Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. For some reason, YA is the genre where I struggle most to connect with the characters. It isn’t a matter of likeability–I definitely don’t require that my characters be likeable. But sometimes I think I’m supposed to click with characters in YA when I really don’t.

Team Gale or Team Peeta? Team Yawn, I say. I have had students get very passionate in their defense of one boyfriend-ish over another, but it’s really all about Katniss for me. Let her be single!

This is so obvious it isn’t even a fair choice, is it? This probably goes without saying, but Bella may possibly be the most boring character in all of YA literature. I stopped reading after Book 1, and so I’ve never found out the only thing I really wonder about with this series: Is it ever revealed that Bella has some sort of physical ailment that causes her to fall down so often and need to be rescued?

I always love John Green’s almost cool nerds, and I don’t even mind their single-minded devotion to manic pixie dream girls. However, Colin Singleton somehow never rang true to me.

I didn’t click with Eleanor. I didn’t click with Park. I don’t understand the love for these characters or this book.

This one hurts, because Megan Whalen Turner created my all-time favorite character in Eugenides and a few of my all-time favorite secondary characters in Irene, the Magus, and Costis. I love these characters so much that I reread Books 1-3 in this series just about annually only so that I can spend time with some of my favorite fictional people. But Sophos, who has a minor though important role in The Thief and takes center stage in A Conspiracy of Kings, doesn’t click with me at all.

A Rick Riordan series with not one, not two, but THREE main characters who don’t click with me. Jason made me long for Percy, and Piper made me long for, well, just about anyone else.