I wrote my book and selected the five other books listed because I am passionate about women’s agency and how women may be empowered to achieve such. I started my career in a male-dominated profession and have many memories of differential treatment from my male peers. There are a few #metoo tales in there as well. I also grew up shy and studious, too timid to seek out empowerment or speak truth to power. If I could go back in time armed with these wonderful stories of girls and young women overcoming adversity, prejudice, assault, and other gender-based barriers, I think I would take that trip.
Disappointment has been on speed dial in Ellen Grayson’s life lately. Her dad died, her mom numbs the grief with drugs and alcohol, her secret crush is dating her frenemy, and old friends she used to rely on have been ghosting her. Trusting a popular teacher with her troubles should have been safe and should not have led to a #metoo incident.
With her ability to trust gravely wounded, Ellen must find the courage to speak up and risk sordid whispers and retribution, to tell her secret crush how she really feels and risk rejection, or hold all her secrets inside. After all, it’s the safest place she knows.
Even before #MeToo this book resonated with me. A girl seemingly stripped of her power by sexual assault has to fight to find the courage to speak truth to power, to be believed, and to regain her voice. I purchased and read this book after certain conservative groups labeled it pornography, an accusation both shockingly wrong but tragically telling. If there is a book equivalent to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Ms. Anderson’s is it. Her storytelling methods are as powerful as they are memorable.
Puck is the first female to enter her island’s annual “horse” race, a deadly event featuring ferocious and man-eating sea horses. If you can ride the beasts that come ashore to the island every November without being eaten or carried off to be drowned at sea (and then eaten) the monetary prize can make a huge difference in an economically poor area. 75% of Puck’s fight in this book is overcoming objections to entering the race with the last 25% being the race itself.
Ms. Stiefvater’s writing is incredibly beautiful and as an added bonus I discovered we share our birthdate, in November, of course.
A spellbinding novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater.
Some race to win. Others race to survive.It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die. At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them. Puck Connolly is different. She never meant to ride in the Scorpio…
My grandmother was notorious for labeling girls as “the pretty one,” “the musical one,” or “the smart one,” etc. It felt like she was saying if you weren’t first in line for beauty at least there were consolation prizes to be had. In The Duff, when the protagonist discovers she’s been dubbed such by a popular boy in school, she’s not going to take it. But her power recovery methods don’t involve remaking herself from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Instead, she slowly brings her antagonist around to a different opinion of her. She also exacts her revenge in a way that’s both satisfying and heartbreaking.
Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is smart, cynical, loyal - and well aware that she's not the hot one in her group of friends. But when high-school jock and all round moron Wesley Rush tells her she's a DUFF - a Designated, Ugly Fat Friend - Bianca does not the see funny side. She may not be a beauty but she'd never stoop so low as to go anywhere near the likes of Wesley ... Or would she? Bianca is about to find out that attraction defies looks and that sometimes your sworn enemies can become your best friends ...
Semi-spoiler alert: this book has the best ending line ever so don’t flip to the end or you’ll rob yourself of something very precious. I adore a nice ending twist and although not so much an O’Henry plot twist (love his stories) as an “aha” shift in perspective, it has stuck with me more than any other element of the story.
The book’s blurb very aptly describes The Sea of Tranquility as “... a rich, intense, and brilliantly imagined story about a lonely boy, an emotionally fragile girl, and the miracle of second chances.” I’m a sucker for second chance stories, especially following an injustice. The beauty of this story lies not in the how the protagonist, Nastya, recovers her power by confronting and righting the injustice but in how she subtly and simultaneously learns to look forward instead of backward.
I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.
Former piano prodigy Nastya Kashnikov wants two things: to get through high school without anyone learning about her past and to make the boy who took everything from her-her identity, her spirit, her will…
Sometimes the only way a girl can get her way, assert her power, and find her voice or freedom is to be a boy. There are a lot of terrific girl disguised as a boy stories out there (Mulan and Twelfth Night, for example) but none are so smartly done as Scott Westerfeld’s steampunk trilogy kicked off by Leviathan. This steampunk World War 1 tale re-imagines a war fought by ‘Clankers,’ those who fashion steam-driven machines (Austria/Hungary/Germany) against ‘Darwinists’ (Britain) who deploy genetic fabrications. The heroine, a Darwinist, disguises herself as a boy seeking adventure in the military. She ends up making an excellent soldier. Her story is told in alternating chapters with an equally sympathetic male Clanker’s story. Of course, the two stories eventually converge but it does not immediately devolve into a romance, not until after many heroic adventures with our heroine’s secret very well kept.
Two opposing forces are on the brink of war. The Clankers - who put their faith in machinery - and the Darwinists - who have begun evolving living creatures into tools. Prince Aleksandar, the would-be heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, comes from a family of Clankers, and travels the country in a walker, a heavily-fortified tank on legs. Meanwhile Deryn Sharp, a girl disguised as a boy, works for the British Empire, crewing the ultimate flying machine: an airship made of living animals. Now, as Alek flees from his own people, and Deryn crash-lands in enemy territory, their lives are…
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse the future, she can never change it.
Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her never told her that the touch of a hand can change everything? When she follows Louis to Glasgow, she begins to learn the limits of his devotion and the complexities of her own affections.
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late-nineteenth-century Scotland
Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but…
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