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Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Most Frustrating Characters Ever

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Time to let out the rage! My enthusiasm for this topic is such that I’ve made it one point per book, so I can get 12 characters in. I’m sneaky like that. I have tried to put the list in order going from least frustrating to most frustrating, but it was quite difficult, and it’s not perfect.

This is my fifteenth Top Ten Tuesday post! Top Ten Tuesday was created and is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Be warned: minor swear words ahoy!

This cat represents how I feel about Bella Swan. Yeah, I went to the Flickr Creative Commons page and searched for ‘angry cat’. What of it. Photo by Captain Pancakes, who also has a blog.

Top Ten Most Frustrating Characters Ever

1. Kim Yamamoto from The Boyfriend List, by E. Lockhart – Why would you start dating your best friend’s ex-boyfriend days after they broke up and decide she has to be okay with it because he’s your “soulmate”? Facepalms all round…

2. Dylan Kowalski from the Diary of a Crush trilogy, by Sarra Manning – This one is a good kind of frustrating. If Dylan wasn’t frustrating, there would be no plot. But my god, is that boy frustrating‽ He only gets more frustrating in each book. I love it.

3. Mr Sheridan from Nobody’s Family Is Going To Change, by Louise Fitzhugh – Some more necessary frustration. The point of the whole book is that he stubbornly refuses to consider what would actually make his children happy.

4. Mr Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen – Most people seem to think that Mr Bennet should be in the ‘Top Ten Best Dads in Literature’ list, but they are wrong. He belongs on this list! His wife and all his daughters will become homeless when he dies unless at least some of them get married, and does he give the tiniest shit about it? Does he do anything to try to prevent this? I’m not saying he should be obsessed about it like his wife, but some concern would be, well, parental…

5. Meghan Chase from The Iron Fey, by Julie Kagawa – Oh, Meghan. Why do you keep running into dangerous situations without asking for more information about them?

6. Dolores Umbridge and Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter series, by J. K. Rowling – Musical interlude! This Harry and the Potters song says it all re: Umbridge. Though Imelda Staunton does not look like a frog.

Now, Ron, why are you so jealous that Harry has to risk his life over and over? And why do you keep pretending that you’re not madly in love with Hermione? Oh well, he does grow and change and I love him.

7. Stephen from We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant – He just goes along with life and never seems to actually make a decision or take action for himself.

8. Sephy and Jude from Noughts & Crosses, by Malorie Blackman – I really only mean child-Sephy, because she doesn’t have the imagination to understand why Callum and the other Noughts find some things she says offensive. I like her once she grows up, whereas Jude turns out to be horrible. He doesn’t seem to care about anything at all, not even the cause he’s supposedly fighting for. I think he just enjoys it all.

9. Bella Swan from Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer – So you start at a new school, and almost everyone is nice and welcoming. Are you a) nice back or do you b) not give a crap, only being interested in the pale people who sit together in a boring little clique? Think about it for approximately two seconds and you’ll agree, Bella is a dickhead. And don’t get me started on how she suddenly becomes really clumsy in chapter six, or whatever it is. Based on the film and reviews, I think she only gets more frustrating in New Moon, but I won’t be reading it, because she was barely sufferable in Twilight.

10. Amy March from Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott – She burnt Jo’s manuscript. If someone burnt my only copy of the novel that I had been working on for years, they would be dead to me. Of course she does actually almost die, which leads Jo to forgive her, but that just goes to show how wonderful Jo is. Amy’s still a bumface.

Top Ten Settings I’d Like To See More Of (Or At All)

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In which I share many novel ideas that you should probably use. This is my fourteenth Top Ten Tuesday post, but yet again it’s Wednesday as it took me a while to finish the list! Top Ten Tuesday was created and is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Settings I’d Like To See More Of (Or At All)
  1. British Boarding Schools – I eat boarding school stories up, well, like Girl Meets Cake. (See also: Night School)

  2. London – I live in London, but that doesn’t stop me loving stories set here. From Sarra Manning’s Pretty Things/Adorkable to Luisa Plaja’s Extreme Kissing to Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy – if the characters spend time in London, I’m having fun.

  3. Subcultures – I really enjoyed Jo Brand’s It’s Different For Girls, and won’t somebody who was around at the time write a book set during the heyday of goth? Pretty please with a black eyeliner pencil on top?

  4. Spaceships – specifically, I’d like to read more YA about girls who live on spaceships. I’m brewing up a novel like this myself but there’s plenty of room at this party – come on in, the space water’s lovely.

  5. British secondary schools – I haven’t read many great UKYA books largely set at school and this is a shame, because there is so much potential there to be explored.

  6. Arts schools – E. Lockhart has covered performing arts with Dramarama and visual arts with Fly on the Wall, while Sophie Flack’s Bunheads reminded me how much I loved ballet stories as a kid, but I want more!

  7. Paris – To be fair, there are probably loads of YA books set in Paris, but only Diary of a Crush:French Kiss and Nobody’s Girl spring to my mind immediately. Sarra Manning just makes Paris sound so good, I have to be careful not to read any of her books in the same week that I watch an episode of Rachel Khoo’s The Little Paris Kitchen or I’ll find myself packing my bags and grabbing my passport.

  8. Less well-known countries – Admittedly, there are scores of popular YA books set in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and all the most tourist-doused European countries. Even India gets a fair bit of teen-literary attention, though almost always with an American or British protagonist. I would like to read more stories about teens in other countries that are actually growing up in those countries.

  9. Universities – Young Adult or New Adult or literary fiction, I’d like to read more books set in universities. Especially if those universities are NOT Oxbridge.

  10. Libraries – because they’re not just for sitting in and reading or collecting books from!
Have you read any books with these settings that you’d recommend to me?