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Hunger Games (books)
Jan. 16th, 2015 11:23 pmOne of my favorite kinds of character relationships, that tap-dances all over my id, is "badass teen girl and surly older male mentor". Best of all possible worlds is if they're both surly, distrustful, and broken, team up with extreme reluctance, and spend as much time fighting with each other as uniting against a common enemy. Frances Hardinge is good at these; it's one of the reasons why I like her books. (See also: Manji and Rin in Blade of the Immortal.)
It took me awhile to realize that it works if the mentor is female too; it's just that you don't usually get female versions of that kind of character. The Luideag in the October Daye books fits the "surly mentor" role perfectly, though her relationship with Toby is really too equal to hit this particular button in my head, not that I don't really enjoy them. (If someone saddled her with an angry teenager, though, the needle would probably go off the charts.) But basically, this kind of relationship is one of my favorite things.
.... aaaaanyway, yesterday I finally got around to reading the first of the Hunger Games books, and while I was enjoying it enough to keep reading, it wasn't until about halfway through the book that something in the back of my brain went "*zing*" and then "♥ ♥ ♥ OMG ♥ ♥ ♥" and, er, then I basically read the entire series in about a day and a half. I had no idea this series had one of these in it, especially one which turned out to be pretty close to my Platonic ideal of that kind of thing.
( Spoilers for the end of Mockingjay )
( Frustrations with the worldbuilding - no specific book spoilers )
It took me awhile to realize that it works if the mentor is female too; it's just that you don't usually get female versions of that kind of character. The Luideag in the October Daye books fits the "surly mentor" role perfectly, though her relationship with Toby is really too equal to hit this particular button in my head, not that I don't really enjoy them. (If someone saddled her with an angry teenager, though, the needle would probably go off the charts.) But basically, this kind of relationship is one of my favorite things.
.... aaaaanyway, yesterday I finally got around to reading the first of the Hunger Games books, and while I was enjoying it enough to keep reading, it wasn't until about halfway through the book that something in the back of my brain went "*zing*" and then "♥ ♥ ♥ OMG ♥ ♥ ♥" and, er, then I basically read the entire series in about a day and a half. I had no idea this series had one of these in it, especially one which turned out to be pretty close to my Platonic ideal of that kind of thing.
( Spoilers for the end of Mockingjay )
( Frustrations with the worldbuilding - no specific book spoilers )