Animal Dreams Characters

So you thought people usually have the big stuff in life worked out by their early thirties? Yeah, sorry 'bout that.Meet Our Hot MessCodi Noline contradicts the wisdom that wisdom comes with age. S...

Doc Homer has lived his whole life hiding from a bad reputation. He and his family were the black sheep of the Gracela clan, so his wife Althea's parents hated his guts and tried to keep her away f...

If John Steinbeck had written Animal Dreams, we'd encounter Hallie sitting under a tree—or maybe a large cactus—in Tucson, discussing Marx with the children of the neighborhood. She's the perfe...

Ladies and gentlemen, take notes, because Loyd Peregrina is the perfect man...even if he does wear his hair in a ponytail and have less than the requisite number of Ls in his name. Why is Loyd so g...

Back in the glory days of Grace High School, Emelina Domingos was named "Lucky in Love" in her yearbook (4.24), and that's a pretty good assessment of her character. With a beautiful house, a husba...

Viola is J.T.'s mom and Emelina's mom-in-law. In this female-centric novel, she's a way bigger character than J.T. Back when Codi and Hallie were little, they used to hang out at Viola's house and...

Juan Teobaldo (J.T.) Domingos is the railroading husband of Emelina. We don't learn a huge amount about him, except that he loves his wife. He seems like a nice guy, and he looks awfully pretty whe...

Emelina's five sons are pretty delightful. We only get a few short glimpses of their lives, but we know that they all dig their Aunt Codi. John Tucker is the oldest. We know because he has his very...

Doña Althea came here to be sassy and make papier-mâché peacocks, and she's all out of peacocks. Just kidding. She has a lot of peacocks left, because people bring her feathers all the time. As...

The Stitch and B**** Club is basically the Grace, Arizona version of the Sons of Anarchy, except instead of running drugs and getting in fights, these ladies make paper-mâché peacocks and bring t...

In our opinion, Uda doesn't get nearly enough respect in this novel. First of all, she basically raised Codi and Hallie, taking care of them for ten years after their mother's death. Now that the g...

Carlo is one of the first characters we meet in Animal Dreams. He's the guy Codi has been dating for ten years. Codi tells us lots of stories about their relationship—like the time they were both...

We never meet Leander, but the twin brother Loyd lost at fifteen is still a major figure in the story. His death is probably part of why Loyd was such a jerk in high school, and certainly, losing L...

Yeah, we know he's a dog and not a person, but even though he never says a word, this pooch is a character, and we are not just talking about his fashion-forward neck bandana. Loyd's story of offer...

Sean Rideheart shows up late in the narrative. His name, Rideheart, and his white hair make him a sort of knight in shining armor for the Stitch and B**** club, even though they think he's kind of...

Codi meets Alice on the bus ride out of Grace. She's wearing a jogging suit and reading a gardening magazine. It turns out she knew Hallie—at least by voice. She used to call her about slugs, whi...

Loyd's family is Apache, Pueblo, and Navajo. They're scattered all across the area from Grace to Santa Rosalia Pueblo, and most of what we know about them is that they're a bunch of sweet folks. Th...

Cissy RamonCissy Ramon is a low-down, good-for-nothing type who wears green nail polish and doesn't keep her promises. At least, that's what we hear, since we never meet her personally. She was Loy...