Poppy Post: Awesome Non-Human Sidekicks in Books

After Poppy’s beautiful “That Moment When…” post, A Handy Guide for Choosing Your Institute of Magical Education, LiteraryCharlie’s Angels, and Eleanor Oliphant Wasn’t Completely Fine, and Neither Are Many of Us art essays, we are so excited to have another post from her!

Poppy is a long-time fan of SBTB and loves cats, books and coffee, in that order. She illustrates The Loo Cats, an imaginative series starring her rescue cats in the most fantastical, improbable scenarios. The series is an ode to four spunky felines who survived abuse and abandonment before they found their forever home. Now they are elderly and ill, and can only travel in their human’s wild, colour-saturated imagination – but they continue to bring delight and iridescence to the lives of those around them. Join them on their adventures @geninepoppyloo on Instagram!

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Hello dear SBTB community! I thought I’d do a very quick re-introduction to myself, by way of also introducing this post. I live in Singapore, work in the design field, drink too much coffee, and share my home with five cats. Actually, only the last point is important.

The cat-human relationship has been a subject of some debate. Are cats as affectionate as dogs? Do cats really love you? Are cats assholes sometimes?

The answer to all of that is yes.

The point is, my kitties are a huge part of my life and much-loved members of my strange little family. I talk to them, sleep with them, and as all cat owners would know, take a shit with them because they will not stand for being left outside the bathroom.

And so! All this makes me tend to go weak-kneed around books that center around human x non-human friendships! I loved CS Lewis’ Narnia as a kid. Not so much for the lion – I could never quite get onboard with how he seemed to appear and disappear at random – but for the tiny brave Reepicheep, leader of the Talking Mice.

As an adult, I’ve replaced that with Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which is top three on my Desert Island survival list, beneath “water” and “a satellite phone.” (Full disclosure: I think I’ve read the series back to back about three times, and some individual books about five times.)

As I’ve written about the Temeraire series before in previous Poppy Posts, today I thought I’d share a few other awesome non-human sidekicks.

Solovey the horse in the Winternight trilogy, by Katherine Arden

“Just as you and I are many things, and my house is many things, and even that horse with his nose in your lap is many things.”

Solovey appears to be a horse – although as the quote above shows, who can really tell, as he was a gift to Vasilisa Petrovna (Vasya) from Morozko the Winter King/ Frost Demon. Vasya is a teenaged girl born in the remote backwoods village of Lesnaya Zemlya in 1300s Rus’ (Russia). She’s one of the strongest YA/NA protagonists I’ve ever come across, I think.

In the first book, The Bear and the Nightingale, Vasya ran away from home to avoid bleak options of being forced into marriage or getting stuck in a nunnery. She met Morozko, and they developed kinda-sorta feels (yes, a teenaged girl and an age-old frost demon, as you do) for each other. But Vasya, being as irrepressible as she is, was eager to embark on solo travels no matter what: “No, I am going on. I will see the world beyond this forest, and I will not count the cost.” Morozko thus gave her Solovey (which also means Nightingale) to journey with and protect her.

If you’re a Solovey fan as I am, then I should point out that most of their relationship and adventures develop in the next book, The Girl in the Tower. (If you’re a frost demon fan, then I should also say that Vasya and Morozko’s relationship develops more in the second and third book. BUT I’M HERE FOR THE HORSE, REALLY.)

Some wonderful Vasya and Solovey moments, from the lushly magical –

A girl rode a bay horse through a forest late at night. This forest had no name. It lay far from Moscow – far from anything – and the only sound was the snow’s silence and the rattle of frozen trees… yet this girl and her horse went on through the wood, dogged. Ice coated the fine hairs about the horse’s jaw; the snow mounded on his flanks. But his eye was kind beneath his snow-covered forelock, and his ears moved cheerfully, front and back.

To the sweetly mundane –

A hoof scraped on wood, and a large, whiskered nose thrust itself against hers. “Go away,” Vasya said to Solovey, and pulled the blanket over her head. “Go away now. It is ridiculous for a creature of her size to act like a dog.” Solovey, undeterred, threw his head up and down. He snorted his warm breath into her face. It is day, he informed her. Get up!

An added bonus: Solovey’s much better at geography than Vasya is –

…Vasya raised her eyes, following the line of sledges. The haze of many fires showed over the trees. More fires than she had ever seen together. “Is that Moscow?” she asked Solovey, her breath coming short. No, said the horse. Moscow is bigger. “How do you know?” The horse only tilted an ear in a superior fashion.

Also, on the topic of non-human friends – Vasya could see and communicate with spirits and other beings, and the Winternight books are full of terrifying and wonderful otherworldly creatures – the domovoy, household spirits that guarded homes in exchange for food offerings; the bannik, spirits who lived in bathhouses; dvorovoi, spirits of stables and yards (in the novel, the dvorovoi warned Vasya of the fading of the old world, as villagers increasingly converted to a different religion).

A heads-up, by the way: in the final book, The Winter and The Witch, the Vasya-Solovey arc is particularly emotional and heart wrenching. In case you’re planning to read it (and you should – what a lushly written, evocative story it is) –

If Solovey were a human friend IRL, he’d be those older, wiser friends who seem to have mastered almost every aspect of life, including but not limited to having a kitchen stocked with all the herbs and ingredients you need for whatever spur-of-the-moment supper you decide to throw together, after they’ve just spent five hours listening to and advising you on your career/love-life problems.

Downside: A slightly superior know-it-all attitude, but who could blame them?

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Erg the doll in Vassa in the Night, by Sarah Porter

By pure coincidence, my other fav non-human sidekick also comes from a book based on Russian folklore (Winternight was a mix of Russian folklore and Slavic mythology). And it also features another female protagonist named Vasilisa – Vassa in the Night is a contemporary Brooklyn-set retelling of “Vassilissa the Beautiful”, which as far as I can discern, seems to be a cross between Cinderella and Hansel & Gretel?

Sarah Porter follows the original tale quite closely – Vassa is a beautiful girl whose mom died and left her with a magical wooden doll. Her dad remarried and her stepmom and stepsisters mistreated her (in Vassa this was not strictly the case). She was sent out to fetch something (in the folktale, she went to the witch Baba Yaga’s hut to ask for light/fire; in the novel she went to BY, the Convenience Store of Death run by Babs to buy lightbulbs), ended up caught and stuck there, and threatened with death unless she completed some impossible tasks. She did, of course, with the help of the wooden doll.

In the novel Vassa, the doll is called Erg, and I absolutely LOVED the characterization of Erg as Vassa’s slightly bitchy, demanding, pushy, whiney but completely loyal sidekick.

Actually I might not even call Erg a sidekick, because Vassa would’ve been deader than dead if not for Erg’s mysterious magical abilities to get her through her crazy tasks. Even if Erg had a rather screechy way of getting through it:

She’s howling like a siren from the instant I reach into my pocket.

“No! Vassa! No, you can’t do that! Stop having such bad ideas! You can’t leave me!”

“Erg,” I say. “You have a truly crappy track record with impulse control. I can’t trust you not to get me killed. That makes sense, right?”

…Erg can’t talk anymore. She’s sobbing, her little painted face all crimped and deformed. It’s incredible that something so small can make such a racket.

And could not seem to stop eating (this is also true to the original folktale, in which Vassilissa’s mother told her to keep the doll fed and watered) –

“As you can now demonstrate your appreciation for my extraordinary heroism by getting my one of those hot dogs, please. Lots of mustard. As in lotsandlots. And extra relish.”

Bonus for being super fierce and bloodthirstily smug –

Erg crawls out of my pocket and up my arm, then perches on the counter with her tiny legs dangling over the edge.

“Nice work!” she says. The blood on her chin has dried into a garnet smudge.

“I mean, that what you should say to me, now. And you could add something poetic about your inexpressible gratitude, and how super dumb it would have been to leave me outside.”

If Erg were a human friend IRL, she’d honestly tell you that you don’t look good in that dress and irritate you by insisting on choosing every restaurant (but then they all turn out to be the best restaurant you’ve ever been to), but also drop everything and show up at your door at 7am or 11pm if you call her in tears and need her help.

Downsides: Sometimes you might need to take a break from her because she is so very too much, but then you also know she’s 100% squarely in your corner, so she’d understand.

Tybalt the cat in Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake

This might seem like a weird choice because Tybalt wasn’t exactly front-and-center of the story, and also because Kendare Blake has a wonderfully compelling trilogy, Three Dark Crowns, featuring people with “naturalist” gifts who have animal besties called familiars.

One of the main characters, Jules, actually has a full-grown cougar called Camden. (By the way, Kendare Blake has also written a delightful piece on animal sidekicks!)

But Tybalt’s here because he’s a ghostspotting cat, was adorably curmudgeonly, and also

Anna Dressed in Blood has a very interesting premise (quite catnippy to me!), which has teen ghosthunter Cas Lowood hunting down a murderous ghost that had been haunting a Victorian house since the 1950s. He’s practically a full-time ghost hunter and part-time student, travelling around and transferring from school to school, based on tip-offs on where various problematic ghosts were.

Cas lived and travelled with his mom and Tybalt (#heartemoji) and was so used to moving that “my mom and I are professional packers; we don’t mess around with castoff cardboard from the grocery or liquor stores. We have high-grade, industrial-strength, reinforced boxes with permanent labels. Even in the dark I can see that I just tripped over the Kitchen Utensils (2).”

Because of Cas’ profession, one could appreciate how a ghostspotting cat could come in really handy, even if boy and cat didn’t much like each other –

It’s an unruly thing, and it doesn’t much care for me. I don’t care much for it either. It has a weird habit of pulling all the hair off its tail, leaving little tufts of black all over the house. But my mom likes to have a cat around. Like more children, they can see and hear things that are already dead.

(At this point I actually noticed my own cats were staring intently into space and got completely creeped out!)

But lest you feel anxious (like I did) that Tybalt was lacking in love, fret not. He loved Cas’ mom and she loved him –

…he’s perches on her shoulder with his tail wrapped around her neck. He doesn’t spare me a glance. He’s half Siamese and has that breed’s trait of choosing one person to adore and saying screw off to all the rest…

My mom is staring up at the clouds, humming something that isn’t a real song. She’s wearing the same smile as her cat.

And here’s Tybalt doing his best, most professional ghostspotting inspection duty when Cas and his mom moved into a new house –

We follow him as he checks the entirety of the lower level. I get impatient with him in the bathroom, because he looks like he’s forgotten that he has a job to do and instead wants to roll on the cool tile. I snap my fingers. He squints at me resentfully, but he gets up and continues his inspection… (he) then walks in a bedroom. He stares at the dresser, and regards the stripped bed with distaste. Then he sits and cleans both forepaws.

Unbelievably adorable. Also, why didn’t I think of putting my cats to better use when I moved houses last year?

Tybalt as a human friend IRL? Tybalt would be one of those super interesting, fascinating-with-hidden-depths people you run into at a conference/ party/ café and have an awesome connection with, but then part ways from without exchanging contact details. (I just want more Tybalt, is what I’m saying.)

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Special note: Thank you to all SBTB readers who took part in the Pay-Your-Way Postcard Project last year! I hope you have all received your cards (I’ve emailed everyone; please email me or contact me through IG @geninepoppyloo if you haven’t!) I’ve also put up a highlights reel on my IG page featuring some of your lovely responses. Some of you asked me not to share publicly and that’s totally cool. But thank you for taking part! (I still do have some extra packs of postcards left so please hit up the link above if you still want them!)

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Also somewhat on the topic of non-human friends, I’m sure all of us have heard about the tragic and scary situation with the coronavirus that has, to date, killed more than 1000 and infected more than 50,000 people. What’s even sadder and more dangerous is the rise of racist, xenophobic reactions.

As a counterpoint I’d like to share an article about the work of Lao Mao and his band of volunteers in Wuhan who have rescued more than 2,500 pets stuck at home without food or drink because their owners were caught in the quarantine and lockdown. (I’d also like to give a shoutout and express absolute gratitude to the countless extremely brave and selfless medical health professionals working on the frontline of all affected countries, especially in the worst-hit Wuhan.)

So those are some of my fav non-human literary friends – and I’m always up for making new ones! Please tell me who yours are?