They may induce sighs or eye-rolling. More serious offenders may cause erratic page flipping or even book slamming. Surely you have come across them: the terrible horrible no good very bad pet peeves. We’ve recounted our top five for your viewing displeasure.
1. Orphans attached to prophecies. Harry Potter is the obvious example. Lyra and the Pevensies count, too.
Comment: Can’t orphans have character arcs without “fate” aka author hand waving to explain everything?
2. Precocious kids, idiotic adults. How does a society where all the adults are less intelligent and less capable than their progeny function at all? A Series of Unfortunate Events comes to mind.
3. When authors think their main characters are more amazing than they actually are. Obviously this is subjective, so we won’t give examples.
Comment: Let readers determine whether they like a character or not. Don’t hit us over the head with a character’s amazing perfection.
4. A corollary of Pet Peeve #3. When characters are perfect, except for one teensy-weensy “flaw,” like being too noble, stubborn, or self-sacrificing. And there are no long term consequences to possessing this “flaw.” Basically, everyone Finnikin looks up to and tries to emulate. Mary Poppins counts, too, but at least we weren’t supposed to be invested in her.
5. Long fantasy names with a string of apostrophes and rarely used letters of the alphabet, like x, v, k and z.
See Prince Balthazar and Trevanion from Finnikin of the Rock and the Ra’zac and Queen Islanzadi from Eragon for a phonetic headache.
What about you? Feel free to gripe about your kidlit pet peeves in the comments below. Or email us at readsforkeeps@gmail.com. We’ll feature your pet peeves in a future post.
Have you read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones? I think you would appreciate it. Here are some of my pet peeves:
1. Characters help in epic ways, then have their memories erased by the adult magician once the epic is complete. The Dark is Rising series, I’m looking at you.
2. Everyone is default Caucasian unless the author describes skin tones using caffeinated beverage or food images.
3. The girl has to disguise herself as a boy because that’s the only way she can follow her dream to become a warrior. I’ve enjoyed past stories of this ilk (i.e. Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series), but I’m all done now.
These are good pet peeves! And I really need to read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
[...] and Lisa over at Reads for Keeps did a forthright post a few weeks back on some of their pet peeves in children’s books. They followed that up by reaching out to some of us to give them our pet peeves. Mine are in this [...]