Reddit mentions of Uglies (The Uglies Book 1)

It's probably pretty telling that the character I relate to most in fiction is pretty damn unlikeable. That would be Victoria/Egg in Boy Proof: self-sufficient, cynical, and obsessively nerdy while pushing everyone away. It was so refreshing to read about a character who didn't have friends fawning over her and wasn't treated as a martyr because people weren't fawning over her. Narratively, the situation was a pretty clear-cut case of "You really brought that on yourself, you know" rather than "Poor MC!"

I will draw a distinction between characters who are meant to be unlikeable, characters who are inadvertently unlikeable, and characters I probably wouldn't want to be friends with in real life.

Whether your MC is a hero(ine) or antihero(ine), you're supposed to be rooting for them. Everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story, and they should have internal motivations and justifications to match. The bully isn't spreading a rumor about the girl she hates because she's a bully: she's doing it because she feels she deserves it. Show why she thinks the objective victim deserves it. Maybe she humiliated her at the science fair and she's been nursing a grudge. Maybe she gave her a nasty look on the bus. Maybe everyone thinks she's Little Miss Perfect and she's not. Maybe the evidence said she stole the money but she didn't really. Reading about these justifications and looking at situations from another perspective is why reading good fiction makes you more empathetic: you get to know characters who have entirely different thought processes.

Some more examples:

Meant to be unlikeable, but you're rooting for them because you understand them:

• Gilly in The Great Gilly Hopkins (MG about foster care) - angry, rude, thieving
  
• Elisa in The Girl of Fire and Thorns (YA fantasy about a fat, religious princess) - borderline case as I thought she was a very sympathetic character, but she does wallow quite a bit in self-pity before she develops a (seriously impressive) spine.
  
• Tris in the Circle of Magic books (MG-YA fantasy about mage school) - abrasive and prickly
  
• Daisy in How I Live Now (YA WWIII) - emotionally flat
  
• Eleanor in Eleanor & Park (YA contemporary set in the 80s) - pretty sure the reader is meant to understand that Eleanor is isolated by both personality and circumstance. She's not exactly reaching out to anyone.
  
• Claudia in Incarceron (YA steampunk/fantasy mashup) - imperious, demanding, self-centered
  
• Meggy in Alchemy and Meggy Swan (MG historical fiction) - cranky and resistant to change
  
• Matilda in Matilda Bone (MG historical fiction) - pious and judgmental
  
  Meant to be likeable and they're not:
  
  
• Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladies (adult historical fiction about Appalachia) - twit
  
• Eve in... Eve (YA dystopia) - self-centered twit
  
• Tris in Divergent (YA dystopia) - no discernible personality that I could find to base a judgment on
  
• Briar Wilkes in Boneshaker (YA steampunk + zombies) - Again with the lack of personality thing. Among all the characters, she came closest to having a personality, but was still a cardboard cutout.
  
  When characters are supposed to be likeable and they're just not, the fault usually seems to lie with the author for failing to tack on a complete, nuanced personality. Or, the personality is there and the decisions run entirely contrary to the informed traits and it's clearly not a case of "humans are occasionally inconsistent."
  
  I think what annoys me the most is when characters make dumb decisions that run contrary to what we know about that character. For example, in Eve, [when](#s "Caleb tells her that she should move on because all of the small children she supposedly loves and all of the men she's supposed to be deathly afraid of will certainly die when she is tracked, Eve throws a hissy fit because obviously he's a cruel man who doesn't want her love and is just trying to get rid of her.") Also, even though she's never seen a movie or really read about (what the reader knows as) modern times, "the crickets sound like cheerleaders!" :D :D :D This runs entirely contrary to what we're supposed to know about her (she's desperate to get to a different location, she's terrified of men, she protects people).
  
  In comparison, Nell from Into the Forest (adult dystopia) makes some [objectively terrible decisions](#s "like giving up a chance to return to society and fingering her sister"), but they make sense for the context and what we know about her character (scared of change, totally focused on the memories of her family). Daisy from How I Live Now is another unlikeable but sympathetic character making [bad decisions](#s "such as splitting up the group, obsessing about an incestuous relationship, etc"), but again they're presented in a way that makes sense for her mindset and circumstances.
  
  Likeable characters I probably wouldn't want to be friends with, but root for anyways:
  
  
• Aly in Trickster's Choice - keeps trying to score points off people with snark and humiliating come-uppances. Fun to read about, but annoying in real life.
  
• Gemma Doyle in A Great and Terrible Beauty - overly concerned with being in the popular crowd, which is not my thing.
  
• Tally from Uglies - again with popularity as a major motivation
  
• Anna in A Countess Below Stairs - so selfless she'd make me suspicious
  
  These girls have complete personalities and are sympathetic in text despite their flaws. However, I feel like I "know" them well enough that I can tell we probably wouldn't get along in real life.
  
  tl;dr: Readers are supposed to root for the MC even if they are objectively unlikeable. When the reader doesn't want to root for the MC, it's probably because the author didn't convey their personality clearly or consistently. I wouldn't want to be real-life friends with many of my favorite characters.

Depends what sort of dystopia you're looking for, I suppose.

Modern Classics and "Literary" Speculative Fiction

• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, about social stratification, rule by corporations, and rampant genetic engineering. Has two companion volumes (not sequels) told from different points of view: The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. This is going to be an HBO series.
  
• Also by Margaret Atwood is The Handmaid's Tale, which is the US reverting to a theocracy and written in response to the rise of evangelical Christian politics in the 80s.
  
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro has a movie, but if you've even seen the trailer for it, it gives away the premise and half of the book is about the slow build to "something is not quite right."
  
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy is another one with a movie. A father and son struggle to survive in a bleak nuclear winter.
  
• Into the Forest by Jean Hegland is about two sisters trying to survive mostly on their own after a flu pandemic. I didn't like this one at first because I couldn't understand the main character's decisions and the symbolism bordered on magical realism, but it grew on me in retrospect.
  
  YA and Graphic Novels
  
  
• Feed by MT Anderson is one of my favorite books. In a hyper-capitalist future, everyone has the internet in their heads from birth.
  
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (free ebook) is about a teenage hacker swept up by the Department of Homeland Security following a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Very detailed about coding and internet privacy issues.
  
• Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is about a perfect society that will make you both pretty and dumb on your 16th birthday. The series went downhill, but I thought the first one was good.
  
• The Giver by Lois Lowry bears no relation to the movie trailer. In a society that has reverted to a simpler way of life, a 12-year old boy is given the task of remembering what it used to be like.
  
• World War Z by Max Brooks again bears no resemblance to the movie. It might not even be dystopian, but the interconnected interviews show how different societies survive and evolve following a zombie apocalypse.
  
• Habibi by Craig Thompson is a graphic novel about a child bride and a slave boy in a post-apocalyptic Middle East with elements of magical realism.

Uglies is one of my favorite books. Westerfield does a good job of drawing you in and there's a little romance w/o being too soppy. It's part of a series. The order is Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras. READ THEM ALL SO GOOD

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Several of the ones I would recommend have already been mentioned, but I also enjoyed The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey and The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell. Another good one is The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. It's YA, and it is the first in a series. I haven't read the other books in the series, though. I think it works fine as a stand alone and just haven't had the desire to read the others.

If you're interested in YA, you might also enjoy the Uglies series by Scott Westerfield.

Pecksniffian

This is my book of choice. It's one of my all time favorites and my paperback copy is starting to fall apart, and it may have gone swimming a few years back. Heh.

Thank you!