Okay, so we exaggerated a little bit—the characters in these 10 stories aren’t exactly going to be your best friend forever. Most of them aren’t real, although they’re going to feel quite real to you by the time you finish the book. Some of them are charming, some are devilish but all are flawed, vulnerable and intimately knowable. Inspired by veteran screenwriter and humorist Paul Rudnick’s new young adult novel Gorgeous (the kind of young adult novel adults shouldn’t discount just because it’s sold as a YA novel), which wins our unofficial award for best opening sentence of any book published so far this year, this week’s list is full of characters you won’t soon forget.
