By Kaitlyn Meyers
Creating characters is fun, right? Yes? No? …Maybe?
Creating and crafting a character is, unfortunately, vital to stories because they are the ones actually telling the story. So what makes a reader love a character, especially a main one? The same things that make a person care about another person.
Think about your closest friend. Have you had conversations with this friend about everything from favorite ice cream flavors to the role of humanity in the grand scheme of the universe? Have you two talked about your independent plans and dreams for the future? What about shared interests? I would hope the answers to these are “yes.”
These conversations most likely brought you two closer together and made you care about each other. Well, it’s the same with characters in a story with the reader, albeit a one-sided conversation.
In The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, the main character is Linus Baker, a forty-year-old caseworker working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). This Linus Baker is suddenly assigned to investigate the Marsyas Orphanage, which is under the care of Arthur Parnassus, and the six magical (and dangerous) children under Arthur’s tutelage. Adventure ensues, as it usually does with six children in one place.
Linus, however, is an ordinary man working in a gray office who doesn’t really want his world to change. The author builds a relationship between the main character and the reader through those one-sided conversations. They should (and do with Linus) make a character authentic and human. The authenticity of the main character is achieved by (1) Linus being relatable to us as readers and (2) Linus having a dream.
I, personally, love Linus Baker. Yes, he’s ordinary (aren’t we all a bit ordinary?), but he’s not a flat character (in fact, he’s very (physically) round, so much so that he eats mostly salads in attempts to diet). Both of these alone make him relatable to me as a reader. Compounding on those is his anxiety, which is shown early on in the story (something I relate to as well).
Linus is summoned to Extremely Upper Management on the fifth floor of DICOMY for an unknown reason. He’s fretting with his paperwork and mentally spiraling until the scheduled time of his appointment. This comes to a head on pages 34 and 35 of Chapter 3:
By the time the doors [of the elevator] opened on the fifth floor, he was sweating. …
“Okay, old boy,” he whispered. “You can do this.”
His feet didn’t get the message. They remained firmly stuck to the floor.
By placing Linus in a situation that is very much a shared human experience, Linus is authentically human. These relatable tidbits about Linus are sprinkled throughout the story, like how he talks to his cat, Calliope, and kind of hates the office side of his job.
Linus’s mousepad at his office desk has a beach scene on it, the line “don’t you wish you were here?” above it. He has this mousepad because he also has a dream: it’s a simple desire to see the ocean, something that he’s never seen in the gray and rainy world of the city. Klune is clever in giving Linus a small dream (just to have a vacation to the ocean), because it’s something easily obtainable yet just out of reach. Possibly very similar to a reader’s dream. Linus, as his feet aren’t moving from the above example, continues to talk to himself, saying:
“No time for cowardice,” [Linus] scolded himself quietly. “Chin up. For all you know, maybe it’s a promotion. A big promotion. One with higher pay and you’ll finally be able to go on that vacation you’ve always dreamed about. The sand on the beach. The blue of the ocean. Don’t you wish you were here?”
Chapter 3, page 35
This dream, to see the ocean by getting a promotion, is something small yet relatable. It’s authentic; it’s something that’s gut-wrenchingly human, just as wanting to know the role of humanity in the vastness of the universe. It’s through that humanity and authenticity that readers will love the characters that are set before them.
Add The House in the Cerulean Sea to your Goodreads list or purchase a copy or an audiobook on Amazon.