Character Study: Waiting for the Cyclone

Our new and improved Character Study column takes the CanLit books you love and re-imagines them as Hollywood movies: who would play your favourite bookish characters and why.Leesa Dean’s Waiting for the Cyclone (Brindle & Glass) takes you on a ride through thirteen stories featuring strong female leads who deviate from the status quo. One of the collection’s edgier stories is “Tiebreaker” in which we find Valery, a fearless hitchhiker in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car. See who would play some key characters in the fictional movie adaptation of “Tiebreaker.”Valery, played by a fierce Kat Dennings

Long black hair and Mia Wallace bangs, Valery stands by the highway, wearing red heels and a floppy hat, holding a yellow suitcase. Adventurous and carelessly bold, she relishes the taste of a little danger. It’s why she’s hitchhiking to her brother’s wedding, why she’s instantly attracted to the man who picks her up, with his one-word answers and tattooed knuckles.

Christian, played by bad boy Robert PattinsonHe, like everyone, has a hard time reading her. Flirty one minute and cold the next, Valery is the type of cool you admired in high school but scorn in full-grown adults. But she can make a person talk, he thinks. Why else would he be listing off the terrible things he’d done? With an unsettling prescience, Valery knows something is coming—something will connect them. But nothing can prepare either of them for what happens when she uncovers the tie that binds.

* * *Thanks to Tori at Brindle & Glass for bringing this edition of Character Study to life! For more in-depth examinations of your favourite protagonists, click here.