My YA Crush

I have received a request from Strange Chemistry, the YA branch of Angry Robot Books, for a YA crush, i.e. which character from a YA novel is your crush? Well, I thought I'd blog about it here rather than on their blog, although they may reproduce it if they like.

And my YA crush is Aubrey Fitzwilliam from Michael Pryor's fabulous YA steampunk series The Laws of Magic. Maybe he's a crush for a mature woman rather than a teenager. When you're in your teens you want a prince to sweep you away on a white horse (or to a dark vault or into the realms of Faerie or whatever).

But I like Aubrey. And I did even before his image started to appear on the covers of the new edition of this series. Okay, he does dumb things now and then. That only proves he's human. But Aubrey is not only a strong character in his own right - clever, funny, great at improvising in a nasty situation, a genius with magic - but he likes his women strong. Well, his woman. And this is the hitch. I'd never be able to pry him away from his beloved Caroline. :-( And you do have to be careful, now I think of it. Caroline could warn any potential Aubrey girlfriends of the sneaky thing he did to get her on-side in Heart of Gold, the second book in the series, when he needed her help. Lady Rose, his mother, was not at all impressed with him in that case!  At least you'd have her on-side if he stuffed you around. Aubrey does have strong women in his life from childhood on - his mother, a scientist in the parallel Edwardian era, his grandmother... Aubrey reminds me a bit of my other main crush in fiction, Miles Vorkosigan.

Okay, if I couldn't have Aubrey, his best friend George is also pretty good. He's handy at just about anything, considerate, also likes his women strong (woman - Sophie the journalist and potential magician - drat! Taken, again) and best of all, he can cook, and looking after people, feeding them, is the dream that comes up in one of the books when they're in a fantasy world where you get what you really, really want. He's also got common sense and is able to hold Aubrey back when he gets an idea that's just too insane.

If you haven't read the series, go get it! Both boys and girls are borrowing it from my library and loving it. I'm going to see if young Shane (see the interview with gabrielle Wang - that Shane) is interested in it this year, when she finishes with Terry Pratchett's Discworld books...