Charlotte

Charlotte is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Tricia Levenseller's The Shadows Between Us, a young noblewoman with an unusually honest and ruthless ambition: she intends to seduce the mysterious Shadow King, marry him, and then kill him so she can rule in his place. Charlotte is one of YA fantasy's most refreshingly amoral heroines — she knows exactly what she is and makes no apologies for it.

What makes Charlotte compelling rather than simply villainous is the intelligence and self-awareness she brings to her scheme, and the way the Shadow King proves to be a far more complicated obstacle than she anticipated. As her plan encounters genuine feeling, Charlotte must reckon with the possibility that her certainties about herself and what she wants might not be as fixed as she believed. Levenseller gives her a sharp, funny voice that makes her scheming genuinely entertaining to inhabit.