27) A book, in which the main character is your "ideal"

Finally! I've been aching to write about these books forever and they were so good for many categories, but the only ones I could think of for this one, so I saved them. The book on the left is the first of four books by Tamora Pierce about Alanna, following her life from the age of 10 to somewhere in her early twenties. Those books are definitely the ones I've read the most often - or that I had read to me the most often. The books are for people over the age of 12, but my sister got the first one for her 9th or 10th birthday and read it to me (I was 7 or 8) and I loved them immediately.
The book is set in a fantasy world, but without dwarves and elves etc. It's mostly just a made-up world that is kind of like our middle ages but with magic and other gods. It starts out with the fact that Alanna's father, a nobleman, wants to send her to a school where she can learn how to use her magic and become a lady and her twin brother to court, where he is supposed to become a knight. Unfortunately, the boy loves magic but hates fighting (and is very bad at it), while Alanna loves hunting and weapons, but doesn't like magic, so they decide to switch places. She dresses up as a boy and becomes a knight eventually, but not without hard work, adventures and also people finding out about it. At the end of book 2 everyone finds out about it during a fight and she leaves the court, but returns at the end of book 4 as the right hand of the new king, one of her best friends and also her ex lover.
As a child, Alanna was definitely my ideal. She was strong and brave (which I was not) and also strong-minded (which I was) and highly disciplined and persevering (which I was not, but which I became eventually). Yep, I definitely wanted to be a knight rather than a princess as a kid. And now I'm just becoming a psychologist... lame :(