Top 5 Wednesday was created by Lainey at Ginger Reads Lainey but is hosted by Sam at Thoughts on Tomes. You can read more about this meme on the Goodreads Group here.

This weeks topic is:

Characters You WOULDN’T Want to Trade Places With

–We always talk about how cool it would be to be a character in our favorite books, but who would you not want to trade places with?

This was another easy topic for me to cover because there are a lot of characters that either piss me off or that I feel super bad for. Here are my choices for this week’s Top 5 Wednesday.

1. Edie from Who’s That Girl? by Mhairi McFarlane.

When Edie is caught in a compromising position at her colleagues’ wedding, all the blame falls on her – turns out that personal popularity in the office is not that different from your schooldays. Shamed online and ostracised by everyone she knows, Edie’s forced to take an extended sabbatical – ghostwriting an autobiography for hot new acting talent, Elliot Owen. Easy, right?

Read this part of the synopsis and it will tell you why I don’t want to trade places with her. She went to her crush’s wedding and he kissed her and they got caught. If that happened to me, I’d want to be like one of those Southwest Airline commercials…you know, the “Wanna get away?” commercials. How embarrassing to be known as the home and wedding wrecker, especially when it wasn’t even your fault!

2. Lily from A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean.

Miss Lillian Hargrove has lived much of her life alone in a gilded cage, longing for love and companionship. When an artist offers her pretty promises and begs her to pose for a scandalous portrait, Lily doesn’t hesitate…until the lying libertine leaves her in disgrace. With the painting now public, Lily has no choice but to turn to the one man who might save her from ruin.

Lily’s naked body is going to be shown to everyone in England and she is not about that life. Neither am I. I wouldn’t want to trade places with her for obvious reasons. Poor thing.

3. Rachel from The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

Ugh, freaking Rachel. She couldn’t get her shit together, she put her nose where it didn’t belong and for what? A whole lot of trouble. She got on my hot damn nerves throughout the entire book. She just kept right on finding my nerves and stomping on them. I wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with her either.

4. Sofia from Overruled by Emma Chase.

But when Stanton, her “friend with mind-blowing benefits” begs for help, she finds herself out of her element, out of her depth, and obviously out of her mind. Because she agrees to go with him – to The-Middle-Of-Nowhere, Mississippi – to do all she can to help Stanton win back the woman he loves.

Her head tells her she’s crazy…and her heart says something else entirely.

Sofia falls in love with her friend with benefits and things are going swimmingly until her friend with benefits gets a wedding invitation for his main squeeze’s wedding back home and freaks out because the main squeeze wasn’t supposed to get married to anyone…but Sofia’s friend with benefits. So he flies home to try to persuade the main squeeze to NOT marry this other guy and he brings Sofia along for support. I just can’t even with that dumb ass. I felt bad for Sofia at first but the longer she stayed, the more pissed off I got at both the friend with benefits and HER. That whole book was a hot mess and I wouldn’t trade places with Sofia to save my life. Nope. Never.

5. Any heroine in an SEP book.

From Molly in This Heart of Mine and that scene to Rachel in Dream a Little Dream and all of the crap she went through in that book to Meg in Call Me Irresistible and just every single SEP book ever written, each heroine is humiliated and dragged through the mud and we’re a witness to it all. It’s really hard to read those books even though the heroines are strong and their stories end with a huge happy ending but still, I wouldn’t want to be an SEP heroine. I couldn’t deal with all of that madness.

There’s my top 5 for this week. What characters would you not want to trade places with?