Rach's Reading Club

Reading "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" showed me how not to give a main character a flaw.

We are told to give our characters flaws to make them more believable. That makes a lot of sense.

In the "Curse Workers" trilogy, the books I read before this, the main character breaks the fourth wall in the second chapter and says that we should not feel too sorry for him because he killed a girl. I was taken aback, but kept reading. Not only did this character feel terrible about that, it also turned out that he was under a sort of hypnosis when he was ordered to kill the girl but achieved to save her life instead - something that he finds out later. Flaw delivered and then later solved to redeem the character.

In the below book, the main character's flaw is to be needlessly cruel to people who can't defend themselves against him or they would lose their job and livelihood. On top of it, he makes fun of incontinence products. He didn't kill anyone, but his flaw is a character flaw within him. He is not someone I would hang out with in real life. He never expresses any remorse for his behaviors. If it weren't for the adventures in the book, it appears he would have grown up to be the basic frat brother with all the trimmings that nobody likes. I don't think this book is a good children's book because the hero is the exact opposite of what we want in teens or young adults.