Some books don’t just constrain their protagonists—they sideline them. Not because the plot requires it, but because the author is more invested in something else: satire, format, descriptive indulgence, shock value. The character becomes a tool rather than a person. Their agency is limited, their interiority is thin, and their autonomy is withheld because the author has other priorities.
Two of these books—Yesteryear and Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales—are recent reads that I rated two stars specifically because of this pattern. The third, All the Light We Cannot See, I read in 2019 and rated one star. It remains the clearest example of how an author’s priorities can completely override a protagonist’s agency.
Natalie: Drugged for Satire and Reproductive Servitude
In Yesteryear, Natalie is drugged by her husband and family for fifteen years. Her memory breaks apart. She can’t trust her own perceptions. It’s domestic horror, but Burke doesn’t treat it as horror. Natalie’s confusion becomes a device for mocking influencer culture and manosphere rhetoric. She’s written as judgmental and foolish, and the book frames her chemical imprisonment as a kind of deserved consequence.
And then there’s the reproductive servitude. Natalie may be foolish, unkind, or driven by shallow goals, but none of that justifies forcing her through nine children, several of whom are conceived via turkey baster. The book tries to justify this by having her promise Caleb’s father—Doug, the three‑time presidential candidate—that she’ll give Caleb “lots of babies” and build a “big American family” on the Idaho property Doug purchased for $5 million. But buying land does not entitle you to a woman’s reproductive labor. It doesn’t make her a “good wife” to have nine children. It makes her exploited.
Even within the story’s own logic, the promise doesn’t hold. A vow made in her twenties does not explain why she’s still being artificially impregnated into her early forties. It doesn’t explain why she and Caleb share a bed when neither of them is interested in sex with the other. It doesn’t explain why her reproductive life is treated as an obligation rather than a choice. These pregnancies don’t deepen her character or advance the plot. They’re not consequences of her decisions. They’re consequences of the author’s decisions.
The solo birth at forty to a blue, oxygen‑deprived infant is the same problem. It’s dreadful to read and completely unnecessary. It doesn’t illuminate any theme. It doesn’t catalyze change. It’s just another moment where the narrative punishes her instead of developing her. Her reproductive life becomes a spectacle—a place where the author can escalate suffering without earning it.
The parallel storyline with Caleb's mother Amelia, also chemically diminished, gets dropped. The book sets up a family-wide pattern of controlling women through pharmaceuticals and then abandons it. Natalie never gets clarity about what happened to her. The ending doesn’t resolve whether she escapes, stays, or even understands her situation.
Her fractured state isn’t a character arc. It’s a narrative convenience. The satire takes priority over the character.
Emily: Denied Interiority in Service of Format
Across the first two Emily Wilde books, Emily reads as possibly neurodivergent: literal, structured, uncomfortable with emotional reciprocity, and reliant on observation rather than introspection. These traits make sense within the journal/field‑note conceit. Her voice is clinical because the format is clinical. She processes the world through taxonomy, classification, and data. Even her one moment of longing for Wendell is immediately reframed as a recurring physical sensation she’s been tracking: a feeling she notes rather than experiences.
But in the third book, the format shifts. The “journals” become more like standard first‑person chapters with date stamps. The writing leans into immediacy rather than documentation. And as the format loosens, Emily’s characterization loosens with it. She suddenly has more fluid emotional reactions, more spontaneous commentary, and less structured observation. The traits that previously read as neurodivergent become inconsistent—not because Emily has grown, but because the narrative device has changed.
This is the core problem: Emily’s interiority isn’t rooted in who she is. It’s rooted in whatever the format requires. When the journal conceit is tight, she’s clinical and distant. When the narration becomes more conventional, she becomes more conventional. She isn’t allowed a stable inner life because the author is more committed to the epistolary device than to the character herself.
Meanwhile, Wendell remains consistently thoughtful—protective cloaks, tailored clothing, specialists for his dying dog, an entire library commissioned for her research. Emily responds by complaining the journals are too fancy. She doesn’t examine his care or her own reactions to it. She doesn’t let any of it matter.
By the third book, the distance isn’t restraint. It’s avoidance. Emily is kept emotionally inert because the format demands it, not because the character does. The format takes priority over the character.
Marie-Laure: Infantilized for Descriptive Prose and Shock Value
Doerr’s prose in All the Light We Cannot See is undeniably beautiful, but Marie-Laure is written as an “Angel in a Glass Box.” She’s blind, so she’s treated as incapable of basic tasks—packing, dressing, washing her own hair. Her father does everything for her. Her disability becomes a device for sensory description rather than a lived experience.
She survives the war, earns a PhD, works in a museum, writes books. She does all of this while blind, yet the narrative never allows her access to the medical intervention that would restore her sight. Cataracts are treatable. By the book’s timeline, she lives in an era where surgery is available. But the author keeps her blind because her blindness serves his aesthetic.
Instead of giving her autonomy, he adds more cruelty—rape, traumatic brain injury, land mines, a magical diamond subplot. Shock value accumulates while her agency stays static. The prose takes priority over the character.
Across all three books, the protagonist is sacrificed to something else:
- Burke’s satire replaces Natalie’s agency.
- Fawcett’s commitment to format replaces Emily’s interiority.
- Doerr’s descriptive agenda replaces Marie-Laure’s autonomy.
None of these characters are allowed to become fully realized. Their constraints come from authorial preference, not narrative necessity.
A protagonist doesn’t need to be likable or triumphant, but they do need the chance to be a person. They need interiority, choice, contradiction, growth, failure—something that belongs to them rather than to the author’s agenda.
When a book denies that, the character becomes a prop. The narrative calls it sophistication, restraint, realism. But the cost is paid by a protagonist who never gets to want anything, understand anything, or choose anything.
That’s why Yesteryear and Emily Wilde’s Compendium landed at two stars for me. The concepts work. The prose works. But the protagonists are never allowed to fully exist, and the books treat that as a feature rather than a flaw.
All the Light We Cannot See earned one star because it takes this pattern to an extreme—Marie-Laure’s agency is not just limited, it’s systematically erased.
When character sacrifice becomes the foundation of the narrative, the narrative itself is weakened. No amount of technical polish compensates for a protagonist who’s been denied the chance to be a person.
