The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes & Heroines...A Review

After reading The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes & Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes by Tami D. Cowen, Caro LaFever, and Sue Viders, I was presented with a dilemma because so many laud this book and I cannot. It is a good resource when taken with a few grains of salt, but hardly "complete" as promised by the title. Scratch the surface and the flaws become readily apparent.

If you are writing male/female romance and want to stick with rigid stereotypes, this is your book.

For anyone wishing to move beyond stereotypes, the book is too tidy for its own good. There are exactly eight male archetypes and exactly eight female archetypes. A bit too convenient. Moreover, the authors give the same archetype different names for males and females. For example "the chief" (male) and "the boss" (female) are the same archetype based on the authors' descriptions, but in their minds are two separate archetypes.

Logic faults like this unfortunately abound all through the book.

The male archetypes are:
the chief
the bad boy
the best friend
the charmer
the lost soul
the professor
the swashbuckler
the warrior

The female archetypes are:
the boss (would a chief not be a boss?)
the seductress
the spunky kid (guys apparently are not spunky)
the free spirit (ditto above)
the waif (???)
the librarian
the crusader
the nurturer

As mentioned before, some of the corresponding archetypes are really one not two. Moreover, the naming of some is jejune at best.

The book was written as a look at heroes and heroines, rather than character types which would have been more useful. The tome also is skewed toward the perspective that all interactions are male/female, further blunting its usefulness.

Would I encourage people to read The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes & Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes? Yes. Would I say it is complete? Not by a country mile!