Woke Up Like This

Char is the protagonist of the novel as well as its first-person narrator. Like many heroines of romance novels, she is smart and proud. Char is a dynamic character who undergoes a significant change in her outlook on life throughout the narrative as a result of her conflict with J. T. Renner. In ninth grade, her wounded ego launched her into an adversarial relationship with J. T., but once these rivals are removed from the present and cast into the future, she learns to recognize her own mistakes and grows to understand his perspective. Char also learns to read and anticipate J. T.’s emotions, something at which she fails miserably at first, as she learns The Need for Empathy and her tendency toward judgment diminishes. She begins the novel as a character who is consumed by past resentments and future anxieties, but she ends it as someone who lives in the present.

When she was a child, Char’s father left and her parents divorced, compelling Char to become self-sufficient because of her mother’s forgetfulness. As a result of these experiences, Char has difficulty trusting others: One of her parents left the family and contacted Char with greater infrequency over the years, and the other parent cannot be counted on for basic things like providing rides to and from school.