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Some random book thoughts
The Warchild snippets I mentioned in my last post are making me go back and reread the books -- not cover to cover, just spot-reading to get context for the vignettes, but it's reminding me how much fondness I have for these characters. ♥
Particularly Cairo Azarcon. When I read the books the first time, I imprinted heavily on Jos and Niko in the first book, but I think the more time I had to reflect on the series, the more I adored Cairo, who's probably my favorite character in the series now. And reading the missing scene I linked to in the last post made me realize something about him that I don't think I'd consciously thought about before, which is that he's a not-uncommon character type who's shown at a stage of life that we almost never see for that character type at all.
Abused children and troubled, angry young people (boys, especially) are a dime a dozen in fiction (though Lowachee does it better than many, IMHO). But I can't think, off the top of my head, of another character like Cairo, that we first meet at an age when he's already worked through all of that and come out the other side, only later finding out about his troubled past. It's not that he's miraculously healed -- a lot of his uneasiness with Ryan, I think, has to do with loving him but not really being sure how to show it, since his own childhood was such a wreck -- but he's gone from being a miserable, angry, abused teenager to an adult who is centered in his own skin, an authority figure and a loving father to Ryan, dedicated to helping other children like he once was. (It was his scenes with Ryan in the second book that really made me fall for him, after being kind of iffy on him in book 1, where we mainly see him through Jos's eyes.)
And I can't actually think of another character like that. I'm sure they must be out there, but usually we see that arc from the beginning, and go through the troubled-childhood parts, without getting more than hints that there's a happier, more settled future waiting for them. There's something amazingly positive about Cairo just being there in the series, something that says It's bad now, but it gets better, really it does.
Particularly Cairo Azarcon. When I read the books the first time, I imprinted heavily on Jos and Niko in the first book, but I think the more time I had to reflect on the series, the more I adored Cairo, who's probably my favorite character in the series now. And reading the missing scene I linked to in the last post made me realize something about him that I don't think I'd consciously thought about before, which is that he's a not-uncommon character type who's shown at a stage of life that we almost never see for that character type at all.
Abused children and troubled, angry young people (boys, especially) are a dime a dozen in fiction (though Lowachee does it better than many, IMHO). But I can't think, off the top of my head, of another character like Cairo, that we first meet at an age when he's already worked through all of that and come out the other side, only later finding out about his troubled past. It's not that he's miraculously healed -- a lot of his uneasiness with Ryan, I think, has to do with loving him but not really being sure how to show it, since his own childhood was such a wreck -- but he's gone from being a miserable, angry, abused teenager to an adult who is centered in his own skin, an authority figure and a loving father to Ryan, dedicated to helping other children like he once was. (It was his scenes with Ryan in the second book that really made me fall for him, after being kind of iffy on him in book 1, where we mainly see him through Jos's eyes.)
And I can't actually think of another character like that. I'm sure they must be out there, but usually we see that arc from the beginning, and go through the troubled-childhood parts, without getting more than hints that there's a happier, more settled future waiting for them. There's something amazingly positive about Cairo just being there in the series, something that says It's bad now, but it gets better, really it does.