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Come Looking For Me by Cheryl Cooper - Q2
Q2 - Characters
Come Look For Me is rich in characters, both important ones, like Emily, Mrs Kettle, Leander, and Magpie, middle characters like Fly Austen, Octavius Lindsay, and Prosper, and lesser ones like Gus Walby, Captain Moreland, Bisuit, Maggot and Weevil, and Brodie. How did these resonate with you. Were they well drawn? Diverse enough? Considering the action takes place on a ship full of sailors, how do you think she handled the quantity of characters?
Comments
This is where the novel fell down for me. I could see what Cooper was trying to do, and I think she almost succeeded. I think the characters were well-drawn and the major ones were distinct. But I didn't really care much about them.
It could be because the relationships were mostly about how people related to Emily, and I didn't much care about Emily. I don't now why that is. It could be because the initial mystery of her identity was overplayed, for little reason that I could understand.
Technically well done, but left me cold.
Inevitably there were very few women characters! Basically one "nice" and one "nasty". It's hard to see how it could have been otherwise, unless much more of the action had been at a port, but this did mean that we saw much more about the reactions of the various men to these women than the other way round.
By and large, though (as I think I said in my comments about Q1) the characters were interesting and seemed to be a diverse representation of navy crew of the era. Carrying on the theme of "nice" vs "nasty" it seemed to me we got to know a lot more about the crews of the two ships which helped Emily, and rather less about the crew which abducted her. I did think that there was a well-drawn part about how crew members, both skilled and unskilled, might be simply assimilated into the crew of a former enemy who had defeated the original.
I agree with this - I still wasn't sure at the end why it had been such a big deal for her to disguise her identity, or why the Bad Guys were determined to capture and expose her.
The characters were, I think what drew me in and ultimately why I liked the book. She was very good at making individuals who resonated as real. The exceptions were the Bad Guy and the Heroine. I don't think either felt like real people. I cared far more deeply about Magpie and Gus Walby than I did about Emily.
Yes, definitely