This raises the question: What are some strong girl and/or strong boy books you’d recommend to people buying books for youngsters? My go-to strong-girl book is “Little Women,” but that’s just me.
You? Any ideas?
(And thanks, Jerome, for the idea.)
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L. Frank Baum, Anne of Green Gables, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels,dreamsnake by vonda mcintyre, some of john varley, herland.., the womanwarrior, isabel allende i am not sure whatage group weare talking abt here
I’m not sure, either, but these are great suggestions.
How young?
Anne of Greene Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery springs to mind. (A great miniseries with Megan Follows/Colleen Dewhurst.)
Montgomery’s books were common within my extended family back in the day.
Us boys could usually be found with Mark Twain when our noses could be pried from the comics.
Max Brand, A.B. Guthrie and other western writers weren’t uncommon. Most of my reading as a youngster was in magazines. We had what seems like dozens arriving every month. All sorts of magazines. I remember finding Hemingway and Poe through magazines.
Same here. We must have had 5-6 magazines coming in every week and I devoured them.
Philip Pull man’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time quintet. Almost anything by Octavia Butler or Joanna Russ. Come to think of it, just steer them into the science fiction aisle. But nothing before about 1970.
Yes!
Wired had a list of “Princess-free stories” this past issue; http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/05/ff_noprincess/
One more suggestion, and actually she should have been at the top of my list. A nothing by Tamora Pierce. Absolutely anything. Strong females are her speciality. For pre-teens and early teens. For that age or a little younger, anything on the Caldecott Award winners or nominees lists.
http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/caldecottmedal/caldecottwinners/caldecottmedal
Octavia Butler and Joanna Russ will be there for them when they are older teens.
“A nothing” should have been “anything.” Stupid auto complete. Stupid touch keyboard.
Yes. I’ll add some of Laurie Halse Anderson’s books. (for young readers and young adult)
Historical Fiction with strong females:
Chains
Fever 1793
Contempory fiction involving difficult topics for teenage girls – how they overcome:
Speak
Wintergirls
Catalyst
For the younger reader:
Independent Dames – Susan might like to check this out http://madwomanintheforest.com/youngreaders-independent-dames/
To find out more, check Amazon or Google it.
Oh, fabulous! I’m still buying picture books for the twinlets, but the triplets and their older siblings need good reads, too.
Beverlycleary too. If Ramona Quinby isnt strong…and Louise Fitzhugh Harriet the Spyand the Long Secret.
Ramona the Pest! One of my favorite books!
For the younger set… “The Paper Bag Princess” by Robert N. Munsch
These are for girls a bit older than “Ramona” age, but, of recent books, I recommend “The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate” and “Big Girl Small.”
Oooh, seconding Tamora Pierce. Anything by Tamora Pierce. Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves series is good. A bit mature (I read it at eight or nine, though – results may vary, some of the mature stuff may go over kids’ heads), but a really good coming-of-age type of story. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is quite good…* Harry Potter, of course, focuses on the titular character, but Hermione and Ginny (and in some ways, McGonagall and Molly Weasley and even Lily) are all quite strong in their own right. (I assume you know all this! But, you know, sometimes it’s the most obvious stuff we forget quickest.) I don’t have any personal experience here, but I have heard very, very good things from very reliable sources about the Young Wizards series, by… Diane Duane, I think? And the same goes for Diana Wynne Jones. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was an excellent book, the plot driven by a young girl (and her brother).
Putting this question to a friendly literature-obsessed (but unfortunately, mostly sleeping) chatroom yielded a recommendation of the Animorphs series (personally, I’m lukewarm, but they’re by no means bad books), and the series Skulduggery Pleasant, which I have no experience with**.
A bit older of a target, Lois Bujold writes males and females– but her female characters (Shards of Honor and Barrayar, for example) are as strong and amazing as her males. Another good one for older girls is B-Mother, and anything at all by Ursula LeGuin (not all of her stuff features a central woman protagonist, but it’s all quite strongly feminist – with the caveat that she wrote it back in the mid-twentieth century, so for example you’ve got a character from a progressive anarchist planet musing that he’s never had to “pretend” that a woman was his intellectual equal, to the shock and horror of the “modern” society he’s addressing. Obvious to a modern reader, but very progressive for her time.).
If you don’t mind leaving the written page, the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender is quite good (give the Shyamalan movie a wide berth, though) for pretty much any age (I’m twenty-one and love it, but there’s nothing over PG-13, and most of it is PG or so).
Okay – to be fair, a great deal of this is fantasy or sci-fi! I will not pretend otherwise, I am a geek and these books were my bread and butter as a kid. But I will cut the list short here, before I am tempted to run up into the attic and find a list that will eat all of your bandwidth – OH! Beyond the Western Sea, by Avi – about an Irish brother and sister who set out to travel to America alone to escape famine. Excellent books – a series of two.
*Oh my God. I just opened my jelly-cabinet-turned-bookshelf to see if anything sprang out, and saw the abandoned copy of Atlas Shrugged I’d been planning to do a review series of. Oh God oh God, never let anyone you care about read Atlas Shrugged.
**The accompanying description was: “The POV character is a twelve-year-old Irish girl (who does grow up over the series) who kicks ass and takes names.
And she’s all out of names.”
Ah, the chatroom has awoken. The list thus far:
(Authors) Jane Yolen, Vivian Velde, John Green, and, with a caveat, Terry Pratchett. Not all of his feature female characters centrally – the Watch books are my favorite, but they center on Sam Vimes; the Death books are good, and they feature almost equally Death and his granddaughter, Susan; the Witch books are good, and the Tiffany Aching (a younger witch) books as well – and the book he wrote with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (you’d like it – very satirical, about the apocalypse) has Anathema Device, who’s quite excellent. (And Agnes Nutter, who is… well, Agnes Nutter.)
(The Hunger Games were mentioned, but personally I wasn’t sold on Katniss being an Awesome Role Model.) If you’re looking at older girls – mid-teenagers and onwards, the Sandman comic/graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman is really, really, really good.
Jim Butcher’s POV characters are male in both his series, but he does write strong female characters as well. (I’d recommend Codex Alera before The Dresden Files though, especially for less experienced readers – simply because Harry Dresden has a lot of ‘chivalry’ baggage mostly, if you consider carefully, stemming from a youthful trauma, but either way, all the awesome strong women are filtered through his chivalrous-and-somewhat-objectifying gaze. If you pay attention, it shows through the writing that he’s a deeply flawed guy and this is not upheld as Correct Behavior, but sometimes it’s still a pain in the arse. His character for Alera, Tavi, is a teenager when the series starts, being raised by his amazing aunt and uncle – he never develops the Issues that Harry Dresden has.)
Neal Stephenson can be tough to get into, and very, very heady, but he has excellent strong female characters – Diamond Age is mostly centered on a young girl’s transformation in a very twisted world, and both Snow Crash and Anathem feature the male protagonist, at some point, getting his head smacked straight by a female friend/ally/person. Oh, and Snow Crash also works from the POV of Y.T., a very complicated and awesome girl.
Anne of Green Gables is a good one for younger girls. (And older girls, I don’t know).
(I warned you. I can go on like this for days.)
I remember, vaguely, a book about a girl dealing with a fairy changeling called Poison that I never finished, and there was The Goblin Wood. Dancing in Red Shoes can Kill You is a great book, deals with a lot of stuff involving the female body, and pressures to change or not change or ‘fix’ it.
Jim Hines, though I have personally never read his books (YET), just grabbed my attention earlier this evening with This and this post, discussing the Serious Issues with female poses on book covers (and, y’ know, EVERYWHERE), and oh my good golly gosh so awesome. (And while discovering his blog, I found a series about some character called Mercy Thompson that looks really good! But I can’t recommend it yet. Yet!)
…I’ll stop now.