I think this book would have worked better if it had been integrated into a revised edition of Schmidt's earlier book 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters rather than published separately. In the first half of the book, Schmidt briefly describes the interactions between the character types she introduced in 45 Master Characters, working her way through all female pairings, all male pairings, and all male and female pairings in that order. It's a good start, but it really only felt like a start. Schmidt mentions the negative manifestations of the character types in their basic descriptions, but they're not included in the interactions section. The interaction descriptions are extremely formulaic, with many sentences repeated word-for-word several times throughout. Only the male-female interactions have a romantic interpretation included, although since the interactions are so pared down, the writer of a male-female romance isn't getting much more help than the writer of a same-sex romance.

In the second half of the book, Schmidt focuses on animal archetypes. She uses the archetypes to describe character arcs rather than character types themselves. There are virtually no connections between this and the first half of the book, and it might have done better as a small book on its own. ( )