Yes.
One thing that brings me out of a novel is when I can’t picture the character.
So if a character has a gender-ambiguous name and their gender isn’t immediately clear, it pulls me out of the story. (And I mostly read Christian fiction, so the characters are all male or female. The author isn’t trying to be ambiguous, as might be the case in general market fiction.) I don’t need a lot of character description.
I just need to know if I’m in the head of the hero or the heroine.
It could be that the authors know their characters so well that they assume everyone will know Hunter and Cameron are male characters. But the first Hunter I met in real life was a teenage girl, and the Cameron I “know” best is the female doctor on the famous TV series, House.
Then there are the names which can apply to either gender:
- Ashley/Ashleigh
- Lesley/Leslie
- Billie/Billy
Those last two are all the more confusing as the “ie” ending is male for Leslie, but female for Billie (well, I’ve never met a male Billie).
Then there are non-English names, like Iola (which is Welsh, and means “valued by the Lord”). My sister’s name means “fair maiden”, so she was somewhat surprised to meet a male with her name. (There is a traditional masculine version, but that’s spelled differently. This boy definitely had the female spelling).
Another reason is when I’ve seen the character’s name in a novel by another author in the same genre.
I’ve seen this a couple of times. In one, it was made clear that the characters were the same, and that the author had “borrowed” the character with the permission of the other author.
The shared character was Gwen Marcey, from Carrie Stuart Parks’s Gwen Marcey series. I liked that, and it made sense. Gwen Marcey is a forensic artist, the books were set in the same part of the USA, and it made sense that the characters mentioned Gwen in the context of the story.
But I read another novel where a character shared an unusual name with a character from a novel by one of the author’s mentors. It was never clear whether they were the same character or not, and that detracted from my enjoyment because I was wondering about the character, not the story.
I’ve also read multi-author series where the different authors share some of the same characters. This doesn’t bother me, because it’s been established all the authors are writing in the same series, so it makes sense that they’d share some characters.
So yes, I have sometimes found myself taken out of a novel because of the character’s name.
