T10T: Favorite Fictional Friendships

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is Book Characters I’d Love to Be Besties With, but since I couldn’t think of (m)any, I’m going to talk about something a little different: my favorite fictional portrayals of friendships.

While writing this list, I tried to mostly focus on female friendships, and… the YA world has come so far since its long “all is about romance; friendships, especially female friendships, are irrelevant” phase.

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The Grays from The Lost Coast

It only makes sense that in a book from the point of view of a queer girl that is specifically about finding your community, friendship is one of the most important themes, and this group of queer witches (“the grays”) are now one of my favorite friend groups. This whole book and the way it talks about friendship reminded me a little of The Raven Cycle, except not male-focused, and I loved that.

The Grays are really close, all love each other in different ways, and everyone has their own magic; it’s so great to see this in an age range in which most friendship groups have always more male characters than women and no non-binary characters at all.

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Haimey, Connla and Singer from Ancestral Night

It’s always so nice to read books in which the relationships the characters value the most are friendships instead of romances, especially when it comes to books that, like Ancestral Night, are specifically about recovering from trauma. (The “romantic love cures you” trope is out. The “support from friends can be great” trope is in.)

Haimey Dz is a lesbian space salvager who lives on a spaceship with her pilot friend Connla (who is a bisexual or pansexual man), the AI Singer, and their two cats (yes, everything is better with cats, including space). I loved reading about their interactions and their ship-scavenging pirate-escaping life in low gravity.

[This is the only book on this list that is adult and not YA.]

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The friend group from The Weight of the Stars

Teens in difficult situations come together in this genre-bending sci-fi romance, and the friendships in this book have a complicated and… sometimes all but smooth dynamic, but there’s so much love here. Ryann and her group of mostly dysfunctional friends. It’s one of the examples in which I didn’t care strongly for every single character individually (it’s a standalone, the space to develop characters is what it is, and I still really liked most of them) but I cared so much for them as a group.

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Fatima and the Alif sisters from The Candle and the Flame

Fatima is a character who has lost so much – both her parents and her adopted parents, and might lose more yet – so seeing her have a relationship relatively devoid of conflict with the three Alif sisters was so refreshing and wholesome (they’re not her sisters, adoptive or not, but they feel as if they were). Also, this book portrays an aspect of female friendship, especially between young teens, that you rarely see in books: part of it is just… being silly because you can, and I loved how this book never portrayed that in a judgmental way.

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Jam, Redemption, and Pet from Pet

I feel like middle grade is really good at portraying friendships (I haven’t read a lot of it, but that’s the impression I have), and upper YA is getting better at it, but as time goes on, I see less and less lower YA in general. So, reading Pet, a lower YA focusing on friendship and family, was so refreshing. The friendship Jam and Redemption had was so sweet, and I also really liked how the two interacted during their “monster hunt” with Pet, the mysterious creature who came out of one of Jam’s mother’s paintings. I know this isn’t going to happen, because this makes sense as a standalone – and a really short one at that – but I’d love to read more books with them.

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Jules, Dia and Hanna from This Is What It Feels Like

Complicated friendships! One of my favorite topics to talk about in literature. This Is What It Feels Like is about three girls who were once friends and in a band, but their band fell apart for various reasons (one of the girls was dealing with grief and a pregnancy, another with alcoholism) and this story is about them reconnecting. It’s an emotional read with three beautifully-written character arcs and one of my favorite portrayals of friendship ever.

Maybe a friendship can’t survive everything, but just because something ended, it doesn’t mean it can’t start again. The second chance trope isn’t just for romance.

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The Mercies and Trigve from The Boneless Mercies

Four warrior girls and a soft healer boy go on a quest to slay a monster, not because they have to, but because they want to, they’re seeking glory, and isn’t reading about active protagonists looking for their place in the world the best thing ever, especially when they’re women? This is one of the very few books I know that, instead of making the usual, boring assumption that romance is “being more than friends”, explicitly has a character answer “so it’s deeper, then” when the main character says that Trigve is not her lover, he is her friend – and this was so interesting to see. I loved the Mercies and Trigve so much, all of them, and I really want this to get a sequel.

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Mercedes and Victoria from The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

The Gallery of Unfinished Girls is a story about art and perfectionism just as much as it is a story about a friendship going through a difficult time – high school is ending and Mercedes and Victoria aren’t going to see each other as often during college; also, Mercedes has realized that she has unrequited romantic feelings for Victoria. It’s not a romance, it is a character-driven story about the complexity of teenage female friendship, about moving on, and… it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.

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Xiomara and Caridad from The Poet X

This is a poetry novel, and there is one poem that stuck with me over all the others, in a book that was already really emotional and impactful: Caridad and I Shouldn’t Be Friends. What you almost never see in novels are friendships in which the people involved are… so different, even sometimes in what they believe in, that they should clash all the time, but they don’t. Because, as this poem says, they know each other in ways they don’t have to explain.

I’d love to read a book that explores a dynamic like this one as the main plot, because there’s a lot to say about the… inevitable moments of resentment and sometimes envy, and why the characters are close anyway. I’d love to see this for both friendships that end up working out and for ones in which the characters grow apart.

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Jess and Angie from A Line in the Dark

And to end the post on a “typical Acqua” note, I’m going to talk about my favorite portrayal of a toxic friendship, from A Line in the Dark by Malinda Lo. This is a story about unrequited love and tangled feelings and how the line between loyalty and obsession is sometimes far too thin. It’s fascinating and ugly, and I loved every moment of it. Not only parents and significant others can be toxic for you – I’d say that teenagers are as likely to have been in a toxic friendship as in a toxic relationship – and I’d like YA fiction to reflect that.

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What are your favorite fictional portrayals of fictional friendships?