Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten All Time Favorite Characters In Books

It’s Tuesday again and over at The Broke and the Bookish that means it’s time for another Tuesday Top Ten! This week’s topic is the Top Ten All Time Favorite Characters In Books and boy is this going to be a difficult list to make. There are so many characters I ADORE and it will be incredibly difficult to narrow it down to just ten.

Well, here goes nothin’!

1. Mara Jade from the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn. I will always love her. She’s badass, compassionate, stubborn, loyal and a fighter. I usually cosplay as her for my yearly trip to DragonCon and she is the reason I began dying my hair red, so my love for this character runs pretty deep.

2. Laura Ingalls Wilder from the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. When I was tiny I wanted to grow up to be Laura Ingalls Wilder and as an adult I’m still sometimes disappointed life didn’t work out that way. it was somewhere between Laura and Jo March that I decided I wanted to eventually be a writer.

3. Aerin from The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. Every time I read this book I am amazed by Aerin’s sheer determination in the face of ridicule and other’s disappointment. She’s an inspiration and a role model on top of being one of my all time favorite fantasy characters.

4. Adrian Ivashkov from Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. I adore his snarkiness and look forward to his sarcasm. I was sad to part with him at the end of the Vampire Academy, and then become beyond excited to learn he would play a role in the Bloodlines series.

5. Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables (and it’s sequels)  by L.M. Mongomery. I love Anne Shirley so very much and I read this books over and over as a kid/teen. I came to an even better understanding and appreciation of the kind of person Anne is as my most recent re-read of some of the books was from the perspective of an adult. I’m just still hoping to find my own Gilbert.

6. Jo March from Little Women by Lousia May Alcott. If I could be any character in YA literature it would be a toss-up between Jo March and Hermione Granger. Jo March was the character who I most identified with as a child; she was a tomboy, loved her sisters fiercely and aspired to see the world and be an author, it was everything I wanted for myself!

7. Peeta Mellark from The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Out of all of the characters in The Hunger Games trilogy I think that I love Peeta the best. He is the only truly kind and good person to exist in the entire series, and while some argue that it’s a flaw in the character (that he’s too one-dimensional) I think he was exactly what the book needed in this work of greed and dishonesty. His change in Mockingjay was one of the things that hit me the hardest in the entire series and I struggled with it until the end of the book.

8. Mia Hall from If I Stay and Where She Went by Gayle Forman. In reading If I Stay, I related with Mia in a way that I’ve never been able to with another character. It was both Mia’s strong relationship with her family and the fact the she was a teenage girl that played the cello that drew me to her. I adore Mia and I admire her strength, I’m honestly not sure I’d ever been able to make that same choice.

9. Will Parry from the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. As much as I adore Lyra, I think I loved Will a bit more. The devotion and care he gave to his mother was so outstanding in a boy of his age. He was the perfect foil and partner for Lyra. I’m still heartbroken over the end of The Amber Spyglass.

10. Neville Longbottom from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. I’ll admit the first time I read the books I simply adored Neville as my favorite of the side characters (along with Fred and George). However in subsequent re-reads and in noticing details strewn through the series I started to see Neville for the person that he truly was and I understood an empathized with him in a way that I never did with Harry (In fact Harry barely even cracks my list of top ten characters in his own series!). By the end of the seventh book when he had his moment of glory I was rooting for Neville so hard I almost forgot that the book was about Harry. (Also, if anyone reads fanfic, there is an incredible one about Neville that I heavily recommend).

Honourable Mentions:
Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.
Fred & George Weasley  from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.
Jill from the Novels of Deverry by Katherine Kerr

What are you top ten all-time favorite characters in books and why did they make the cut? Can’t wait to see who everyone else has in their list!