Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! As usual for the week of Valentine’s Day, this is a love freebie. I’ve written about couples for the past several years for this prompt, so this time I’m switching it up. Here are ten of my favorite deeply bonded pairs who certainly love each other, but not in that way.
Harry and Ron (Harry Potter): The relationship chronicled over the seven books of the series between our hero and his best friend is complicated and rich and more thoroughly developed than either of their romantic lives.
Meg and Charles Wallace (The Wind in the Door): The connection between these two siblings is beautifully rendered and significant in all the books in the series, but particularly in the second one, where Meg has to save his life.
Vasya and Solovey (The Bear and the Nightingale): We’ve all heard enough jokes about horse girls to recognize the strength of the bond between young women and their equines, but Solovey isn’t just any horse and I really enjoyed the bickering and love between these two.
Joe and Sammy (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay): The artistic partnership between these two cousins has ups and down but is rooted in mutual admiration and care that pays off deeply in the end.
Francie and Johnny (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn): Johnny is a warm-hearted, charismatic addict, which makes him a terrible husband and a bad provider, but the easy, straightforward love he’s able to show his sweet, bookish daughter is a lovely thing.
Becky and Amelia (Vanity Fair): Becky is a fascinating character, with her scheming and lack of morals. She’s not a good friend in the conventional sense, but she does care about the docile Amelia in her own way, and their friendship is both interesting and of an uncommon sort.
Boris and Popper (The Goldfinch): One of the things I found most delightful about this book was the bond between protagonist Theo’s crazy Eastern European best friend and the little dog he ends up liberating from his stepmother. These two were my favorite characters in the book, honestly.
Legolas and Gimli (The Lord of the Rings): The longstanding disdain between elves and dwarves means these two are often at each other’s throats in the beginning, but the grudging respect and then genuine friendship that grows between them is often a more light-hearted highlight in an otherwise often serious series.
Annemarie and Helen (Number the Stars): I loved this book growing up, not in the least because of the warm, close friendship between gentile Annemarie and Jewish Helen and how it helps give both of them the strength for the former’s family to help the latter’s escape.
Lyra and Iorek (The Golden Compass): She’s one of my favorite literary characters, and the way she earns the admiration and friendship of the king of the armored bears with her quick wits and bold lies is one of the reasons why.