Top Ten Tuesday (on Thursday) Characters who you want as best friends

This week I have been extremely busy with schoolwork and I feel like a bad blogger but I love the theme of this week so I decided to take part albeit very late.

Top Ten Tuesday is held at The Broke and The Bookish and is a meme where bloggers share their Top Ten of a particular theme each week.

Top Ten Book characters who I would like to have as best friends (in no particular order):

• Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Jo is vivacious, clever and independent and at the end of the day she is always there for her family. Jo loves books and writing so we would have a lot in common and I love her sense of fun. I think she would be a loyal best friend even if she does have a fiery temper.

• Lizzie Bennett from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I'm sure Lizzie Bennett will be on many people's lists, she has been like a best friend to many Pride and Prejudice and Austen lovers over the years.

• Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables

I would love to be Anne's best friend partly because I want to go and live on Prince Edward Island in her era and wear pretty dresses! Like Jo, she would be a very fun and faithful person to be around.

• Joey Bettany from The Chalet School

In the Chalet School books Joey always makes me laugh with what she says and with her quirky obsession with Napoleon. I would definitely like to be around when she is up to mischief playing tricks at school! Joey is also the editor of her school newspaper like me and wants to be an author.

• The O'Sullivan twins from the St Claire's series by Enid Blyton

Pat and Isobel may at first be a little tiresome to their school mates but I would love to go to the fictional St Claire's boarding school for a week and enjoy midnight feasts, lacrosse and tricks on the mistresses

• Ellie from The Secret Countess by Eve Edwards

Ellie is such a sweet and kind but sensible girl

• Arabella from Arabella by Georgette Heyer

She is very naive and innocent but caring and sweet, hitting a Georgian London season with her would be a lot of fun

• Sapphire from the Ingo series by Helen Dunmore

Sapphire has a great sense of humour and it would be wonderful to visit the underwater world of  Ingo with her!

Polly from House of Secrets by Jennie Walters

Polly takes a huge risk to help her best friend so she would make a very trustworthy and reliable friend. Aside from the fact that she lives in Victorian England!

• Sarah Stanley from The Golden Road by L.M Montgomery

Sarah appears in The Golden Road but I know her best from the Canadian TV series which is based around it called Road To Avonlea. She is very imaginative, which means she is always coming up with plans and ideas and she is a brilliant storyteller.

Character Connection: Sophia Stanton Lacey (The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer)

Character Connection is a weekly feature held every Thursday by Jen at The Introverted Reader, which spotlights our favourite characters to share with all the participants and blog readers.

The Grand Sophy was the second Georgette Heyer book and after falling in love with the world of Regency romance and the sweet and charming yet somewhat impetuous heroine in Arabella. In the Grand Sophy, I could not have encountered a more different but just as lovable heroine: Miss Sophy Stanton Lacy.

Sophy- as she is known by her friends- is a 20 year old young lady, the daughter of a well travelled diplomat whom she calls 'Sir Horace' and she has managed his household since her mother died. When he is sent on a trip to Brazil, Sophy is sent to stay with her relatives in London, arriving in Spring 1816. Expecting her brother's 'little Sophia' to be of the shy, well mannered and dainty types of girls, her Aunt and the rest of her family get quite a shock when Sophy turns out to be quite the opposite.

From the moment she sets foot in Berkeley Square, clad elegantly and a massive mountain of suitcases, a monkey and a parrot, a dog and a horse as well as her staff trailing behind her, it is clear that she is not an ordinary heiress at all.

Bemused by the tangle of affairs that she finds her cousins in, she promptly sets about trying to sort all the family's problems out, much to the annoyance of the her cousin Charles, the Ombersley's heir who wants to be rid of her 'meddlesome troubling.'

Sophy has a strong personality, outrageous, headstrong and wittily humorous, she is used to doing what she likes and going out unaccompanied which is unheard of in London's high society. Not afraid to say and do what she thinks, her family are scandalized by her behaviour. However Sophy has no intentention of conforming to the rules of society and soon has the whole of London talking with her 'antics.' I couldn't help loving her and whatever she was doing from setting up her own stable, riding her cousin Charles' carriage among other things and behaviour considered 'masculine' and horse dealing with suspicious money lenders, it was always entertaining to find out what she would do next.

The relationship between her and the hero, her cousin Charles was very amusing as they were not able to do anything without flying into rages at each other and both are extremely stubborn and proud.

However, for all her schemes the intelligent Sophy is very caring and thoughtful at heart, only wanting the best for people. Acting a bit like a mother hen, she tries to help her poor cousin Cecilia who is besotted with a young feather brained poet, the young Hubert who is caught in the clutch of dubious and threatening money lenders and Charles who is engaged to the sour and priggish Miss Wraxton.

She reminded me of a bit of Jane Austen's Emma, trying to help other people in their life but I think Sophy's character is a lot more likable as selfishness is not in her nature.

Earning herself the name of 'The Grand Sophy,' Sophy is an endearing but outrageous gem of a heroine that cannot be forgotten easily and can be relied on for a good dose of ‘pick me up’ fun!

Stephanie <3

Character Connection- Robin Humphries (The Chalet School)

A drawing of some of the Chalet school girls
(I cannot find a picture of Robin on the Internet)

In my first Character Connection post, I talked about Jo Bettany who is the protagonist of The Chalet School series by Elinor.M.Brent Dyer. This week’s character is ‘The Robin’, who Jo looks upon as a baby sister and the two are very close.

Robinette Humphries comes to The Chalet School (a girl’s boarding school in the Austrian Tyrol mountains near Innsbruck) when she is six, soon after her Russian mother passed away with tuberculosis. As Robin inherited her mother’s weakness and frailty, she must be protected to make sure that the disease that killed her mother doesn’t strike her too. So, whilst her father, Captain Humphries travels around on business, Robin is sent to The Chalet School where the air is fresher and clearer so that she can grow stronger until all danger of tuberculosis is over in her late teens.

Robin is such an adorable little character who I couldn’t help but love, with a sweet and loving nature that doesn’t grow spoilt even when she is petted all the time. At first when she arrives at the Chalet School, she can’t speak much English as she spoke French at home, which is very cute and as Jo looks after and befriends ‘the baby,’ she pronounces her name as ‘Zoë.’


Here is a few sentences from the chapter where she first arrives: ‘

The whole of the day was devoted by the girls to the Robin, with whom they all fell in love once. She was a dear little girl, very happy and sunshiny, as her father had said, and very shy.

Robin is often called Engelkind (in German), meaning Angel child by the local Tyrol residents. Her singing is also described as that of an angel, especially when she is singing the song that her mother sang to get Robin to sleep, which is called The Red Safaran.

Here is a description of her from Jo of The Chalet School:

Such a lovely baby face! With curly black hair clustering over her small head, and long black lashes resting on her rosy cheeks, which were tear stained.

As I mentioned before, the Robin and Jo become like sisters because she stays with Jo and her elder sister (the head mistress) Madge during the holidays. The two are devoted to each other and Robin is very subdued when she can’t see Jo much and gets extremely worried when Jo- who is also a fragile girl- falls ill. Jo is also very protective of Robin, always fearing tuberculosis and one time, not eating or thinking of anything else while there is a threat for Robin.

I love the Robinette, Robin or the Robin (however you like to call her!) with her tragic story of her mother death and her struggle with keeping away the threat of it infecting her too. Although she is almost too cherub like for real life (but not all the time!), that is part of her charm.

A very late Character Connection (2)

Kitty Charing from the Regency Romance Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

To give you a bit of background information on Kitty's character, I will include a synopsis of the book:

Young Kitty Charing stands to inherit a vast fortune from her irascible great-uncle Matthew--provided she marries one of her cousins. Kitty is not wholly adverse to the plan, if the right nephew proposes. Unfortunately, Kitty has set her heart on Jack Westruther, a confirmed rake, who seems to have no inclination to marry her anytime soon. In an effort to make Jack jealous, and to see a little more of the world than her isolated life on her great-uncle's estate has afforded her, Kitty devises a plan. She convinces yet another of her cousins, the honourable Freddy Standen, to pretend to be engaged to her. Her plan would bring her to London on a visit to Freddy's family and (hopefully) render the elusive Mr Westruther madly jealous. Thus begins Cotillion, arguably the funniest, most charming of Georgette Heyer's many delightful Regency romances.

Young and pretty Kitty is a slightly selfish girl sometimes but this is made up for in her usual loveablely charming and generous nature. At first, Kitty is very unfashionable, living with her old Uncle who adopted her and tending to his needs but although she loves him, she wants to leave the house on a break for once in her life. Adding to this is his plan for his fortune to be Kitty’s dowry, which brings all her cousins visiting and proposing to Kitty. So, as she is very cunning and convinces her cousin Freddy to pretend they are engaged so that she can escape from her grumpy adoptive Uncle and visit London for the first time.This is  very different and somewhat difficult experience for Kitty, who has been raised in countryside seclusion with a dependance on literarure and she tries to learn to be independant and discover that her perfect love is very different from the stories she reads.

The conversations between her and Freddy (and their relationship) can be very funny, especially as Kitty is very new to London Society. Her kind nature leads her to helping people along the way such as her impoversished but beautiful friend and  her cousin who is fearful of his overbearing Mother and is afraid to tell her of his secret love.

I could not help liking Kitty and how she grew as a character in the book. If you would like a character that escapes Regency Romance novel heroine pre-conceptions then read Cotillion for a breath of fresh air.