Tag Archives: Top Ten Tuesday

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

This is going to be one of those tougher weeks when I do not have ten answers for the prompt, but I’ll do my best to come up with as many as possible.

Please note there are a few spoilers in this post, so reader beware if any of these books are on your TBR list.

It was interesting to me that all of the authors I picked this time around were women.

That was not done on purpose, and I didn’t even realize it until I was nearly finished writing this post.

Isn’t it interesting how our brains sometimes make patterns like that without us noticing it at the time?

1. The Ghost and the Real Girl by Avery Carter (My Review)

My Assumption: It was going to be 90% romance and 10 % fantasy.

What It Was Actually Like: 90% fantasy and 10% romance. I ended up really liking this one.

2. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

My Assumption: The justice system would work in Pecola’s favour, and the person who abused her would be punished.

What It Was Actually Like: Beautifully written but sadly lacking in justice of any sort.

3. Skylark (#2 in the Sarah Plain and Tall Series series) by Patricia MacLachlan

My Assumption: The first book in this series was about a single woman named Sarah coming to visit Anna, Caleb, and Papa while she decided whether or not she was going to marry Papa and stay on the prairie. There was a lot of angst about her possibly leaving them in that tale, so I assumed the sequel would move on from that conflict now that Sarah and Papa are married.

What It Was Actually Like: I was wrong. Everyone still worried about Sarah leaving because of how homesick she was for Maine. It was cool to revisit characters I originally met as a kid, though.

4. Still Stace: My Gay Christian Coming of Age Story by Stacey Chomiak

My Assumption: This is an autobiography of the author’s evangelical childhood as a deeply closeted lesbian. I thought that Stacey’s parents were eventually going to accept that both of their kids were gay.

What It Was Actually Like: Based on the post-script, her parents are more accepting now but their relationship still sounds pretty strained.  I wished she could have had a happier ending before she became a parent herself, but it was honestly pretty realistic for the time and place Stacey grew up in based on my own experiences with that denomination.

Well, that was a short list this time! There aren’t a lot of books that defy my expectations these days, but I hope the rest of you had better luck coming up with answers.

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

I read books from so many different genres, styles, and eras that it’s often hard for me to imagine what various characters might think of each other.

It’s like grabbing two random pets and expecting them to be friends. Maybe it will work, or maybe they’ll fight like, well, cats and dogs.

Some books dive deeply into character development. Others barely skim the surface of it in favour of adding in extra action scenes. There are also cases where the characters are all well-rounded but so wildly dissimilar that I don’t know how much time they’d even be willing to spend in the same room.

(My theory is that those of you who tend to stick to one genre for most of your reading time are going to have an easier time coming up with matches. Let’s see if I’m right!)

With that being said, here are my picks:

1. Anne Shirley from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series and Ove from Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.

The Ove we first met would probably be irritated by how talkative Anne could be when she was a child, but I think these two would eventually get along well if they’d met when Anne was older and a little quieter. She was almost always good at softening out the edges of grumpy people, and I think he’d be amused by some of her fanciful ideas about how life should work.

2. Yetu from Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Ariel from The Little Mermaid

They’d be good friends, I think. Well, other than the fact that Ariel wanted to be human and Yetu most definitely did not.

3. Fatima from Nnedi Okorafor‘s Remote Control and Charlie from Stephen King’s Firestarter 

They were both young girls who had been given powers far beyond their comprehension that they needed to learn how to use safely. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what they thought of each other?

4. Yetu from Rivers Solomon’s The  Deep and Fatima from Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control

I hope it’s okay to pick the same characters more than once, because I also think it would be cool to see how Yetu and Fatima got along. They both had a strong desire for justice that I think would become even more noticeable if they teamed up.

Anyway, that’s my short list. I look forward to seeing what everyone else has to say.