Follow TV Tropes

Following

Massive Numbered Siblings / Literature

Go To

  • The All-of-a-Kind Family has five daughters, each born two years apart. They're followed by a son, Charlie, when the youngest girl is about four or five.
  • Angel Child, Dragon Child: Ut has four elder sisters and one younger brother. Because there are so many children in her family, there was only enough money for them and their father to come to the United States, while their mother stayed in Vietnam.
  • In Angel in the Whirlwind, Kat Falcone is the youngest of ten siblings, which means she inherits a negligible share of the family company and isn't important enough for an Arranged Marriage, meaning she's pretty much free to do as she pleases... which in her case means serving in the Commonwealth Navy and dating a commoner, Major Pat Davidson.
  • L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables:
    • Probably one of the most humorous parts of the series is that not only does Anne marry her once sworn enemy Gilbert Blythe, but they go on to have seven children (six living). It really stands out, too, as none of the other main characters have nearly that many children. Diana and Fred have three while Owen and Leslie Ford have two. The only one that comes close is the Meredith family, who have four.
    • Rachel Lynde mentions having twelve children, two of whom died at a young age.
    • Prior to the start of the books, Anne lived with the Thomas family, who had seven children, and the Hammond family, who had eight children including three sets of twins.
  • Aquamarine is one of seven mermaid sisters.
  • Jane Austen:
    • Northanger Abbey
      • Catherine Morland has nine siblings, which puts a not-insignificant financial strain on their father when it comes to planning for their futures, like her brother James's marriage.
      • Catherine's brother James has a friend named John Thorpe; Thorpe has five siblings: two boys and three girls.
    • Pride and Prejudice:
      • There are five Bennet sisters who unfortunately have no brother to save them from losing their home to an entailment whenever their father dies.
      • The Lucases have several children; the eldest, Charlotte, is protagonist Elizabeth's best friend, and although the exact number of her siblings is never stated, there are at least two sons and two daughters younger than her.
    • Fanny Price of Mansfield Park is the oldest daughter among 10 siblings (including the deceased Mary), although she lives with her uncle's family from age 10 to age 18, after her mother—on her latest pregnancy—wrote to her wealthier sister and begged for help. Returning to her dysfunctional childhood home for a season is a living nightmare because the family is impoverished and barely genteel.
    • Emma Woodhouse's older sister has her fifth child shortly before the story begins in Emma.
    • Charlotte Heywood in Sanditon (an unfinished novel) comes from a family of 14 children. Their parents are happy together and sedentary, but wish for their children to travel and mix in society.
    • The title family from The Watsons are a large family: sisters Elizabeth, Penelope, Margaret and youngest Emma and brothers Richard and Sam. Emma was adopted by a childless aunt and uncle, but her widowed aunt has remarried and Emma has to return home.
  • The Baby-Sitters Club:
    • Mallory is the eldest of eight children. (The next oldest children are triplets.) This gets poked fun at by biased characters in Keep Out, Claudia! when they wonder if her family's Catholic.
    • It also applies to Kristy's blended family; she has three biological brothers, then gains a stepbrother and stepsister through her mother's second marriage, and then her mother and stepfather adopt a baby girl together.
    • The Barrett-DeWitts, clients of the club, are another blended family example of this trope, with three Barrett children and four DeWitt children.
  • Exaggerated in The Bad Guys. Mr. Piranha, being an actual piranha, has 900,543 brothers and cousins, who all fill up a single gang. Mr. Piranha is the youngest of all of them, too.
  • The Bakers' Dozen series by Suzanne Weyn is about a family with twelve adopted children. It seems they all joined the family within about four years. Later their mother gives birth to a thirteenth child.
  • Implied that this will happen to Geran and Beldaran in The Belgariad. Belgarion is a sorcerer just like his 7000-year-old grandfather and is therefore all but immortal. His wife Ce'Nedra is a Dryad and it is suggested that she could easily live hundreds of years as well. The Voice of Prophecy even takes the time to congratulate Belgarion about the daughters he is still to have (Prophecy clearly states that Geran will be Garion's only son, but says nothing about how many daughters he could potentially have).
  • Ben and Me: Amos is the oldest of twenty-six children.
  • By the end of Blandings Castle we've heard about ten different sisters of Lord Emsworth, as well as two brothers. Granted, many of these siblings only exist for Nephewism, but others show up as either one-off or recurring characters (most notably Constance and Galahad).
  • The parents of The Bobbsey Twins come just shy of this trope with four kids, but they're unusual because the mother was only pregnant twice — they have two sets of fraternal boy/girl twins.
  • Also by Wen Spencer, families in A Brother's Price tend to be huge. Jerin Whistler has twenty-eight sisters and three brothers, and Mother Eldest is pregnant again. However, due to a rarity of males, family structures in this world are different — he has twelve mothers, all of them sisters born to his ten Whistler grandmothers.
  • A Certain Magical Index: Mikoto Misaka started out as an only child, but in middle school found out that Academy City created over 20,000 clones of her, of which a little less than 10,000 survive (9,968 of the original batch, plus at least 3 more "special" clones). Her parents aren't aware of the clones' existence, but Mikoto has declared them all to be her sisters. The clones originally called her "the original", but after that declaration they refer to her in turn as their elder sister.
  • Charlotte The Scientist Is Squished is a children's picture book about a young bunny scientist named Charlotte who considers moving to the moon because at home she's too squished to do her experiments and doesn't even have room to relax properly when in the bath because, well... rabbits.
  • The original book Cheaper by the Dozen, which inspired the various film incarnations, was an autobiographical account of the authors' childhood; their parents had twelve children.
  • A Christmas Carol: The Ghost of Christmas Present says that over 1,800 of his brothers have come before him (i.e. the number of years since the birth of Christ).
    Ebenezar Scrooge: A tremendous family to provide for.
  • The Chronicles of Amber: The first book is even named Nine Princes in Amber. And that's not counting the Princesses... Even worse, that's only the known ones. New siblings have a habit of popping up out of nowhere. It's an express option in the RPG.
  • In the Crank trilogy, the protagonist Kristina eventually has a total of five children and is a Missing Mom to all of them on some level.
  • The Unseelie King of The Dark Artifices has fifty sons (daughters are apparently killed at birth). Several of them appear throughout the series, though the only one to be a major character is the youngest and Unfavourite, Kieran.
  • The Stanton family in The Dark is Rising. Will is the youngest of nine, and it's revealed that his parents' first child, Tom, died shortly after birth or was stillborn — which allowed Will to be the seventh son of a seventh son (his dad also had a large family).
  • A lot of Diana Wynne Jones' work feature siblings, but the Dark Lord of Derkholm books have it topped with Derk and Mara having two human children (Blade and Shona), five magically engineered griffins who share their DNA (Kit, Callette, Lydia, Don, and Elda), and, in the sequel, two Winged Humanoid children.
  • In The Diamond Girls, Dixie has three sisters and another sibling on the way. They all have different dads too. She's also got three paternal half-sisters she's never met.
  • In Discworld, Nanny Ogg is the matriarch of a clan like this, having birthed fifteen children. By the time she's a main character, the kids have all grown up and moved out, but they still merit a mention.
    • Her children are even more notable because, given Lancre's small size, she's practically given birth to half of it.
    • Tiffany Aching has six older siblings and one Annoying Younger Sibling.
    • The father, grandfather, and great-grandfather of Coin, from Sourcery, each had eight sons. (Possibly some daughters also, although they're not mentioned.)
    • The fact that Esk is an eighth child of an eighth son is what sets off the plot of Equal Rites.
  • Doom Valley Prep School, Princess Ella, 259th daughter of the Mad Immortal Emperor of Arp, has around 350 brothers and sisters. She's not exactly sure how many she has at any one time, because new brothers and sisters are born all the time, while others are killed off by assassinations, plots gone wrong, and accidents.
  • The long-term implications of this set the scene for Mercedes Lackey's Dozen Daughters series. The royal family of a minuscule kingdom (maps of the region made in other countries often forget to acknowledge that they're even there) ends up having 12 daughters before finally producing an actual heir, at which point they realize that they can't afford twelve royal dowries. As a result, the princesses are all given first-rate educations in whatever craft they desire until they turn eighteen, at which point they are all expected to leave the kingdom and seek their own fortune.
  • Dragonriders of Pern:
    • In Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern and the side volume Nerilka's Story, Nerilka's father Lord Holder Tolocamp has nineteen acknowledged children (although The Plague kills four of them at the beginning of the book) and an unspecified number of illegitimate children as well. They're informally known as the Fort Hold Horde. And that was before his first wife is killed by The Plague and he remarries his mistress, who is literally young enough to be his daughter.
    • Groghe, a descendant of Tolocamp who became Lord Holder at Fort Hold many years later, is noted to have fifteen sons and an unspecified number of daughters.
  • In the Dreamblood Duology, that's only natural in the royal line where the Prince is expected to take two hundred fifty-six wives. As a bonus, all of them are expected to duke it out among themselves to determine who will become the next Prince of Gujaareh.
  • The Dresden Files:
    • Karrin Murphy has numerous brothers and at least two sisters. In the Tabletop RPG rulebook, her family is listed as including an "unknown number of brothers", with a footnote from Harry saying that he's pretty sure Mrs. Murphy knows how many sons she has, but he just can't keep track of them all.
    • The Carpenters as well. In the third book, Charity gives birth to her seventh child. She and Michael probably would have gone on to have even more kids were it not for the events of the book, which render her sterile. The Carpenters later become foster parents of an eighth child, Maggie Dresden.
  • Did Dr. Seuss ever tell you of Mrs. McCave? She had twenty-three sons and named them all Dave.
  • Earth's Children:
    • Haduma had sixteen children, all of whom survived to adulthood. It's therefore not surprising she's the ancestress of most of the Hadumai.
    • Tremeda has six living children. She neglects all of them, forcing her eldest daughter Lanoga to step in as a parent.
    • The Aurochs Hearth is a downplayed example, with Tulie having given birth to five children in all; she was married to two men at the same time and they both fathered children with her. Her eldest son lives at another camp and her eldest daughter is planning to move out once she gets married, although the younger three are still children and won't be moving out any time soon.
  • In Firebird (Lackey), Tsar Ivan has eight legitimate sons, an unspecified number of daughters and illegitimate children, and nowhere near enough property to give an inheritance to all of them. Ilya, the main character, is one of the middle children.
  • Faeries in The Folk of the Air have very low birth rates, yet prince Cardan is the youngest of six siblings, implying his father Really Gets Around.
    Dulcamara: Most Folk are lucky, if in a hundred years, they beget a single child. Two is considered a great blessing. Six is vulgar fortune.
  • In the Galactic Milieu series, the Remillard clan (also, naturally, a Big, Screwed-Up Family). Paul Remillard is one of seven siblings, father of six legitimate children and thirty-eight illegitimate. And then his son Marc one-ups him by artificially siring upwards of a hundred children for his Super Breeding Program.
  • In the Geronimo Stilton spin-off Thea Stilton, Pamela, one of the Thea Sisters, has nine siblings.
  • Harefolk Hunter from Goblin Slayer has at least 7 living siblings (there might have been more at one point).
  • The Hands of the Emperor: Cliopher's mother had fifteen siblings, and all but one had children themselves - in Cliopher's generation, there are now 59 cousins.
  • The Happy Hollisters have 5 kids.
  • Harry Potter:
    • There are seven Weasley siblings - Bill, Charlie, Percy, twins Fred and George, Ron, and Ginny. When you add that Harry is all but adopted and Hermione spends practically every holiday with them and that both eventually marry into the family... However, by the time the story starts, Bill and Charlie are already adults living on their own, and eventually Percy, Fred, and George move out over the course of the books as well. (In fact, we only see the entire Weasley family in the house at the same time once, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).
    • It's implied in the first book that having large families may be something of a Weasley tradition; Draco Malfoy notes that his father told him that all Weasleys have red hair "and more children than they can afford." In the last book, Harry is introduced to an elderly relative of Mrs. Weasley's while in disguise as a Weasley cousin; said relative remarks that they "breed like gnomes".
    • Discussed and Played for Laughs: at one point, Trelawney predicts that Harry will have twelve children. By the end of the series, he has three (four if you count his godson).
  • The Heartstrikers: Dragons can lay very large clutches of eggs at a time; this is balanced both by the fact that most dragonesses only clutch once in their lives, and dragons tend to kill each other, so most older dragons only have one or two surviving siblings. However, Bethesda the Heartstriker is known as the Broodmare to her enemies due to her habit of laying very large clutches as well as clutching as often as possible — she's had eleven clutches over a thousand years (they're currently on J clutch), and even with attrition, infighting, and her killing underperforming children, there are still hundreds left. Over a quarter of all dragons in the world are Heartstriker, and Julius's clutch alone consists of about thirty or so dragons.
  • In one of the Heralds of Valdemar short stories, the main character is the youngest of twelve children in the royal family (his mother kept having twins and triplets). All of them were Chosen, which is why he gets to ride an Internship Circuit out in the field rather than being kept to the palace and capital city.
    • In the Collegium Chronicles, Herald Jakyr's parents belonged to a religion that believed in having as many children as possible for the Glory of God. He tells Mags that his parents had so many children that half the time they called them by the wrong names, and that according to the brother he still talks to, they never even noticed when he was Chosen and left. Jakyr ends the conversation by saying that "Just because you can have a quiverful of youngsters, it doesn't mean you should. Or any."
    • Dirk in the ''Arrows Trilogy" is said to have six siblings: three older sisters, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. Also, as among the Holderkin, girls (who outnumber the boys) have to get married unless they go to serve the Goddess, Talia has numerous half-siblings via her father's many wives (eleven in total, with nine living at the start of the series). She doesn't seem to have any full siblings, however, as her mother died giving birth to her.
    • Tuck (best friend of Lavan Firestorm) in Brightly Burning has five sisters and four brothers.
  • In The Heroes of Olympus and all other books in The Camp Half-Blood Series, the protagonists are mostly demigods. The Greek gods have many children with humans, so that almost every demigod has several half-siblings. Often there are so many that they can fill the cabins in Camp Half-Blood, though it's rare (or at least unusual) that someone has full-blooded siblings. All Greek gods (and titans by extension) are related to each other, so they also have many cousins. When you add the Roman camp into the mixture as well, things just get even messier from there. The most simple way of explaining it is that technically, almost Everyone Is Related in the series.
  • It's stated in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that hobbits are very fertile and have large families, in stark contrast to dwarves and elves. This is best shown with Samwise Gamgee and his five siblings (Hamson, Halfred, Daisy, May, and Marigold) as well as Bilbo Baggins' mother, Belladonna Took, who was the oldest daughter of twelve children. Sam would later go on to have thirteen children himself.
  • In The Hunger Games, Rue is "the oldest of six kids".
  • Jacky Ha Ha: The Hart family has seven daughters: Sydney, Sophia, Victoria, Hannah, Jacky, Riley, and Emma.
  • In the Kate Shugak mysteries, Father Smith is the proud proprietor of a forty-acre homestead in the Park, along with a wife and seventeen children, all of whom live at home.
  • There are seven royal children at the beginning of The Kingdom of Little Wounds, and Queen Isabel gets pregnant again after Sophia dies. The number of children falls over the course of the story.
  • The Little Mermaid is the littlest of six sisters.
  • The Lotterys Plus One: The Lottery family has seven children. Four of them are their own, and the youngest three are Happily Adopted.
  • The taratzes in the German SF series Maddrax are always born with several siblings at once.
  • Mary Poppins: The Banks family qualify for this trope when the youngest child Annabel is born in Mary Poppins Comes Back.
  • In Sid Fleischman's McBroom stories, Josh and Melissa McBroom have eleven kids (Will, Jill, Hester, Chester, Peter, Polly, Tim, Tom, Mary, Larry, and Little Clarinda), and it seems at least once a book Mr. McBroom has to do a head-count.
  • Raphael Santiago from The Mortal Instruments was the eldest of seven brothers from a poor family.
    • The Blackthorn family of the sequel series The Dark Artifices has seven children (Helen, Mark, Julian, Livia, Tiberius, Drusilla, and Octavian).
    • Also in The Dark Artifices Kieran is one of the fifty sons of the Unseelie King. Kieran has no known sisters and it's rumored that this is because the Unseelie King has his female offspring killed.
  • My Ántonia:
    • Lena Lingard has lots of siblings and as the eldest daughter, she has to take care of them. She's not too thrilled about it and says she doesn't want her own family as a result.
    • Ántonia Shimerda is a natural-born caretaker when it comes to children. She ends up having a family of eleven children, and her eldest daughter Martha has her first baby boy.
  • Nina Tanleven: Nina's friend Chris Gurley is the only girl in a family of seven children, which doesn't amuse her — she complains that it's "like living with a football team".
  • Parodied to death in the Nurse Matilda series. The exact number of kids the Brown family has is never specified, but the narration almost never names the same kid twice. Its loose adaptation, Nanny McPhee, bumps it down to a more reasonable seven.
  • In Ōkami-san, Himeno has 7 little brothers and sisters.
  • Louisa May Alcott’s story "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving" (in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag VI) is about a family with eight children, including a pair of twins.
  • Amy, the title character in The Ordinary Princess, is the seventh daughter of the King and Queen. At the end of the book, her fairy godmother promises that she herself will be the mother of at least six children.
  • In The Orphan Train Adventures, there are six Kelly children.
  • Phantastes: Anodos has more than two brothers (as indicated by the sentence "I saw two of my brothers at play.") and at least two sisters.
  • Keladry of Protector of the Small has seven older siblings (four brothers and three sisters) and has varying levels of closeness to him. Her sisters, unlike herself, are busy making prosperous marriages and occasionally come to Corus for the social season. Two of her brothers are also of note: Conal, who was a Big Brother Bully until he was threatened with disinheritance for holding her out of a tall tower when she was a toddler, and Anders, a Big Brother Mentor who gave Kel advice about how to get along in page training. Both are knights themselves, although Anders had to retire from active combat service due to injuries he incurred in the Immortals War.
  • The Redwall series has a couple of examples:
    • The Stump family (hedgehogs) from Mattimeo consist of parents Jabez and Rosyqueen, ten daughters and one son. The latter was named Jubilation (Jube for short) because his parents were so delighted not to have yet another daughter; this implies that he is the youngest, or one of the youngest, of the Stump siblings.
    • Tarquin and Rosie (hares), who appear in Mariel of Redwall and The Bellmaker, have twelve children.
  • Rick Brant: Tag Along Kid Chahda is the fourteenth child of his parents.
  • Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk from Safehold has seven or nine siblings; he's the middle one. When Irys, who has only two brothers, remarks that this is a huge number, he says that most of them are twins. Their mother always wanted to have only four children; it's just that their father didn't tell her that twins tend to run in family.
  • The Heap family in Septimus Heap has seven children plus one adopted daughter.
  • Fëanor and Nerdanel in The Silmarillion have seven sons — the largest recorded number of children for an elven family: Maedhros, Maglor, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, and the twins Amrod and Amras.
  • In the obscure YA novel Sister of the Quints, protagonist Natalie is the only child of her parents' marriage, but her father has a set of quintuplets by his second wife.
  • Obscure kids' book series The Sisters 8 is about a family of octuplet girls. In the final book, another sister is born.
  • In Sky Jumpers, the Grenwood family has loads of kids. So many, in fact, that each of the older siblings are assigned a specific younger sibling to look after. Hope's friend Aaren has been assigned to look after Brenna.
  • In Smaller & Smaller Circles, Saenz is the tallest of seven children, and Arcinas the youngest of nine. This is in sharp contrast to Jerome, Joanna, and even the Serial Killer Alex Carlos, all of whom are implied to be only children. note 
  • In the tween novel The Snowbird, the character July explains to protagonist Willanna how he got his name - he had so many older brothers and sisters that by the time he was on the way, his mother had run out of ideas for what to call her children, so his father said to just name the new baby after the month in which he was born. Since July is The Stoic, he takes it in stride.
    July: Could have been worse. I could have been born in April.
  • Bonnie Bess Worline's novel Sod House Adventure or The Children Who Stayed Alone is about the Dawson family, which has seven children. The Stephenses have ten children: four from a mother who died when her fourth child was a baby, and six, including a pair of twins, from a new mother (who has lost a baby). The Pfitzers have five boys and the Moores have eight children. Later the Dawsons expect another baby. The book has a sequel titled Sod Schoolhouse.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire:
    • Lord Frey's immediate descendants — the ones still living in his castle, at least — are described as such: "Twenty[-one] living sons, thirty-six grandsons, nineteen great-grandsons, and numerous daughters, granddaughters, bastards, and grandbastards." Note that, despite wanting to get rid of them by marrying them off when he can, he still plans on having more.
    • Craster, who is first introduced in A Clash of Kings, has nineteen daughters... who are also his wives. He sacrifices any male children they might have to the Others.
    • From House Targaryen:
      • Aenys I had six children. After his death, his widow, Alyssa Velaryon, married Rogar Baratheon and conceived a son and a daughter, making her a mother of eight children.
      • Jaehaerys I had thirteen children with his sister-wife, Alysanne, most of whom they outlived. When Jaehaerys died, the throne passed to his grandson Viserys I, because his only surviving son, Vaegon, refused it.
      • Viserys I had six children with two different wives. The eldest happened to be a daughter (Rhaenyra), and the birth of her only full sibling, who died in infancy, claimed their mother's life. Viserys designated Rhaenyra as heir but decided to wed again. The second marriage bore four children, three of whom are male. The dispute surrounding the succession launched the biggest civil war in Westeros until the War of the Five Kings.
      • Rhaenyra had five children with two different husbands, and would have had a sixth were it not stillborn. She also had two stepdaughters from her second marriage.
      • Elaena, daughter of Aegon III, had a total of seven children, including two bastards with Alyn Velaryon, a son with her first husband, and four children with her second husband.
      • King Aegon IV had two trueborn children, at least thirteen illegitimate children with his mistresses (including a son with his cousin Princess Daena Targaryen — the boy would end up causing some trouble later), and presumably dozens more he didn't know about with all of the other ladies, whores, and peasant women he's slept with.
      • Maester Aemon is the third of six children born to Maekar I.
      • The Mad King Aerys had eight children with his sister-wife, Rhaella. The problem was that three of them died in infancy, while two were stillborn (there were also four miscarriages), with Rhaegar, Viserys, and Daenerys being the only ones to survive to adulthood.
    • Lord Gorold Goodbrother has triplet sons and at least ten daughters.
    • Lord Cregan Stark happened to have ten children with three wives, but the current family descends from the youngest.
    • Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark has five children with his wife Catelyn Tully, ranging from the ages of 14 to three. Ned also has an illegitimate son named Jon.
    • As mentioned in Maggy the Frog's prophecy, Robert Baratheon had sixteen bastards, in addition to raising his wife Cersei Lannister's three children (who, unknown to him, aren't his).
    • Oberyn Martell had eight bastard daughters, including four with his current paramour, Ellaria Sand.
    • Tytos Blackwood has seven children, six sons (the youngest of whom is deceased) and one daughter. His traditional rival Jonos Bracken (there's been a feud going on between these two families for millennia) has five daughters and an illegitimate son (possibly).
    • Garth Greenhand, the mythical High King of the First Men, is said to have fathered so many children that half of the noble houses in the Reach can trace their lineage back to him.
    • Margaery Tyrell's mother Alerie is the third of ten children born to Lord Leyton Hightower. The eighth child is Lynesse Hightower, Jorah Mormont's estranged wife.
  • Lotte, Love Interest of The Sorrows of Young Werther, has eight younger siblings.
  • In the third book of the Spaceforce (2012) series, we learn that though he turned his back on his family many years before, Jay has eleven sisters (and, presumably, no brothers).
  • The royal family of Stormhold in Stardust features eight children, all of whom were at one point contending for the crown. Their names note in Latin their respective position in the birth order.
  • Stepping on the Cracks: Gordy and Stuart have five siblings (Donald, Junie, two little boys named Ernest and Victor, and an unnamed baby).
  • In The Suitcase Kid, Andy goes from being an only child to having five stepsiblings (three from her mother, two from her father) and a paternal half-sister on the way, making for six new siblings in all. She finds it difficult to adjust, especially because there's not much room for her (both in terms of space and attention).
  • Roofshadow from Tailchaser's Song describes her father, Slipwhisker, as being a respected elder in her clan who sired many kittens. He's implied to not have been very close to his kits, but he did respect Roofshadow.
  • In the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms book Fortune's Fool, Prince Sasha is the youngest of seven sons. His betrothed Katya is the youngest of fourteen children to the Sea King. In One Good Knight, the Champion Gina reveals that she has thirteen siblings.
  • Ann M. Martin's Ten Kids, No Pets and its sequel Eleven Kids, One Summer focus on a large family with each chapter of each book being told from a different kid's POV.
  • In Fannie Wilder Brown's short story "The Thanksgiving Goose" (in the e-book Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know), the Burns family has eight children, including a pair of twins.
  • Eff of Thirteenth Child is, as the title implies, the thirteenth of fourteen children in her family. Her father also had six brothers and an indeterminate number of sisters, making the previous generation also qualify.
  • The Cleary family in The Thorn Birds, which was later adapted into the better-known Made-for-TV Movie, has nine kids, two of whom are twins. Of them all, only Meggie — the lone daughter — ever marries or has children of her own, and she has just two.
  • In Wen Spencer's Tinker, Windwolf was one of ten children. This is very odd among elves.
  • Jardir in The Warded Man has seventy children by his fourteen wives - and one child by a woman who refused to marry him. At one point he is challenged to list their names and birthdays, and is utterly unable to.
  • Warrior Cats:
    • Ferncloud and Dustpelt have 7 children.
    • Every kit in Daisy's first litter has at least 5 siblings, counting half-siblings.
    • Based on him referring to his "brothers and sister" and knowing about his other half-siblings, Firestar must have at least 6 siblings, more if you count the other time he said "brothers and sisters".
    • Bramblestar has 4 named siblings, but if you count the rest of Goldenflower's litter that disappeared after the first book, the number shoots up higher.
  • Wings of Fire: Queen Oasis has 6 children. Clay has 6 siblings (and this is completely normal for a MudWing). Queen Scarlet has 17 children. Queen Coral has 35 children that survived past hatching.
  • A Wrinkle in Time: Calvin is one of eleven children, and Meg goes on to have seven children in later books of the series.

Top