Ten Fictional Characters I'd Invite to Dinner

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks reviewers which fictional characters we'd invite to dinner. 

In theory this could mean dinner-and-a-movie alone,as in a date, or dinner-with-the-family, as in fun for the whole family to know, or any number of other things...People I invite to dinner, in real life, are people who've invited me, or people I want to interview in an informal way. On an Internet writer's income those invitations are few and far between. But let's imagine that I was rich and could afford to host dinner parties where people would have some interests in common, and enjoy meeting each other...

1. Before Robert Louis Stevenson invented his Mr Hyde, who was British so presumably wrote "Mr" without a period, Louisa May Alcott had invented a Mr. Hyde, who was American so presumably used the period. Mr. Hyde was not a regular lecturer at Plumfield, but a family friend whose company the Little Men enjoyed. He is thought to have been based on Alcott's own family friend, Henry David Thoreau. He was a New England naturalist and a sort of father-figure for Dan, the orphan who had been homeless for too long to settle down in a nice quiet home. He didn't get a lot of lines in the book. Alcott's audience failed to ask for a book where he was a primary character. It might be interesting to get to know him better.

2. So, a logical person to seat near him would be either Dan or Jo from Little Men, but that would raise the question of inviting the whole Plumfield crowd. They'd be fun to know, I suppose, in a sententious and Victorian way, like old school Seventh-Day Adventists. But a Top Ten List should steer readers to ten books, so why not Mark Herron, the orphan adopted into Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Family partly because he impressed the Melendy kids by being an amateur naturalist. Obviously this is going to be a family-friendly party. Some people's plus-ones may be their parents, or adoptive parents.

3. Mark might like Sam Gribley from Jean George's My Side of the Mountain. Sam knew enough about the woods in upstate New York to live in them on his own for a year. (He's one of the few human characters by whom George's novels were driven. Usually, even if the point of view is human, the central characters in her books are animals.)

4. People can bring their own dates to this party, which may be the kind where people form single-sex conversation groups and there's nothing wrong with that, but it needs some women. Why not Della Turnbow from Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior? Even if she's not reconciled with her husband, she'd behave decently in a group that includes children. 

5. And Susie Schnitzer from Harriette Simpson Arnow's Weedkiller's Daughter. At the end of her story she's still Green mostly because her parents aren't, but she appreciates nature enough to fit in with this group.

6. So, why not poor little Nina from Lynne Kelly's Secret Language of Birds? That child needs to know that older people appreciate nature and wildlife. Older people who are nicer than her parents. Role models. 

7. Fern Arable in Charlotte's Web is too young to be invited to a dinner party but, since everyone here is familiar with time travelling, maybe someone can find and invite her after she's a bit older. She has enough sensitivity to other lifeforms that she'd fit in. (A lot of my favorite fictional characters are children.)

8. So has Laura Ingalls from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. This party needs more adults so let's invite her from The First Four Years, when she's considered a young adult

9. And why not Jesse Aarons from Katherine M. Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia?

10. And, since we're time travelling all over the place and we need an older person, Bertha Damon's Grandma from Grandma Called It Carnal. She has to have been fictionalized, even if she's supposed to be fact-based, and she'd be fun.

Well, dinner parties aren't usually children's parties, but there we are. Children are not the focus of aunts' lives but they have tended to be the focus of this aunt's parties. I like people who are Green and these characters are Green. I like adults who are comfortable around children and these characters are that. 

(Note that that awful cat-hating bed-flopping female from Prodigal Summer is NOT invited--she might not behave well with either the cats or the children. I thought about the nameless narrator from Surfacing, but who knows what might trigger another mental breakdown for her. I thought about Elaine Rowley and her family from Cat's Eye, but couldn't pick just one of them. I thought about some characters from non-US novels and decided that, although this crowd is comfortable with time travel, what they all have in common is a love of North American wildlife, and characters from other places might fit in better at a different party...and anyway, Grandma makes ten.)

(If you've read this far, please don't stop reading because you don't want to be invited to any of my parties! I hardly ever throw parties, and if you visited my town in real life I'd want to have lunch with you at your choice of the Mexican restaurant, the 1950s diner, or the cafe.)