Identifying with the characters

Good Fridays spans the life of Emily Carmichael Wells Curtis, who lived until 2009, when she was eighty-six years old. The character of Vicki Stephenson Edwards is sixty-four during the 2009 life-changing road trip she takes with her daughter, Sara Edwards, who is thirty. Three generations. Three different woman. Three unique personalities. Which woman do readers identify with? That depends on various factors. The comments I'm hearing from readers about the characters in Good Fridays are varied, as are the readers themselves. Age seems to have something to do with how a reader responds to a particular character's behavior. The issue of whether or not the reader is a mother seems to have an impact on how she feels about each of the three main characters in Good Fridays, as well as the type of relationship that reader has with the women in her immediate family. Some readers tell  me they can relate to the adversity each of these characters has gone through, and most certainly Emily, Vicki and Sara have each been victimized in very different ways. A book reviewer brought up the point that maybe in the story of Good Fridays, there is no villain, and that's an interesting observation. Sometimes the protagonist in a story is not a specific character, but maybe a circumstance. More next time...