Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Why Ron Weasley rocks

Sidekicks.

Almost every good hero has one (or more), and I've found that the sidekick is often my favorite character in a story. Since heroes are so gosh-darn heroic, it's not always easy to identify with them in a story, even if they are really well-created. There's no way I'd go roaming the English country chasing a wizard who wants to kill me, and doesn't mind killing a bunch of other people along the way. But I can almost imagine that I might, someday, if I had a best friend who did, feel obligated to accompany that friend. Maybe. And if I did accompany that friend, I can just about guarantee that I'd get grouchy at him if he didn't seem to know what was going on and would quite likely walk out on him at some point--and I hope I'd come back.

So I can identify decently well with Ron Weasley.

I don't know if this is the case for anyone else, but the sidekick often sucks me further into a story than the hero. So to close this (super-short) post, here are some of my favorite sidekicks and other secondary characters. Please note that this is an ad-hoc list created during naptime, so it's nowhere near complete:

Sam from The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Nat and Prudence from The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Haymitch from The Hunger Games trilogy
Homer from the Tomorrow series
Bean from Ender's Game (this is kind of a cheat, because Bean gets his own series...)
Rudy Steiner from The Book Thief
Boots from The Underland Chronicles
Becky from A Little Princess
Evelyn from the Amelia Peabody mysteries
Phoebe from Walk Two Moons

While compiling this list, I realized that in many of my favorite books--especially those that are more realistic than high fantasy--I do identify with the protagonist most strongly. Maybe someday I'll get around to a post on those heroes.

March is almost over...

This is crazy and hard to believe. Since I last posted, my husband and I both turned 30, I took a week-long trip up to MD to hang out with family, I applied for and didn't get a job, and I started looking into renewing my school library license for NC. Haven't gotten too far with that one, yet. We also hired an electrician for the first time, and got a wonderful one, so if you need electrical work done in NC's Triangle area, let me know. Otherwise, not much happened. When home with kids, there is a lot of activity, but not a lot to report to the outside world. It's fun and maddening by turns, and the kids are hilarious to watch as they try new things out and add words to their vocabulary and skills and ideas to their repertoire.

I have my drafts of children's literature-related opinions still saved, so let me try to get one up...