This week’s Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) topic is Characters I Didn’t Click With. Oooh…I just love this topic! I actually wrote an entire post earlier this year delving into what makes a character dislikable and the impact that disliking characters has on my and others’ opinions of an entire book. The short answer is that it totally depends on the situation for me…as you’ll see by the mix of loves and hates in the books below! Time to get a bit snarky…

Top Ten Characters I Didn’t Click With

Pretty much every character from Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro (hated the book)
Almost every character in this book illustrates some facet of why we left NYC soon after having kids. 

Barbara Beegan from Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford (DNF’d the book)
Barbara Beegan is the kind of striving, social climbing mother that puts an insane amount of pressure on her daughter to mix with the “right crowd”. I DNF’d this book at 25%, so maybe she got better, but I didn’t really care about finding out.

Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (loved the book)
What a wet noodle…I’ll take Rhett Butler any day.

Mattie from The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo (DNF’d the book)
I didn’t make it very far in this book, mostly because Mattie annoyed the heck out of me. An adult human cannot be this irresponsible and this big of a disaster.

Serge from The Dinner by Herman Koch (loved the book)
One of the things I loved most about this book was Paul’s witty social commentary about his brother, Serge’s, pompous behavior (wine snobbery and excessive image consciousness to name a few).

Lillian Meecham from The Great Santini by Pat Conroy (loved the book)
Most people would probably say abusive father Bull Meecham was the resident dislikable character in this book (and I agree), but let’s not completely absolve his wife, Lillian. She was a classic enabler and repeatedly chose to protect the family’s image instead of protecting her children from Bull’s wrath.

Cecilia from The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty (hated the book)
A Tupperware saleswoman (yes, really) who’s the head of every single committee at her children’s school, hand-makes their Halloween costumes every year, and is OCD-level organized about things that don’t matter. Gag me.

Olivia Moon from The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh (didn’t like the book)
Olivia is supposed to be a “free spirit”, but I just found her irresponsible, immature, and lacking judgement…and, I was annoyed during every section of the book that focused on her.

Geraldine Coutts from The Round House by Louise Erdrich (didn’t like the book)
I wasn’t a fan of Geraldine’s lack of fight and icing out of her son in the aftermath of her rape. This probably sounds callous, but I promise I have my reasons.

Joseph Castleman from The Wife by Meg Wolitzer (loved the book)
I find men who were clearly coddled growing up by doting females, consequently ending up as what Wolitzer calls “gigantic babies”, totally unattractive. That is Joseph Castleman in a nutshell.

Tuesday Intro

Every Tuesday, fellow blogger Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where bloggers share the first paragraph of the book they are currently reading or thinking about reading soon.

Plot Summary from Amazon (adapted for length)

Bill Reed manages a wildlife sanctuary in rural Idaho, caring for injured animals—raptors, a wolf, and his beloved bear, Majer, among them—that are unable to survive in the wild. Seemingly rid of his troubled past, Bill hopes to marry the local veterinarian and live a quiet life together, the promise of which is threatened when a childhood friend is released from prison. Suddenly forced to confront the secrets of his criminal youth, Bill battles fiercely to preserve the shelter that protects these wounded animals and to keep hidden his turbulent, even dangerous, history. 

Here’s the first paragraph:

1996

What you have come for is death. You might try to convince yourself otherwise but you know in your heart that to do so would be to set one falsehood upon another. In the end there is no denying what is true and what is only some thin wisp of hope that clings to you like hoarfrost on a strand of wire. At least you have learned that much, although you are loath to admit it just as you are loath to come down the mountain, down from the animals, to confirm what you already know you will find. All the while you can feel their shining eyes upon you, their noses pulling at your scent, their bodies pressed tight against the interlaced fencing of their enclosures. The world in its bubble and you holding fast to its slick interior as if to the blood-pumped safety of a womb. You and the animals. And yet after everything you have done, everything you have tried to do, everything you have promised yourself, today you know you will have to put on the old clothes of the killer once again.

Would you keep reading?