Avi's young characters tend to be repressed people who, during the course of a story, slowly break free of restrictions society has placed on their conduct. For instance, in The Man Who Was Poe (please see separate entry), Edmund Brimmer, the young male protagonist, is forever telling himself to defer to what grownups tell him to do; he is even unable to take action without being told to do so. During the novel, he learns to take his own initiative and to act on his own best motives, much as Charlotte Doyle does in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Not all of Avi's young characters are like this, even though they usually are. For example, in Nothing but the Truth (please see separate entry), ninth-grader Philip Malloy yields to his own worst nature, creating a bitter tragedy.

Also typical of Avi's fiction are character studies...