Is it the author’s fault when a reader has a character all wrong?

Jester reading a book (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few years ago, my father was multiple books into a series before he realized the main character was black.

Shortly thereafter, I was reading a book and didn’t realize until halfway through it that the main character was female.

When I told my dad about my this to commiserate our confusion, we discovered only then, that what he’d been reading and what I’d been reading were both by the same author! It was wacky.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever had an image in your head of what the protagonist looks like as you read only to find out pages later that you’ve got it all wrong?

It makes me wonder, is this an author or a reader problem? When I went back, I noticed clues to the character’s gender that I’d missed or misunderstood the first time through so the author had tried to steer me in the right direction. So is the issue that the author didn’t do a good enough job of giving me, the reader, a clear picture of the character? Or is the reader to blame for not reading closely enough and bringing too many preconceived notions to the book?

What do you think as a reader and writer?