Having climbed many a tree with the boys as a kid, I cannot stay away from a good gender-bender romance. The suspense, the humour of it, and the inevitable conclusion that not your appearance but your choices define who you are – a perfect combination in my opinion. Mix in a male counterpart who is supportive and understanding and I am hooked! So much so, that I have written a book about a girl who dressed up as a boy.
A somewhat different kind of setting awaits readers in The Academy. It depicts a dystopia in space that resembles Victorian times quite strikingly. Pretty awesome combination, huh? The heroine infiltrates an all-boys school to become a spaceship pilot and navigate the stars. Only to discover even the galaxy is not big enough to run from love.
The Academy Where things are not always as they seem…
My name is Kris Jameson and I’m a student at the Royal Academy. I’m at the top of all my classes, what they call a “model student.” There’s only one problem—the Academy is an all boys school and I’m a girl.
It started as a prank when I took my brother’s place. But things got complicated when I caught Broward, the school bully, in a compromising position. They got even worse when I was assigned my roommate—the handsome but enigmatic North who saved me several times from the bully’s attacks.…
“Horse Crazy” isn’t a description; it’s a way of life for me. I’ve loved horses since I could remember, selling Girl Scout cookies to finance my way through three years of horse camp, working weekends cleaning stalls, even pursing a degree in Equine Science. Discovering fantasy books with magical, sentient horses not only introduced me to fantasy fiction, but also just made my own experience with horses seem real. Currently, I write equestrian fantasy as well as equestrian literature (horse books for those who chose not to grow out of being horse crazy” and live on my homestead with my herd of rescue horses, who inspire me every day.
If Magic’s Pawn introduced me to Valdemar, then By the Sword, based on the ballad Kerowyn’s Ride, stole my heart forever. This is a standalone book in the world of Valdemar, and Kero spoke so much to me as a tomboy that it instantly became my favorite Mercedes Lackey book. If you don’t want to start out with a trilogy, and yet want a taste of Ms. Lackey’s writings, then By the Sword is a great place to start.
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. When an attack on her home leaves her father slain, her brother wounded, and her brother's fiancee kidnapped, Kerowyn prepares to face the enemy who has shattered her family's dreams.
Is the hot new guy next door
really a serial killer? Will I be his next victim? In a season of extremely
dark (and highly sexualized) romances exploring this topic, I was in desperate
need of a lighter read but still intrigued by the premise.
Lo and behold this
quirky coming-of-age romance for the young adult crowd. Its relatable suburban
setting mixed with the perfect blend of campiness and an underlying layer of
mystery makes Serial Hottie feel like John
Hughes meets The Burbs.
There's something so delightfully 80s about it if that makes sense. I spent the entire night reading this with a smile glued
to my face until the very last page. If you're looking for the teenage Haunting
Adeline, this isn't it.
If you're looking for an intense murder mystery,
this isn't it. If you want a lighthearted contemporary romance that just so
happens to…
Hockey-obsessed tomboy Eleanor Westley has never been the object of a guy's affection before. So when the hottest boy she's ever seen moves in across the street and starts treating her like she's the center of his universe, naturally she's going to be a little skeptical. But everything starts to make sense when girls who look just like Ellie start dying all around the city. Obviously the new guy is the killer, and of course he only likes her because he wants to slice her into tiny pieces. Right? The more Ellie gets to know Seth the more she's convinced…
I was raised in a home where one parent was an acute alcoholic and the other parent was the child of an acute alcoholic, codependency and boundary issues flourished, and there was a touch of end-times religion to top it all off. This made me a kid who was highly tuned in to everything going on around me as a way to maintain a sense of control. Though that probably wasn’t the best thing for my emotional development, it’s turned me into a writer who strives to delve into the authentic human experience and a reader who wants that, too. The books on this list meet that bar!
This 1977 novel is one of the books that made me want to be a writer, and I’ve read it more times than I can count.
I love the fact that it’s about a tomboy who lets a new friend believe that she is a boy. The historical background of the polio epidemic is interesting (and newly relevant). And I especially like that it breaks one of the “rules” about books for kids, which is that they shouldn’t include too much about the adults. But why not? Adults had a huge impact on me as a kid, for better or worse, and they’ve always interested me as characters.
The vulnerability of thirty-three-year-old Dwayne Pickens, whose mind has never grown beyond that of a boy, leads to a disaster that unites Casey, her family, and their Southern community in an effort to keep Dwayne from being sent to the "home" he dreads.The vulnerability of thirty-three-year-old Dwayne Pickens, whose mind has never grown beyond that of a boy, leads to a disaster that unites Casey, her family, and their Southern community in an effort to keep Dwayne from being sent to the "home" he dreads
Born into a family with friction between parents, I never thought relationships could get much worse. When my parents divorced, father became estranged, then died by apparent suicide, memoirs by diverse voices opened my world and made me feel less alone. When I went through a sexual and gender identity crisis of my own, they helped me navigate the turmoil in my own life. I spent more than twenty-five years writing professionally for corporate and academic employers before writing biography and memoir became a coping skill.
Although we’ve never met in this sprawling metropolis, I feel a kinship with Ivan through their writing and history. We’re both from rural upbringings and have inhabited the gender spectrum in non-binary tomboyhood, and shared what could be called “same-sex attraction,” if we believed that it was as simple as some believe it to be. Ivan’s memoir gave me a mirror to see the struggle with gender from the assigned female-at-birth (AFAB) side as I was working towards the middle from the AMAB side. I hope to write one day with as much honesty and potent imagery.
Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada’s Yukon, and how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don’t fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.
Ivan writes movingly about many firsts: the first time…
As a young girl, I thought I was a tomboy—or I wanted to be one, because the image of a “normal” girl was far too pink and frothy and shallow for my tastes. For me, being a tomboy was less about being boy-like than being unable to claim the markers of femininity. As a historian of women and girls, I wondered how young women saw their futures in this modernizing America, with its True Women and New Women and the opening of advanced education. Did tomboys grow into the rebels who changed the world? Or, like the tomboys in so many fictional stories, did they renounce their assertive sense of self upon marriage and motherhood?
Comedian Jessi Klein explores the nexus of American femininity and female masculinity in this hilarious memoir. I particularly love her pithy statements on how commercial culture sells a somewhat toxic form of femininity that can make even the most female-identified person reconsider their gender. She cuts to the heart of the tensions of growing up in a culture that places gender on a spectrum but continues to market it as an extreme binary.
Jessi Klein is not a girl's girl, or a woman's woman. Raised in Greenwich Village by parents who didn't notice if she wore the same pair of pants for months on end, she later learned that there were some essential lessons in femininity she'd been missing: how to get your butt to look like two round tennis balls (barre class); how to wait patiently for an engagement (get drunk by yourself at Logan Airport); and how to get over an ex in the age of Google (use the World Wide Web to discover everything about his new girlfriend). In this…
As a young girl, I thought I was a tomboy—or I wanted to be one, because the image of a “normal” girl was far too pink and frothy and shallow for my tastes. For me, being a tomboy was less about being boy-like than being unable to claim the markers of femininity. As a historian of women and girls, I wondered how young women saw their futures in this modernizing America, with its True Women and New Women and the opening of advanced education. Did tomboys grow into the rebels who changed the world? Or, like the tomboys in so many fictional stories, did they renounce their assertive sense of self upon marriage and motherhood?
Gilder’s memoir of growing up in the 1860s as a boyish girl will seem remarkably contemporary to those who equate nineteenth-century girls and women with corsets and overly important etiquette. Gilder writes about baseball, pranks, and various attempts to look like a boy, confirming an instinctual tomboy identity even at a time when females could not legally wear pants.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
Born in Texas, raised in Colorado, I’ve always had one foot in the working cowboy world and the other in the Rocky Mountains. I’m a member of the Western Writers of America, and I’ve summited all 54 fourteen-thousand foot peaks in Colorado. For a number of years, I worked with horses at a therapeutic riding center, as a barn manager. After that, I worked as an equine veterinary assistant, driving around with the vet in a pickup truck to doctor horses. Following that, I pursued the arts. Over the years, I’ve recorded and performed western/folk music (find me on Bandcamp), acted in western films (check my YouTube channel), and written western novels (Sunbury Press/Milford House).
I’ve been to the Tomboy Mine. All that’s left of the camp are old foundations in a rocky basin above timberline, surrounded by high peaks, 3,000 feet above Telluride. The only gold left behind is in the rich hues of a Colorado sunset. While the Tomboy may be gone, it’s the same view Harriet Fish Backus saw every day. Life at a remote mountain mine was full of “mishaps and makeshifts,” and she kept a diary of daily events. Nothing she writes is a dull description, nor is it the soaring purple prose of Victorian-era romanticism. Her account of mining life in 1906, from a woman’s perspective, detailing daily routines, friendships, and fears, is invaluable as a western author, to create believable female characters in the Old West.
A Colorado favorite, Tomboy Bride presents the first-hand account of a young pioneer woman and her life in a rough and tumble mining town of the Old West.
In 1906 at the age of twenty, Harriet Fish hopped on a train from Oakland, California, to the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in search of a new life as the bride of assayer George Backus. Together, the couple ventured forth to discover mining town life at the turn of the twentieth century, adjusting to dizzying elevation heights of 11,500 feet and all the hardships that come with it: limited water, rationed…
When I was a teen, I had zero aspirations to become a writer. I didn’t discover my passion for writing until I was thirty! But once I started writing, it was these books and the way they made me feel that I drew on. I wanted strong heroines that I wanted to be—and be friends with. I wanted a slow burn, skin-tingling romance with a lot of push and pull. I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. To go on a quest. To feel victorious. And it is my hope that I can give my readers all the feels these books gave me.
I devoured everything in the Sweet Valley world as a teen, though I was more into Sweet Valley Twins than Sweet Valley High for some reason. Maybe it’s because I liked the twins’ innocence, and the high school drama was too much (or too relatable!) to me. I like to escape to a happy ending! And in complete seriousness, I debated naming my daughter Lila because I didn’t want her to be associated with mean girl Lila Flower. In the end, I named her Delilah (Lilah—with an h!—for short) and that eased my worries.
At any rate, I’ll read a family saga any day. And we’ve established that I love historical romance and costumes, so give me all the Wakefield history.
I learnt to read at about the age of three or four and have been devouring books ever since. However, it took a few decades for me to begin creating my own stories. I have a passion for writing and whenever I can, I try to help new writers improve their expertise. I’m a strong believer in writing groups, for that reason. My first book, born from a few-hundred-word short story at my writing group, turned into a three-book thriller series. Since then I’ve branched out by publishing a rom/com, a humorous ghost story as well as a standalone thriller.
By the time I learnt to read, Enid Blyton had already written six or seven children’s books. One of my early reads was likely to have been this one, the original adventure. Eventually, I read them all.
I learnt the characters so well; their looks and personalities, they were embedded in my mind until the next book – and the remaining nineteen! So clear were their identities, my friends and I were able to re-enact the Five’s escapades taking the roles of the siblings and cousin.
Although some of her writing comes in for criticism these days (from adults), it’s for things that went unnoticed by the average child swept along by the book’s adventures.
In my writing I work hard to create memorable characters and I’m always delighted when they are mentioned by readers.
Meet Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timothy. Together they are THE FAMOUS FIVE - Enid Blyton's most popular adventure series. All 21 titles also available as audiobooks!
'There was something else out on the sea by the rocks - something dark that seemed to lurch out of the waves . . . What could it be?'
Julian, Dick and Anne are spending the holidays with their tomboy cousin George and her dog, Timothy. One day, George takes them to explore nearby Kirrin Island, with its rocky little coast and old ruined castle on the top.
