October 3, 2017: Top Ten Book Boyfriends/Girlfriends (Which characters do you have crushes on?)
I’m going off topic again, and going to skip the book boyfriend in order to go back and do the character topic from last week. Ten Books That Feature Characters ____________: Examples: Ten books that feature black main characters, characters who hold interesting jobs, characters who have a mental illness, characters that are adopted, characters that play sports, etc, etc. Can’t wait to see what you all come up with!
Now that I’ve read some of the other posts from last week I’m feeling a bit more inspired. (Plus my husband is such a total heartthrob I don’t need a book boyfriend 😉 )
This list is in the order they came to mind. It’s not a ranking of their survival skills.
Top Ten Survivors
- Brian from Hatchet – The quintessential wilderness survival book. Brian is lost in the woods with only a handful of supplies and a hatchet after the small plane he was in crashes into a lake in the Canadian wilderness. If you haven’t read it you are missing out. I enjoyed it as a young teen and again as an adult.
- Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins – Another YA Classic, and another book I enjoyed both as an adult and when I was younger. Left alone on an island after her tribe moves away Karana is forced to find a way to survive alone against the forces of nature, wild dogs and loneliness.
- Sam from My Side of the Mountain – So a lot of these are simply classics. In this story Sam feels crowded in the small apartment in NY so he runs away and finds a home in the Catskill Mountains inside a hollowed out tree. The kid in me get excited just thinking about Sam’s adventure.
- Katniss from the Hunger Games – Notice how I specified, Hunger Games, when it’s because of the skills Katniss learned in the wildness, where she hunts and forages for food for her family that she survives the first games. Even using the wilderness again some of her opponents.
- Matt from Sign of the Beaver – Matt and his father build a frontier cabin and then Matt’s fathers leaves to go get the rest of the family. Leaving 13 year old Matt to fend for himself, but what’s a boy suppose to do when the weeks, and it seems that his family will never come back.
- Minnow from The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly – A book I just recently devoured, uh I mean read. I started to read the excerpt and couldn’t stop. The cover is deceiving because one of the defining characteristics of Minnow, is that she has no hands. She survives when her hands are taken from her by the cruel cult leader, she survives to runaway from the cult’s wilderness homestead in the middle of winter, and in jail the girl with no hands learns to kick-butt. A powerful story.
- Marie Dorion from A Name of Her Own – Jane Kirkpatrick always does a great job of making history come alive, but there is something special about this story of the Astor party and Marie’s survival on the second cross-country trip to the Oregon country after Lewis and Clark’s journey.
- Jonnie from Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 – My husband rolled his eyes when I told him this was going to be on my list. But he’s only seen the movie, and has not read the book, which is so much better. Although, Barry Pepper is Jonnie in my mind, he fits the part so well. Jonnie survives not only in the fringes of the wildness, but also in an alien concentration camp, torture and more.
- Heidi and Peter in Courage Mountain – I read the novelization of this movie before seeing the movie. In fact, I read it several times.
Heidi and Peter are forced to help a group of girls cross the alps during World War II. There’s danger a plenty and a young Charlie Sheen, back when he was hot and not crazy, in the pictures in the middle part of the book.
- The Swiss Family Robinson – Now here I’m cheating a little because I have only read the abridged version and then seen the movie. But when it comes to surviving and thriving in the meanwhile no one comes to mind like the Swiss Family Robinson.
Note: No Robinson Crusoe is NOT on this list, and that’s on purpose. Have you read that book? It’s rubbish! I’m still convinced that everyone else has read the abridged version or stopped after part one (he actually on the island for only a short amount of time.)