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| Hi, Random Girl! |
This picture of this random girl who I have not been able to identify despite my best efforts, is as close to Suzanne as I have been able to find on the internet. This girl is not quite as alternative in style as Suzanne is, but Suzanne is not as goth or alternative as the pictures that turn up when I google those key words, so this girl will have to do. Imagine her wearing more black and more eyeliner and you'd have her about right.
Contrary to the beliefs of some of my friends, Suzanne is not me.* She and I are similar in many ways, but Suzanne comes from a very different background and operates with a level of self-assurance I never would have had as a girl her age, because she comes from privilege and, as a result, has the belief that she should get what she wants when she wants it. Sometimes, that makes Suzanne kind of a bitch in the bad way. In fact, one of the reviews from a stranger of The Fifth indicated that, although they liked the book, they didn't like Suzanne very much. That's cool: I don't really believe in "likability" for a character anyways, especially not female characters.
I also think that Suzanne can be a bitch in a good way, as well. She stands up for what she believes in, and she is not afraid of a fight. That means sometimes she lashes out when she shouldn't, but Suzanne is not a girl who is going to be pushed around.
Her weakness, though, or one of them, is that she is attracted to people who seem mysterious to her, because she thinks they know something she doesn't know. She dismisses Gabriel as obvious, and likes Anastase and Morgan because they are mysterious. She really overvalues that as a good quality and part of her arc in The Fifth is her realizing that everyone--even Gabriel, even her parents, even herself--is more than they seem.
Suzanne is a Fifth, which means she got a little bit of every power (although not much at the moment) and can amplify the power of others. She doesn't have a defined strength or weakness, an ambiguity in her powers that we'll see more of in the sequels. But The Fifth isn't really about Suzanne learning to use her magical powers, it's more about her learning to live in her relationships with other people, and how those relationships make her stronger than she would be on her own.
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*Although, true story, I picked her name because it is similar in spelling to my own. That is purely practical, though -- it makes it really easy to type. :)
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