The Long & Short Reviews prompt asks which fictional characters readers would like to meet. I don't know whether any reviewers think about that kind of question, much, unless someone asks it.
Orphan characters? One could adopt them.
Enslaved characters? One could emancipate them.
Characters from times and places of terrible poverty? They could eat well, go to school, get jobs and enjoy luxurious lives like ours...
But which individual characters do I like enough to go back and spend time with them, while being aware that they're only expressions of parts of their authors? There are several. I don't like most fiction enough to read a novel twice but there are several novels I like to revisit every few years. Some characters, like Sherlock Holmes or Huckleberry Finn, are probably more fun to follow than they would be to meet. Generally I suppose reading a character's story is like hanging out with the character. So, more or less in the order in which I read the books...
1. The Melendy Family by Elizabeth Enright. Feel-good fiction about the Appalachian Mountains.
2. Just about anybody from the Narnia books. "They were ready to be friendly with anyone who was friendly, and didn't give a hang about anyone who wasn't." Definitely the right sort to hang out with.
3. Meg Murry from Madeleine L'Engle's Time series. At any age. I would like to have seen more of her as an adult.
4. Most of Joan Aiken's protagonists--not superheroines, just cool young women. Georgia Marsh from A Cluster of Separate Sparks might be my favorite, or Alvey Clements from If I Were You (originally titled The Butterfly Picnic and Deception). I like the trademark pairs of gifted children, too.
5. Jeeves, the original, as written by P.G. Wodehouse. Quiet, discreet, well-informed, and always able to think of a solution to any problem.
6. Menolly in the Harper Hall of Pern trilogy by Anne McCaffrey. In the adult trilogy written in the same years I remember thinking that Lessa was too tough and Brekke was too wimpy. Menolly was just right.
7. Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. You know he'd be good in Glyphosate Awareness.
8. Jane Eyre.
9. Dicey Tillerman, the teen heroine of Cynthia Voigt's best books. Voigt wrote a lot of stories about young people who pursued excellence in various ways. Dicey, who is splendidly feminine in the sense of loyal, loving, and motherly, but didn't want a bra in grade eight and doesn't "spend nearly enough time necking" before marriage, seemed to be everyone's favorite, though all of them are a pleasure to read about. I don't quite believe that any set of children led by a late-blooming thirteen-year-old ever really did walk from Massachusetts to Maryland all by themselves, but they ought to have done, and if they did the thirteen-year-old would have been like Dicey.
10. Connie Ramos in Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.
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