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These Unlikable YA Heroines LOL at Your Concern, Quietly Plot Your Destruction
The idea that readers can’t identify with unlikable characters is hilariously, fatally flawed. In pursuit of a good story, we’ve rooted for the success (or at least avidly followed the story) of psychopaths, rabbits, the color red, unapologetic pedophiles, and bees. If you stick googly eyes on a rock and give it a purpose (to kill all the other rocks!), our story-seeking brains will find a way to care. There’s a great sequence in Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds that illustrates the point: in it, a fictionalized version of John Green exhibits the importance of plot to a room full of school kids by telling a vague, one-paragraph story about two characters named “my friend” and “his girlfriend.” When he cuts the story off at a crucial point, revealing he made up the whole thing, the room still clamors to know what happened next. We will identify with nameless archetypes in an invented anecdote, if that’s what it takes to get our stories!
Once the idea of unlikable characters being unable to carry a narrative is out of the way, let’s consider why complex, “difficult” females are so crucial in YA. Aside from the fact that great antiheroines are harder to find than their male counterparents, there’s the reality that, for a girl, making “nice” your default setting can be downright dangerous. In the first episode of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a woman explains the circumstances of her kidnapping by a religious fanatic (and subsequent years-long entrapment in a bunker) like so: “One night he invited me out to his car to see some baby rabbits, and I didn’t want to be rude, so…here we are.” Feel that? It’s painfully funny because it’s true. Readers need girls and women who aren’t “good”—whether that means not nice, not pure, or simply written with complexity—because they need to know it’s not just the good girls whose stories are worth telling. In the interest of giving our love and our reading time to unsimplified female portrayals, here are 8 complex YA heroines to add to your bookshelf.
Emer Morrissey/Saffron Adams (The Dust of 100 Dogs, by A.S. King)
Saffron has big plans for after high-school graduation: head to Jamaica, dig up the treasure that, 101 lifetimes ago, belonged to her. Back then, she was Emer Morrissey, a murderous pirate captain on the high seas. But right as she was about to leave the pirating life, she was cursed with the “dust of 100 dogs,” then killed. After living 100 dog lives, she’s reborn as Saffron Adams, a high-school student whose soul’s legacy includes 1) all of her pirate and canine memories and 2) the tendency to daydream about popping people’s eyeballs out of their skulls—that was kinda Emer’s trademark. Her story is told in alternating chapters with Emer’s, who became a pirate out of desperation, but stayed a pirate because it was good, as a refugee, orphan, and rape survivor, to get some of her power back (also, she finds she likes shiny things). She’s a YA heroine with a body count, and we wouldn’t give her up for anything.
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Sadie Su (Delicate Monsters, by Stephanie Kuehn)
Sadie might be the most irredeemable human on this list, a girl whose taste for cruelty runs so bone-deep it drives her own father away. She’s a pot-stirrer who likes to find and feed the darkness in other people. She revels in violence and manipulation, and while she has no patience for nebulous concepts like pity, compassion, or guilt, she knows their existence makes other people easier to use. But her chilling attentiveness to what makes people tick (and how to exploit it) shows its flipside when her interest is taken by Miles Tate, a hollowed-out teen who’s subject to bullying and frightening visions. Sadie’s inability to entirely disengage with other people’s needs and impulses—including not just Miles but one of her victims, a boy whose near-death got her kicked out of boarding school—keeps her from retreating entirely into sociopathy. She’s an earthy, unpredictable character, and Kuehn takes readers deep into her darkness. It fascinates because of the specific, idiosyncratic ways in which it’s expressed—and the breathtaking directions it takes Sadie’s story.
Addison Stone (The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, by Adele Griffin)
Here’s the thing I love about Addison Stone: she could so easily have become a manic pixie dream girl, but she didn’t. She’s a beautiful, demanding teen artist on the cusp of greatness when she dies in a tragic accident—or suicide, depending who you’re asking. The book takes the form of an oral history on her life, and every time it threatens to descend into hagiography, someone from her past comes and throws cold water on the lovesfest, reminding readers that for all of Addison’s talent, generosity, and lust for life, she also had a hollowness at her core, that threatened to suck up all the love and resources of anyone who got close enough to care for her. The Addison that emerges from their tellings had both sides of creative genius—the gifts and all it took to feed them—as well as a very creepy monkey on her back: a ghost girl who dogged her movements, whether she was a real entity or a symptom of the mental illness Addison didn’t always choose to treat.
Liz Emerson (Falling Into Place, by Amy Zhang)
Falling Into Place opens with popular girl Liz Emerson’s life hanging in the balance, after she drives her Mercedes off the road in an apparent suicide attempt. The book zig-zags between present and past, cataloguing the mean-girl crimes that fuel Liz’s self-hatred, but also elucidating the girl she’s capable of being: a girl who wishes someone would punish her for her repeat offenses, who once played with an imaginary friend (presented here as a narrator), and a girl who still commands the love of one of her victims, a boy who’s waiting, in more ways than one, for her to wake up. Zhang doesn’t use Liz’s pain to make her interesting; instead, she builds a character, layer by layer, who we believe is capable of containing the multitudes that make her deserving of both punishment and love.
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Parker Fadley (Cracked Up to Be, by Courtney Summers)
In telling the story of one-time golden girl Parker Fadley, and her precipitous plunge from future valedictorian to self-destructive drunk, Summers does a brilliant job of showing the ways high school is essentially a giant Real World house, where you can become so locked into the drama of your life that you keep returning to your bullies, abusers, and exes just to keep the narrative going. In hiding from her guilt and shame, the source of which is slowly explained over the course of the book, Parker continually bites the hands that try to feed her. She lashes out at the ex who still loves her, manipulates and mocks the girl who has stepped into her own Queen Bee shoes, and generally pushes away every opportunity she receives for outside help—because the healing that needs to happen, the shift that must occur for anything to get better, can only come from within. And in the hellscapes of Summers’ high-school halls, redemption is never guaranteed.
Alice (Side Effects May Vary, by Julie Murphy)
When Alice is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she makes a bucket list. But it doesn’t contain items like “pick blueberries in Nantucket one last time”—instead, it’s a document of vengeful destruction, enabled (reluctantly) by Harvey, the boy who has been in love with her for forever. But when Alice unexpectedly goes into remission, she has no idea what to do next. Harvey assumes they’ll be together, but Alice is neither certain enough to jump into a relationship with him, nor strong enough to let him go. She runs hot and cold, she regrets none of what she’s done to her high-school enemies, and she allows Harvey to keep coming back for more abuse, even as she knows she can’t give him what he wants. In other words, she’s a young human, high on the queasy power of being loved by someone she can use. Look deep into your high-school past (or high-school present): you’ve probably been one half of this dynamic.
Hanna Jarvinen (Bleeding Violet, by Dia Reeves)
How unlikable is Hanna, a damaged, bipolar girl on the run? When she hits the tiny town of Portero, Texas, in search of her absentee mom, she isn’t even sure whether the victim of her most recent violent outburst is alive. Hannah is nearly as amoral as her dangerous mother, and easily as strange as Portero itself, which is saying something: the town hosts portals to other worlds, and monster hunters to beat back the atrocities that come through. Reeves doesn’t hold back in depicting Hanna’s terrible decisions and heedlessness, making her compelling without making her admirable. Bleeding Violet is what happens when crazy meets crazy…and they make beautiful, horrifying, atonal music together.
Dolly Wilde (How to Build a Girl, by Caitlin Moran)
Hilarious, ballsy, sex-positive “Dolly Wilde” (née Johanna Morrigan) is wildly likable, but she’s on this list because she’s nobody’s idea of a “nice” girl. (I’m inviting her to my unlikable heroines party because I’m hoping she’ll take over as DJ). After her big mouth puts her family’s welfare status in jeopardy, she launches herself into a rock journalism career, changing her name and herself along with it. Dolly does reckless things in the name of reinvention: she writes career-wrecking band reviews. She sleeps with sketchy men. She wears a top hat that makes her look like Slash. She chooses her choices and learns her lessons from the ground up, letting experience be her teacher.
Who are your favorite “unlikable” female characters?