Today I am going to cheat a bit. I couldn’t think of a female author I have read whose name started with I, a book title or even a heroine name starting with I, so I have chosen a male character in a novel written by a woman, Lois McMaster Bujold, whom I have mentioned under B.
The novel is A Civil Campaign, her Regency romance-style book set in her Vorkosiverse and her character is Ivan Vorpatril, the cousin of Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of the series.
Ivan is Miles’s best friend and also a humorous sidekick, who appears regularly in the series, when Miles needs his help. He does get his own novel late in the series, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, in which he marries, while helping a woman. In A Civil Campaign he helps more than one woman, starting with an ex-woman, Lady Donna, who has become Lord Dono. He goes to the spaceport early in the novel, bunch of flowers in hand, to meet his former lover, only to find that she is now a he, after a trip off planet. Lord Dono is completely transformed and can even father children. This is a matter of an inheritance to a Countship, something a woman can’t get on the backwards planet Barrayar, where women can’t even join the army.
Ivan gets a shock, but helps out as best he can. While he is generally considered a bit dim-witted, he isn’t, really. He just does what Miles persuades him to do, complaining all the way.
Ivan is tall, dark and handsome, and women like him. He always seems to have one girlfriend or another, while Miles has one romance at a time, keeps proposing and being rejected.
In the novel Cetaganda, when Ivan and Miles are sent to represent Barrayar at the funeral of an Empress, Ivan is the one who receives all the invitations from (female) members of the local aristocracy, while Miles gets on with solving a mystery.
In Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance he conducts a speedy Barrayaran wedding ceremony using a breakfast cereal to represent the traditional circle of groats, to help out a woman who is being chased by the authorities, and gets involved with her family from the uber-capitalist planet Jackson’s Whole, whose Cetagandan matriarch had hidden something important underneath the headquarters of Imp Sec during the time when Cetaganda was ruling Barrayar. I won’t go any further because spoilers, but this novel is a lot of fun and the first time Ivan has been the protagonist instead of the sidekick.
Thinking about it, it’s not as inappropriate as we might think to talk about Ivan instead of a female character, because there are a lot of women in his life, and female issues in the books where he plays a large role.
The Vorkosigan novels are easily available online, in print, audiobooks and ebooks.
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