Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Name a Pet After

Beatrice is a wonderful character and very feline – I could definitely imagine her bringing dead mice to Benedick as gifts! Did she not promise to eat all that he killed in the recent wars?

Such a problematic play! Hard to defend against accusations of misogyny in what appears to be its gaslighting of Kate and subjugation of the woman. And Kate is nowhere near as successfully created as Beatrice. One only hopes that she is double bluffing Petruchio and manages to turn the tables.

But the efforts that Petruchio needs to go to to domesticate her are very much like the efforts you need to tame a semi-feral cat.

And of course, she is a Kat!

The lithe beautiful grace of Cleopatra here is definitely feline! Seductive and tempting but very much on her own terms, and

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

Strange how names for cats draws me to female characters but this is a male – flippant, light and airy, yet somehow earthy too. The changeability and protean nature of Puck is somehow feline.

A name to take care calling, however!

Agnes is a delightfully untamed character in Hamnet – first seen at the edge of the forest with echoes of Rosalind and Beatrice and Cleopatra.

She is a gorgeous wonderful creation, mystical and mythic and vibrant – and, unlike Kate, wonderfully untamed: she flees to the forest to give birth alone to her first child!

Also, look at the cleverness of that segue from Shakespeare to other writers! I’ll clap myself if no one else will!

Vasya is not a dissimilar character to Agnes: a magical spiritual girl who sees the spirits of the home and the hearth and the stables and the rivers, creatures from Russian pre-Christian myth in a Russia just beginning to form and to coalesce and adopt Christianity.

The trilogy’s tracing of her progress from outcast child to potent witch, an equal to the ancient gods Morozko and Medved and even Baba Yaga.

Like any cat, someone who cannot and should not be tamed.

Prowls the streets at nighttime.

Leaps from building to building wreathed in mist and clothed in tattered mist cloak.

Capable to surviving on the street, on the battlefield and in high society.

Of all Sanderson’s various characters, both Vin and Kelsier are a delight and very feral and feline!

Another street child orphan girl from fantasy, Arya is perhaps the opposite of Vin: a high born child who is dropped into life on the streets, on the run, as an assassin rather than a street urchin trained to pass in society.

But no less ferocious or feral or feline for that.

Is there any wonder that she learns her skills by chasing cats??

Once again a runaway, independent feisty character – fantasy as a genre does seem to like these! – and a wonderful creation. As numerous people find out in the series, attempts to trap or to contain Lyra is likely to be as successful as an attempt to keep hold of a struggling cat!

Like a cat, Lisbeth’s loyalty can only be earned not bought. But once earned she is a powerful ally and capable of producing very powerful loyalty in others despite her standoffish defensive and damaged nature.

Any my goodness, Lisbeth has claws if you cross her – truly terrifying!

Ah Gideon, all the grace and power of perhaps a panther (in skeletal face paint) rather than any domesticated cat. The fight scenes in this book are terrific! And I say this as someone who does not terribly enjoy fight scenes!

An inherent desire to belong to be loved, combined with a fear of that same intimacy – Gideon is a cat who has suffered trauma in spades, and yet is able to rise up and pity Harrow her persecutor, and to love her.

The scenes where unthinkingly she throws herself to Harrow’s defence – even as she professes to hate her and hope she dies – are wonderful!

A review for this is half written at the moment! But I loved it because of Juliet.

On the surface a mild mannered secretary caught up transcribing Fifth Columnist meetings in 1940s, Juliet is a wonderfully nuanced and layered character, such as Atkinson is so good at creating!

And a character with absolutely her own agenda kept hidden from everyone, even the reader, like a cat’s inscrutability.

I just adored Hattie: in her nineties having survived nearly a century as a black woman farmer, accepting her great grand-daughter’s gender identity and letting the chaos of her more immediate family wash over her.

She is one of a wonderful cast of characters and you could happily name your pets after all or any of these women. I was tempted to go with Amma as the lynchpin but I did love Hattie so much!

Whilst I was tempted by the pink haired Mirabel from Morganstern’s more recent novel The Starless Sea, Celia picked her to the post as one of the most bewitching (literally) characters, bound up in her father’s contest.

I really do need to read this novel again because it was so exquisite! Be prepared to see it again on December 1st’s TTT!

They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he’s part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumor. And they are wrong on every count.

Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich – they’re the only ones worth stealing from – but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards.