How are you doing now? Checking in with your favorite characters.
Brandy at Random Musings has a post up today on characters that she’d like to just check in with. What a great topic! I totally agree that there are ANY NUMBER of books where you get really attached to the characters and you’d really like to know how it all worked out for them, even after the series has ended.
In fact, I suppose that is probably a pretty universal desire, if the series is good.
Of Brandy’s choices, the ones I most agree with are the Melina Marchetta titles. Her characters go through A LOT, and sure, they wind up in a better place than they started, but it would be great to be able to check on them in a year or a decade and make sure their lives actually turned out well.
But this also made me think about series were we DO get to check in with our characters. Two books spring to mind, very different titles:
1. The Touchstone trilogy. The “Gratuitous Epilogue” is a fantastic bonus. It is all about getting to see how everyone’s life works out. I love it. Everyone should do a long epilogue like that.
Well, except me, I guess, since I never have been inclined to let anybody know what happened with Timou and Jonas and everybody in CITY. Not that I even know. You have to make you your own mind about where that was going. Or Bertaud in the Griffin Mage trilogy. I wanted to get his life in order, maybe hand him a romance that would work out well for him, but it never happened on screen. Though he was in an okay place at the end, I think. But still. I’ve always felt a little bad about that.
Anyway,
2. I’ve been re-reading books recently because if I pick the right books to re-read, I can just dip into them now and then and they don’t interfere with my own work. So I just re-read Regenesis by CJ Cherryh. As far as I’m concerned, the whole POINT of the book is to watch Justin, Grant, and even Ari get their lives into shape. Frankly, I do not care about the broader political plot, which I just skim. Although the vote at the end when all the Councillors wind up at Reseune is exciting, I guess. But my favorite part by a mile is watching Ari walk through the new apartment complex while it’s under construction, and then watching Justin and Grant move into their new apartment when it’s finished. It’s so satisfying just to see them get set to have good lives. It’s a bit like the housebuilding scenes in the Gratuitous Epilogue. It’s just a pleasure to read about that kind of thing.
Are there any other titles you can think of where we get to go back into a world simply (or mostly) to peek in on the happily-ever-after part of the story?
