The best historical fiction books featuring badass women (that do not take place during WWII)

Valentine handles some very heavy topics beautifully.

Many of the characters are connected by only one thread: they are women trying to survive in West Texas in the early 1970s. It centers around a brutal incident and the quest to find justice for a Mexican teenage girl who was violently assaulted.

Throughout the story we get such an intimate look at these women’s lives. I felt like I knew them. I felt like I was sitting right next to them in their kitchen or on their front porch.

These women were all hardened by the trials life had thrown at them, and were battling the urge to protect themselves with the urge to protect one another. I loved this book because it was just so honest. 

Have you ever read a book and thought, I want to be that woman?

I want her courage, her strength, her grit. I promise you that you will feel that way about Margery. A gun-toting Kentucky native, Margery is part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s traveling library “the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky.”

The Giver of Stars follows Margery and Alice—the book’s main character and immigrant from England—along with the other librarians as they not only change the locals’ lives with their book deliveries, but also take on the mining company’s attempt at using dirty methods to acquire more land.

There’s also a terrifying flood, a few love stories, and a murder trial. This book made me want to get my butt up and make a difference in the world!

Night Wherever We Go follows a group of enslaved women in mid-nineteenth-century Texas.

The failed and desperate farmer who owns these women has brought them to Texas to breed them. I recommend this book because it explores an aspect of chattel slavery that is often glossed over.

Slavery is discussed as an institution that thoroughly dehumanized everyone involved. But what exactly that means, to dehumanize, to be dehumanized is not always explored in such depth.

These women band together in a form of quiet, collective resistance. They come from a variety of backgrounds and have different religious beliefs. They don’t always get along, but they band together anyway, because if one falls, they all do.

The ending isn’t happy, but it’s real. It stayed with me for days after I finished it. 

Book of the Little Axe follows one woman at two ends of her life, spanning from the late 1700s to the early 1800s.

One thread follows who she will become—“Ma,” wife to an Apsáalooke man and mother to three children—and the woman she was before, “Rosa,” a daughter and sister in Trinidad. A third thread follows a man named Creadon’s diary.

This book explores so many important and complex topics like what it means to be family, what it means to belong, and what it means to accept yourself. I loved how deep Francis-Sharma dives into the feelings of shame and pride and fear that the characters feel.

I felt those same things and it made me physically ache for them.

Amy Tan is a master at telling stories that explore the complex dynamics of family relationships.

I’ve read a lot of her books, but The Hundred Secret Senses is my favorite because I adore Kwan, the main character’s half-sister from China. Kwan has a special secret that she can see and speak to ghosts, but Olivia always dismisses her as a little crazy and only pretends to believe her stories.

I love this book because it made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions and because it was so relatable.

We all have family members that we both love and can’t stand at the same time. This book goes back and forth between the 1990s and the 1800s.

If you love books about sisters, you need to read this one!