Today’s guest post is by author Christina Wyman.
As an author of fiction for children and an essayist of nonfiction for adults, I often encounter questions—and opinions—about character and narrator likeability. But I also understand the gravitational pull toward this topic as a reader. Who wants to endure stories told from a perspective that we’re not vibing with?
Even still, I need to assert what might be an unpopular opinion: Not all main characters need to be likeable.
In my children’s books in particular, it’s a good long while before my main characters—middle school-aged girls—are able to catch a break from the world around them, that break sometimes not arriving until the last few chapters. In my recently released third novel, Breakout, eighth-grader Ellis is having a hard time making peace with her pubescent acne, which is so severe that she wants to stay home from school, not to emerge until her face stops resembling an active volcano.
In my sophomore novel Slouch, the main character—a seventh grader named Stevie—is nearly six feet tall and receiving unwanted attention from almost every corner of her life, some of it quite scary when it comes from strange men. And in my debut novel, Jawbreaker, seventh-grader Max is dealing with a severe orthodontic issue that gets the attention of her school bullies, her own sister chief among them.
What all of my characters have in common is that they’re having a really hard time. Why? Because adolescence is hard on its best day. I do not know a single person for whom growing up generally, and enduring puberty specifically, was a cakewalk. After throwing socioeconomic issues and dysfunctional families into the mix, I think it’s fair to say that my characters’ lives are messier than average. These authorial choices are intentional and based on deep experience with having a relatively rough childhood marred by financial difficulties, family dysfunction, addiction, and mental illness.
Simply put, complicated childhood—and the glum and surly fictional characters that navigate it—is what my books do. And as a result, I’ve encountered a common refrain: My main characters are regularly accused of not being “likeable” enough.
Readers’ standards for likeability aren’t always realistic
I know firsthand how hard it is to don masks of likeability when life feels unrelentingly difficult for reasons beyond our control. I know very few adults who can fake an amiable or even measured persona when everything is crumbling around them, nor do they try.
So why do we as readers expect children, even fictional ones, to have such finely tuned coping mechanisms? Who do such expectations serve, and what does it teach young readers, and especially young girls, about who they should be and how they should show up in the world when the characters they look up to are taught—are required—to be likeable at all costs?
The reviews of literature I’ve seen that comment on a character’s likeability always, without exception, center on a female protagonist. Why is this? (We know why this is.) I’m reminded of tone-policing. I’m reminded of men who encourage women they don’t know to smile when out in public. (I’m reminded of my mother who agreed with these strange men when my sister and I encountered them.) I’m reminded of accusations that women are too emotional to lead. I’m reminded of sexism. I’m reminded of internalized misogyny.
What do fictional children owe readers?
I offer these observations in the spirit of commentary I’ve seen about my own books but also reviews of books for children and young adults that I’ve read that are far more well-known than my own: Commenting on a younger character’s likeability, I believe, says far more about the reader than the quality of the character and the story in which she is entrenched. It seems that readers’ capacity for emotional discomfort, particularly as it relates to childhood and children’s books, is sometimes projected onto stories that center uncomfortable things.
Let’s take the young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter as a prime example. I bought this book on a whim at my local bookstore. I was itching to add some YA to my TBR list.
Once I started, I could not put the book down. Even though it takes place in Chicago, I was reminded of my own surroundings in Brooklyn, New York, as a working-class child in a somewhat controlling and very dysfunctional home where school, in some ways, was a refuge. Mexican Daughter invites us into a story about a teenager named Julia who dreams of getting accepted to college far away from her overbearing parents.
Mexican Daughter is loosely based on the author’s life as a poor child with hardworking, immigrant parents who have very specific ideas about the kind of daughter they want Julia to be—namely, a replica of their deceased older daughter, whose death the family is actively grieving. Julia is forever at odds with her parents’ expectations, some of which seem to occasionally border on emotional abuse.
From beginning to end, Julia has what my parents would have absolutely called an “attitude problem.” She is snarky, cynical, and gloomy at nearly every turn, even when she’s getting what she wants.
When I finished the book, I rushed to the negative reviews on Goodreads, intuitively knowing that there would be plenty of commentary on the likeability of the character. I do not engage much with my own Goodreads page, but I do have a personal policy of leaving 5-star reviews on books I’ve read. (I will not post a review of a book unless I am willing to give it five stars,) I left this for Mexican Daughter in the hopes that people would see it and think twice before commenting negatively on this protagonist’s likeability:
Sure, Julia isn’t particularly “likeable.” I don’t know how a child is supposed to achieve “likeable” superstar status when she is grieving, anxious, depressed, and not treated well at home as a rule, versus the exception.
I grew up with many Julias, and was—more often than not—a version of Julia myself as I navigated a very complicated and under-resourced childhood in Brooklyn, NY. This book is a very real and honest telling of what it feels like to grow up with parents and family who do not take even one opportunity to understand their developing children. To live every day knowing that your own home is not much a refuge, and to have to turn to friends and teachers in order to be heard.
It is also an honest depiction of how it feels, as a poor child, to grow up on the periphery of the upper/middle classes—a reality that inspires deep insecurities for many children.
Such childhood experiences should be allowed to exist in children’s literature, no matter how uncomfortable it might make some of us, and I am so grateful for this story.
Discussions about character likeability as it relates to fiction that centers childhood trauma inspire this question: Do people really understand what childhood can be like for kids from complicated homes? When I read reviews of “unlikeable” characters, I can’t help but to wonder whether likeability is often conflated with relatability. These ideas are not necessarily the same.
When characters don’t respond to the world the way we want them to
To be sure, readers are allowed to their experiences. I have put down (or declined to pick up) plenty of books for a variety of reasons. And I don’t know many readers who want to read books about other people who just can’t catch a break. Hardship after hardship, without nothing to look forward to, is not a fun reader experience, and young readers especially need hope. As an author and human, I understand this need. I, personally, did not feel hopeful about my own life until long after high school and possibly into my mid-twenties, but thanks to my impossibly talented, patient, and kind editor, I learned quickly that hope—even the manufactured kind—holds an important place in children’s literature.
Books for children are uniquely positioned to instill hope where it might not otherwise exist.
But character likeability and story relatability are two entirely different things. And I believe that there are a few questions readers can keep in mind if they find themselves unable to vibe with a main character:
- Why does this character feel so unlikeable? And why does that make me uncomfortable?
- What are the experiences narrating this character’s world that might help me understand their un-like-ability?
- What is it about my own life experiences that are implicating my ability to connect with this character?
- Is it the character that is unlikeable, or is that I’m unable to relate to what the character is enduring? How would I have reacted to the same set of circumstances if I were the one experiencing them as a child?
- How would I have been permitted/expected to act, by my parents, family, and society, if I were at the center of this story? Are those expectations fair?
I think, as readers and writers, we can center hope while moving away from character likeability, particularly when it comes to young female protagonists. Girls are allowed to take up space— physically and emotionally. The books we write with them in mind must reinforce that message.
Christina Wyman is a USA Today bestselling author and teacher living in Michigan. Her new novel, Breakout, is a fresh and funny middle-grade novel about a girl with chronic acne figuring out how to feel good in her own skin, and is available wherever books are sold, including through local independent bookstores. Her runaway debut hit, Jawbreaker, is a middle-grade book that follows a seventh grader with a craniofacial anomaly, and is a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2023. Her sophomore novel, Slouch, about a tall girl navigating friends, family, self-esteem, and boundaries, is a Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year.
