Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. It was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
Today’s prompt is: Book Characters I Wish Were Real People (And feel free to tell us why! Would you date them, be friends with them, etc.?) (Submitted by Lydia Schoch)
I am choosing book characters I wish were real because I would want to be friends with them or just watch them at work
(Note: I pulled some characters from a post I wrote on a similar top ten last year, but also added a few new ones.)
Penny Parker from the Penny Parker Mysteries by Mildred Wirt Benson
Penny Parker is the main character in Mildred’s Penny Parker Mystery series. If you don’t know who Mildred is, she is the original Carolyn Keene, the pseudonym for the author of the Nancy Drew series.
Mildred, in collaboration with Edward Stratemyer who thought up the idea of Nancy Drew, helped develop Nancy into who she became and wrote the first 28 books in the series. She wrote the Penny Parker series after she stopped writing Nancy Drew (which was written by several authors under the same name) and once said that Penny was more Nancy Drew than Nancy Drew and I know what she means. Writing Penny let Mildred write a more bold and sassy teenage amateur slueth with a bit more grit and danger. She didn’t have to follow the strict rules that Harriet Adams (the daughter of Edward Stratemyer) had for Nancy’s character.
I think Penny would be fun to travel with and solve mysteries, though I’m so old now that I’d probably spend most of the time telling her to be more careful and not get herself into so many dangerous situations.
Paddington Bear from the Paddington Bear books by Michael Bond.
Paddington Bear is a cute, little bear, who travels from Peru to London and ends up living with the Brown family in London and has all kind of silly adventures.
Why do I wish he was real?
Um..because he’s cute and darling and I want to take care of him.
Beth March from Little Women by Lousia Mae Alcott
Beth is one of the four March sisters written about in the book.
I think Beth would be so sweet to know in real life. She noticed all the little, sweet details in life and I think she would help me slow down and notice those things as well.
Miss Marple from the Miss Marple series by Agatha Christie
I would love to see Miss Marple in action when she solves a case. That mind just working on solving things while she’s knitting away. The little smile when she knows the solution and that she’s about to outwit everyone.
Lucy Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Lucy is one of the four siblings who travels into the wardrobe and finds the magical world of Narnia. She was the first to go into the wardrobe and to meet the fawn Mr. Tumnis.
I’d like to meet the older Lucy to learn from her how to be brave in the toughest situations because she was sometimes timid in the books but later became stronger and braver.
Cynthia Kavanagh from The Mitford Series by Jan Karon
Cynthia is the wife of Father Timothy Kavanagh, an Episcopal priest in Mitford, N.C. He meets Cynthia either in the end of the first book or the beginning of the second, A Light in the Window. Their love story is so sweet and pure. It’s a beautiful example of what love late in life can and should be. Father Tim has never been in a relationship and Cynthia was in a cold, loveless marriage before. Their relationship starts slow and awkardly.
Cynthia is an illustrator who also writes childrens books about her cat, Violet, a fluffy, white monster who Father Tim and his dog Barnabas aren’t so sure about. I would love to be friends with Cynthia. We’d sit in her little yellow house and sip tea and talk books and cats and how neither of us are really very good cooks or bakers but like to try anyhow.
Elizabeth “Bess” Marvin in the Nancy Drew books.
I absolutely love Bess from the Nancy Drew books. I love how she is described as pleasantly plump and isn’t shy about eating whatever she wants and flirting with boys – not even caring that back when these books were written fat girls were supposed to be not who boys would be interested in and were shamed into eating lettuce and a tomato for dinner.
I could absolutely see myself hanging out with Bess. She’d be more outgoing and crazy and I’d be quiet and laughing at her crazy antics. We’d talk about what foods we like and how no matter what we do we can’t get ourselves super skinny but there are times we still feel healthy and happy.
Valancy Stirling in The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery
I would absolutely hang out with Valancy from The Blue Castle. If I met her before she received the bad news about her health, I would have been trying to pull her out of her dumps and encourage her to ignore her family’s rude comments about her.
After she received the bad news I would have joined her for tea at her Blue Castle and I would have walked with her in the forest, picking flowers, listening to the wind rustling the leaves and to her read excerpts from John Foster’s books.
Aunt Minnehaha Cheever from Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
Aunt Minnehaha visited Gone Away Lake, really called Tarrigo Lake, with her family, including her brother Pindar, when she was a child. The site was a summer getaway for the wealthy but when a dam was created upstream it caused the lake to dry up and all the wealthy vacationers to leave, many of them leaving their homes behind. When Aunt Minnehaha hits hard times and can’t afford her home in the city she moves back to Tarrigo to live. Eventually, children named Julian and Portia discover the homes and become friends with Minnehaha and her brother, who has also moved there.
Minnehaha has had some sadness in her life but she is full of optimism and likes to look at tough situations in a new and exciting way. If she and I were friends we would look through all the old dresses she has and all the old china and she’d make me some of her amazing tea and then she’d tell me that what I am facing now is nothing compared to what they had to face when they were young, living among some very rich and arrogant neighbors.
Flo and Lady Hardcastle from The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries by T.E. Kinsey
I know…I popped in two into this one but they come as a pair, I’d say.
I would love to be friends with Flo and Lady Hardcastle from The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries. Flo is Lady Hardcastle’s maid but really she is her best friend. Both of them have been spies and investigators and solved mysteries during the early 1900s. Flo has no fear when it comes to tracking down criminals and solving mysteries. She fights the bad guys, cleans up, and then heads home with Lady Hardcastle and serves her tea.
Lady Hardcastle, like Flo, has no fear and is like a dog with a bone when it comes to solving a case. I love how both women break barriers, ignoring all “rules” of society in England in the early 1900s.
I could see us enjoying tea (I know! I like tea! What can I say?) and talking about cases we’ve solved together and laughing about how we’ve shown the men in our small town that women can do more than cook and clean and keep house.
How about you? What literary characters would you love to be friends with?
If you are new to my blog, I just wanted to share with you that I co-host a monthly bookish link party called A Good Book and A Cup of Tea (no, you don’t have to drink tea to participate) with Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) and Cat (Cat’s Wire). You can find a link to it at the top of the page. The link party is for all book-related posts from reviews and recommendations to …well, anything related to books at all. Including Top Ten Tuesday, if you want to link your top ten there too!
On Thursdays, I am part of the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot blog link party. You can find the latest one in the sidebar to the right under recent posts.
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.
You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
