The protagonist doesn’t care about anything or anyone.
The novel may have a killer voice, and a beautifully twisted plot, but if the main character is devoid of passion, I don’t care about the book. Some people argue that the teenage experience is Brownian motion. (Actually, since they were English majors, they used a different term.) I’ve never met a teenager who cared about nothing. It may be buried too deep to see at first, but I have to believe it’s there. Even characters at the pit of depression need a flicker of hope to lead them out. If a protagonist is indifferent to everything, why write a book about him? After all, passion is the bottom line.
Why do you give up on a book?
*The exception to the rule is any book that has a vampire in it. Uh, uh. No way. I won’t read it.
5 comments:
I give up if the book I'm reading fails to surprise me in some way. I want to be surprised by the character -- learning and liking him/her more along the way -- and I also want the plot to take turns I didn't count on.
I also stop reading a book if I fall asleep reading it.
Set-piece descriptive passages (especially if there are two or more metaphors) are just plain self indulgent. Just look-at-me-look-at-me. They sometimes stop me reading a book, but I usually skip over them. But if the book has a young first-person narrator, those descriptive passages are definitely a deal-breaker for me; they make the voice too inauthentic.
More stuff! I agree with you about an uncaring protagonist, and I have corollaries. The protagonist who was created only to be able to stitch together a bunch of cool action scenes, which the author (justifiably) calculates will make him a mint.
Cardboard characters, especially cardboard villains, are a huge turnoff.
But perhaps the biggest stopper for me is a big jump in the time-line of the story. I usually like the story line to cover no more than a year. That's a huge reason I prefer children's and young adult books -- there's usually not a long time-line (because, of course, they wouldn't be kids anymore).
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