a realization

[coraa]

One of the things that keeps me reading Diane Duane's Young Wizard books, even though the quality varies some after the (excellent) first couple, is my profound hunger for books featuring protagonists who are responsible and kind.

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

As per that recent post on rachelmanija's journal, this definitely sounds like many, many Rosemary Sutcliff books would work for you. Duty and responsibility are major recurring themes, and even the characters who are warriors by avocation usually have the sort of ethos that sees fighting and violence as an ugly but needful thing, but holds deliberate cruelty as ignoble. The Shield Ring, for instance, has one particularly memorable scene where the heroine finishes up some unglamorous-but-needful work with the other women of the household before she sneaks off to follow her best friend who has been sent out on a dangerous solo adventure -- and even there she's thinking of things not in terms of a self-centered desire for excitement, but rather that a friend going out to face mortal danger and his own greatest secret fear should not have to go alone.

You might want to start with some of the books featuring younger protagonists -- some of Sutcliff's adult heroes can be a bit more prickly or stern, and while they're seldom deliberately unkind, some of them may be a little harsher than you'd like. (Aquila from The Lantern Bearers is probably the biggest example -- he's somewhat twisted up inside from the trauma of seeing his family killed or carried off into captivity and spending years dreaming of vengeance as a thrall in Jutland, and even when he tries to show kindness or caring it often just comes out the wrong way.)