Top Ten Tuesday - Characters As Family

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at The Broke and the Bookish

This Week's Prompt: Top Ten Characters I'd Want As Family Members

This is a difficult prompt for me. I whiled away many an hour when I was young imagining that I was friends with various characters, but today? I'm stumped.

I find my difficulty to be two-fold:

1) Most interesting, well-drawn characters are not people you would want to hang out with on a day-to-day basis. In real life, either they would seem to be jerks, totally uninteresting (because you wouldn't actually be involved in the story), have genes you probably don't want, or downright dangerous to the people around them. People who are pleasant to be around often don't make compelling characters.

2) Many books in the genres I read don't deal much with familial relationships outside of parent-child ties or romantic partnership. Plus if the family is involved, they are usually the source of negative drama.


I was able to come up with just one that avoided these problems.

1. Countess Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Series)
She is smart, strong and caring, and gives really stellar advice to everyone around her.

She shook her head, her smile growing more rueful. "Mark, I'm more than willing to help you and Kareen reach for your goals, whatever the obstacles. But you have to give me some clue of what your goals are." 

Be careful how you aim this woman. The Countess was to obstacles as a laser cannon was to flies. - A Civil Campaign