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[bookelfe]

I am pretty positive that I read Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy - Westmark, The Kestrel and The Beggar Queen - when I was small and reading everything Lloyd Alexander that I could get my hands on, but for some reason they stuck with me not at all at the time and I remembered absolutely nothing about them except that they involved war and street

Comments

[bookelfe]

These also would be my choices exactly! (Keller <33333333!) But I feel there have to be people out there who are all about The Brooding Angst and Secret Insecurity of Justin.

[bookelfe]

Because he had a sad childhood and is canonically very very pretty . . . aren't these, like, the basic prerequisites for fandom adoration?

[genarti]

Ahahaha oh man. I read those books! And loved them! Back in the day in junior high; I distinctly remember getting them out from the middle school library. And being simultaneously a) satisfied by the realism of the thorny ethical stuff and portrayal of everybody going kinda crazy in the war just because... it was war and they were in the middle of it all, and b) deeply unsettled because WHERE IS MY HAPPY GOOD-GUY TIDINESS, LLOYD ALEXANDER, COME ON.

My memory of them is so patchy, though. For the game... uh. I will play, but you have to remind me who Keller is!

(I have no Enjolras-y icon, so you get this or wee huggy Cosette. I opt for this.)

[bookelfe]

I think the b) is what caused me to forget about them when I was ten or so; I was a lot less about satisfying political complexity then than I was now. Uh, possibly unsurprisingly.

:O KELLER. Keller is the best! UM SPOILER WARNING STARTS HERE

--- He is the journalist who writes the Old Kasperl column and is all witty and detached but secretly patriotic, and then gets tragically ill, and tries to get himself arrested to rescue Theo from prison except the guards are like 'dude, we aren't going to arrest Old Kasperl, he is TOO AWESOME' and Keller is like 'DAMMIT, FOILED AGAIN'.

(I approve of either of these things! . . . now I feel I need an Enjolras-y icon, though. Hot revolutionaries are appropriate for all occasions!)

[genarti]

*giggles* I like the edited spoilering.

Keller! I thought that was who it might be, but I couldn't remember. He's one of the ones for whom I have more memory-gaps than, uh, memory.

In that case: marry Keller because he's awesome and relatively detached and stuff. Shag Florian because IIRC he is hot and has that whole Enjolras thing going. Cliff Justin because he is CRAZY. And annoying. And also CRAZY.

Becca I abruptly want someone to cross over this with SKU, just for the revolution...ness. Wacky misunderstandings! UST!

[bookelfe]

I am belatedly considerate! :D

Yeah, I had no recollection of him at all from last time around, but this time he was my absolute favorite.

And this seems to be the popular choice! And yes you do remember correctly, although something that both impresses (due to realism) and entertains me is that Florian starts off really hot and then is described becoming rather less pretty due to stress and illness and so forth over the course of the books. While Justin abruptly becomes, looks-wise, A GOLDEN GOD. So of course half of Florian's followers are now Justin's! Direct ratio of hotness to revolutionary success!

. . . ME TOO NOW. *giggling* Touga/Justin?

[bookelfe]

Oh, same here when I was little (I actually want to reread Vesper Holly some time soon, because I loved those books so much! Vesper Holly > Indiana Jones by far.)

That's why I decided to reread these, actually, because I'd seen them mentioned somewhere as really good and couldn't remember anything. I'm not surprised I didn't like them as much at the time, though, I think they were a little too dark for Tiny Becca. Which is equally why I think they are awesome now!

[bookelfe]

I know, right? What more could you want out of books!