Top Ten Book Turn-Offs

 Hosted by The Broke and Bookish

1.  Absent/abusive/neglectful/general bad relationship parents when it serves no purpose in character development or plot and it is left unresolved or is sort of brushed over as if everything is ok.


2.  Insta-love (which is sort of a given, but there you are).


3.  Main character abandons her family, friends, and all common sense for a guy (or girl I suppose, but I've not seen any lead females do this for a girl, so there you are).


4.  Extreme lack of self confidence.  There is a point when the absence of self confidence is so lacking that it just becomes unbelievable, and it rarely serves a purpose in the plot.  I'm not saying my heroine needs to be self-assured like Celaena, in fact heroines like Mia Thermopolis are fantastic.   But then there are others who will not be mentioned who are just plain ridiculous and they piss me off.


5.  The lead doesn't think she is pretty enough to be with the guy she is with, and while she's got no self confidence about any of her abilities, it is particularly focused on being valued for looks.


6.  Hot, rich jerk.  In chick lit it seems to be ok for the guy to be an arrogant prick, but he's almost ALWAYS rich and hot.  He's at least one of them.  Don't get me wrong, I get sucked into it too, but would the lead let the guy treat her like that if he wasn't rich and hot?  Things to think about.


7.  The cardboard cut out best friend.  She serves no purpose other than as a sounding board about MC's love interest.  OR, even worse you're told she is the best friend, but she promptly acts like a backstabbing b*@#& the whole book, so we never understand why they were friends in the first place.


8.  Love interests unreasonably sticking together, even when the other is a danger to their life.  I can't really explain this well, since technically Katniss and Peeta would fulfill that requirement, and I totally love Katniss and Peeta.  It's more like Bella/Edward and I KNOW this will be an unpopular choice...but Mara/Noah.  Ah - that's what it is.  I need some sort of bond that is made before and outside of just romance for it to work for me - the others stink a bit of instalove.


9.  Slut shaming.  There is something particularly about the use of slut that really, really bothers me.  I briefly ventured out into contemporary YA earlier this year and literally every book I read during that brief foray involved some pretty serious name calling and bullying - but not in a way that I think exposes bullying as a problem.  This word more than any other in YA literatue really upsets me, and it bothers me a lot that it is so easily found.  It's not exactly the word itself (although it sort of is), it's that characters can so easily be painted as "sluts" and written off.  It's seriously the easiest was to disregard a character.   And it's just as offensive when the protagonist is the one being outcast as a slut.  It's just a particularly vitriolic word that I feel is hard to articulate exactly how...just lots of bad feeling come quickly to the surface.  To me it's more horrid to use against someone than b*#$@.  And I think part of the reason it really bothers me is that it is definitely a gender thing.  If a guy is called a slut in a book (or in life), it's usually in a joking manner.



10.  Possessiveness or guy acting in a dangerous way (like a vampire almost sucking girl's blood, etc.) being explained away because he didn't mean it.  Ok I'm sorry, but that is the first sign of an abusive relationship.  Sure it's in the paranormal world usually so it's not the guy beating on the girl or screaming at her, but the message is the same, and that's really not ok.  Plus the situation often gets a rapey sort of feel.  Seriously not attractive, guys.

Olivia Benson would not approve.

There are no pictures (I was originally going to post books that fit my list, but then it made me feel really catty so I decided against it) so this is a rather boring post :-/.  In other news, I am doing a giveaway for The Evolution of Mara Dyer to celebrate my 100th post on the blog, so go check it out!
That's it for my TTT this week, what's on yours?  Leave me a link below!  (And as always just a reminder...really leave a link or I won't be able to find your blog haha)