The Marquis de Carabas of Neil Gaiman‘s Neverwhere is a fascinating character. Dangerous, charming, insulting, and heroic, he’s full of contradictions and larger than life. For a fantasy reader, I was embarrassingly late to discover Neil Gaiman. I had read very little urban fantasy, and I bought Neverwhere on impulse, not really sure what to expect. I loved it! Problem: Neil Gaiman set my expectations for urban fantasy almost impossibly high. The back cover reads: Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he […]
Characters I Love
15 posts
Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. I first read the book in high school and immediately had to watch the movie – the first version I saw was the 1998 version with Liam Neeson playing Jean Valjean. I haven’t seen the 2012 version with Hugh Jackman yet, but I’ve heard it’s good. Les Miserables is a hard book to get through. If you’ve read Victor Hugo before, you know what you’re getting into. I read the unabridged version, and it is a slog. But much like one of my other favorite books, Charles Dickens’ A Tale […]
I love Reepicheep. Reepicheep is a talking mouse who appears in three of the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Last Battle. Reepicheep is brave, but sometimes a little too touchy about his own dignity. Eustace, who begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a horrible little pill, picks on Reepicheep unmercifully, and Reepicheep fights back, taking great pleasure in embarrassing Eustace. Perhaps because he’s small, surrounded by larger, stronger animals, he takes himself perhaps a little too seriously, unable to laugh at himself because he’s offended. Brave, […]
I admit it. I’m a Scarlet Pimpernel fan and have been since high school. I first saw the 1982 movie (link to IMDB) (link to Amazon) starring Anthony Andrews as Sir Percy (absolutely brilliant!), Jane Seymour as Marguerite, and Ian McKellan as Chauvelin. I was hooked, and hunted down all the books I could find. The movie condenses a number of the novels, so if you read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, you may be a little… surprised? In any case, you don’t get the same final conclusion at the end of the novel as you do at […]
Puddleglum is a marsh-wiggle from C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, part of the Chronicles of Narnia (more info on Wikipedia). He enters the story as a pessimistic wet blanket of a character (somewhat like Eeyore, actually, whom I also love!). I love his pessimistic side, even though he notes that he is uncommonly cheerful for a marsh-wiggle (one wonders what the others are like!). As Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum search for Prince Rilian, who disappeared a decade before, they enter the Underland, the realm of the Emerald Witch. Despite the fact that Puddleglum is not particularly courageous, talented, charming, or fierce, […]