Sometimes, you can’t rely on the protagonist in a book to carry the day. Or, if you can, you run into a minor character who steals the show. For example, when I was a little girl, I couldn’t stand The Little Mermaid‘s Ariel but Sebastian? I would’ve paid money to see Sebastian: The Movie, even though I was too young to really understand the concept of money as a whole. And in a book, a good sidekick character is worth his (or her) weight in pure, unblemished gold.
So submitted for your approval, Memiorites, here are my top five irrepressible sidekicks.
Boomer, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
Ordinarily, a character I’d essentially just met wouldn’t even place on a list like this, but I am in love with Dash’s best friend Boomer. Not in a creepy way, but in an I-wanna-squish-him way.
One of the things that works best about Dash is his sardonic, cynical outlook on life in general. I think Levithan and Cohn captured the essence of teenage boy perfectly when they wrote Dash. He’s sarcastic, snide, a little broken, and a lot resentful of what the world expects from people, especially teenaged boy-type people. But the best part about Dash, for me, is Boomer.
Boomer is the classic foil. He’s clueless almost to the point of you wondering if he has a bit of a developmental problem; he loves kids’ movies; he’s almost cavity-inducing in his earnestness and sincerity; he’s incredibly kind. He serves as a window into Dash’s world, too, because when you start the book, you think to yourself, “Dash probably hangs out with people just like himself. An army of little Dashes, snarking at the universe.” And then, you meet Boomer.
I would’ve like Dash & Lily if Boomer hadn’t been there, make no mistake, but he was that little push I needed to stop liking the book and start loving it. He’s a little something extra-special in an already really great book.
Helen Walsh, Anybody Out There?
In a lot of ways, I think Anybody Out There? is one of Marian Keyes’ heavier books. It deals with a lot in a short span of time and it’s almost suffocating in the veins of pain that run through it – and in how absolutely brilliantly it’s done. But more than the actual plot of the book, which I can’t really say anything about without spoiling it, I loved the secondary, mirror plot belonging to main-character Anna’s youngest sister, Helen.
Helen, of the five Walsh sisters, is the irresponsible, lackadaisical, drifts-from-job-to-job-and-drives-her-parents-mental one, but in this book she is absolutely the perfect relief the whole damn time. Her mother recounts most of her exploits as she works as a private eye investigating an infidelity case (which, as it usually goes with the Walsh sisters, spirals entirely out of her control), and oh my stars and garters, it is hilarious. Literally laugh-out-loud-until-you-hurt (LOLUYH?) funny.
And Keyes is brilliant, as an author, in that she places the Helen sections perfectly amid all of Anna’s struggles. Just when you think you literally cannot take another step in Anna’s journey without your heart falling on the floor, there’s Helen, putting herself in mortal peril when all she was supposed to do was take a few photographs. Her mother’s dramatic retellings are even better. It’s absolutely perfect.
I’ll admit that of all the sisters, I was least sold on Helen for a long time, if only because I didn’t feel like I knew her as well as I knew Rachel or the others, but Anybody Out There? had me changing my mind. She’s the one sister who doesn’t have her own book, too, but I don’t think I want one. I think I love Helen as the comic relief, the secondary plot, and the mirror to her sisters’ worlds. Plus, I don’t think anything could top her role in Anybody Out There? No, seriously, I don’t.
Jean Tannen, The Lies of Locke Lamora
I’m not sure if Jean is technically a sidekick. I mean, that’s like saying Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven is a sidekick, and I’m not sure I fully agree with that. But clearly, The Lies of Locke Lamora is entirely focused on Locke as the protagonist, lives-eats-sleeps-and-breathes Locke, and leaves me no choice but to address Jean as a sidekick. Which is okay, because it gives me a chance to talk about Jean, or, as I like to refer to him, my literary boyfriend.
Jean is a thousand things rolled into one, a bit of a high fantasy Hank McCoy but with less fur. He’s a brilliant fighter with an unconventional weapon of choice (seriously, they’re hatchets, how cool is that?), he reads poetry and thinks deep thoughts, he’s unfailingly loyal, and he’s absolutely brilliant. I knew from the very first moment that he appeared in The Lies of Locke Lamora that he would be my favorite character, and I was absolutely right.
But don’t be fooled by my simplistic description of Jean; he’s not just a throwaway loyal henchman with cool weaponry but a fully-developed character. One of the book’s greatest strengths is the fact that every character has a past, a hook, and a real personality, and Jean is no exception. The sequences about his past made my heart ache and sing at the same time. And that’s part of the magic of The Lies of Locke Lamora: it’s not just high fantasy meets con-artistry, a sort of pseudo-medieval Leverage, but rather a tale of well-developed people that fits together like the pieces of an expensive puzzle.
And seriously. Can Jean please be real? I will even take the killing people and the being a con-man if I can have a guy like him in reality. No actual person even comes close.
Rosie, Water for Elephants; Mogget and the Disreputable Dog, Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen; Koko and YumYum, The Cat Who… series; the Death of Rats, Reaper Man; Ghost, Summer, Grey Wind, Nymeria, Shaggy Dog and Lady, A Game of Thrones
I just cheated, but I have a good reason for it.
Animals in books – animals who matter in books – are one of my all-time favorite things. I think if you incorporate an animal and do it well, as an author, you have done something special. I’m not just talking about “And Frank had a black cat who slept with him at night” animal-inclusion, either, but ones that actually become characters. Animals that are so intertwined into the actual narrative that you can’t imagine the story without them, those are the animals I love.
As I was trying to decide who my final sidekick was going to be, I was incredibly torn. I thought first of Mogget, from Sabriel, the cat-who-isn’t that makes Sabriel’s journey so engaging and absolutely blows your mind by the end of the book, but to talk about Mogget without mentioning the Disreputable Dog seemed wrong. Then I considered ignoring both of them and talking about Ghost, from A Game of Thrones, but you can’t talk about Ghost without talking about the other direwolves and I wasn’t going to put all five of them into a single sidekick entry! (Plus, sorry Elle, I think Summer might be my favorite of the wolves, not Ghost.) And then I thought of the Death of Rats, who made me happy throughout Reaper Man, and I realize there was no way to just pick one animal. Not unless I wanted to pick all of them.
To go completely into why I love each of the eleven (eleven!) pets-slash-companions-slash-friends I just listed would make this painfully long. I mean, I could write a thesis-length treatise on why Water for Elephants wouldn’t be the same without Rosie, or why Koko and YumYum have instilled in me a desperate need for a Siamese cat, but I think those of you who have read books with integral animals know exactly what I mean. The world would be a far sadder place without direwolves howling in the night and YumYum licking photographs, or without Rosie’s irrepressible spirit and the Disreputable Dog’s running commentary, and I think that’s the essential function of a sidekick. It’s not whether you could live without them, because after all, Batman is Batman even without Robin, but whether the book would be as good without them. And in every case listed above, the answer is an unequivocal no.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot, Dragonlance: Chronicles
Tasslehoff – Tas to his friends – was the first fantasy character I ever fell readily and truly in love with. It’s funny, because I read Chronicles at the same time as a female friend of mine, and while she was drooling after Tanis Half-Elven from page ten onward, there was no character I adored more than Tas. Chronicles consists of the first trilogy of books in what is now a sprawling universe of stories I can barely untangle anymore, but the rest of the books almost don’t matter because they don’t feature my Tas.
Tas is a kender, which is the Dragonlance answer to a halfling, and is a four-foot-tall mini-human with a ridiculous top-knot of which he is very proud. He’s a kleptomaniac but with the best of intentions (and usually he doesn’t mean it anyway), he’s sometimes a bit naïve, and he often throws himself into horrible situations without realizing that he’s about to encounter a dragon or any other number of potentially horrible ways to die. And that’s why I adore Tas in ways I can’t fully describe to you: you just can’t keep him down.
But don’t be fooled by my recounting his madcap adventures (there is seriously one of the spin-off books about him helping to solve a murder! It’s like the Dragonlance Santa Claus brought me my favorite things!). Tas also has a hidden depth. He is a character who made me cry on more than one occasion – and I am not a book-crier. There is a scene with Flint Fireforge, the dwarf who is to Tas what Gimli is to Legolas, that I can’t think about without my heart feeling weak. And I think that’s really testimony to what a good sidekick should be: a little funny, a little serious, a lot unforgettable.
