey isn’t going to win.  She’s going to have to suck it up, be her own person, and stop trying to fit the Sural into a human mold, all while she herself grows as a human person and sheds the effects of her own past.