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Back in December, fellow GeekDad Jonathan Knudsen asked the question "Where are the stories for girls?" We got several responses from readers, but it really got me thinking about the subject. I also have two daughters, and I love finding books with great female characters to read to my kids. Over the years I've built up a pretty good list consisting of new books and classics, novels and comics, and I continue to discover more all the time. (In fact, since I missed a lot of the classics—I didn't really read many "girl" books growing up — my wife has been introducing me to some of her favorites as well.)
Since December when I started thinking about a response, my list has gotten longer and longer. So I thought I'd better spread them out a little so I don't overwhelm you (and also because the more I read, the more daunting it seems to write about all of them at once.) I'll try to offer a mix of genres, age ranges and subject matter each time, to show that it's possible to find girl leads in books no matter what your kids' tastes. And one other note: although these are books that feature girls, many of them would still be great stories for boys as well. Who says only girls should have strong female characters? So while these are all stories about girls, they're for both boys and girls.
By the way, if you're raising a "self-rescuing princess" (or are one yourself), the T-shirt pictured above is available from ThinkGeek, in both kid and adult sizes.
Here are my first ten recommendations with brief descriptions, and where possible I've linked to more in-depth reviews.
The Princess Knight
You'll probably see Cornelia Funke again on my next list as well—she has several books with good girl leads, for several age groups. The Princess Knight is a picture book about a little princess with three older brothers, and the widower King teaches her the same things as the princes: jousting and fighting and so on. Jennifer's full review can be read on GeekMom.
Target age: 4-8
Katy and the Big Snow
This is a classic from the author/artist of the perhaps better-known Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
Target age: 4-8
The Secret Garden
Originally published in 1911, The Secret Garden is a classic in children's literature that has generally been categorized as a "girl book." I'd never read it myself until just this past month when I read it to my seven-year-old, and was surprised to discover that aside from the main character Mary Lennox there were two boys who play a fairly large role as well. There are some things that are dated, but overall the book holds up really well and has a great message about positive thinking. As a bonus, it teaches a parent-approved anti-spoiling message. Here's my review. Bonus: Got a Kindle? There's a free eBook version
Target age: middle grades
Millicent Min: Girl Genius
Lisa Yee's first novel was about a Chinese girl genius who's about to start her senior year of high school at the ripe old age of eleven. It's particularly interesting to read now in light of "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua because Millicent's parents are definitely not tiger material. Millie is one of these kids who is extremely book smart but has no clue when it comes to making friends and interacting with people, and Yee does a great job giving her a voice. Yee later went on to write many more books about geeky kids and invent new ways to torture Marshmallow Peeps. Here's the full review.
Target age: middle grades
The Search for WondLa
Eva Nine is a precocious young girl who's grown up underground, raised by a robotic mother-figure. But when she's forced to go aboveground for the first time, she quickly discovers that the world is not at all what she expected. The Search for WondLa is a superb sci-fi tale that somehow retains the feel of a classic fairy tale. Full review here.
Target age: middle grades
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles
Dragons, brave princesses, magic and cherries jubilee—this series sounds like a winner to me! I haven't read these myself, but during Princess Week GeekMom Kris Bordessa notes that she read this to her sons to introduce them to strong female characters that aren't just helplessly waiting for a prince to rescue them. Be sure to read Kris' detailed review here.
Target age: middle grades
Gunnerkrigg Court
I got a glimpse of Gunnerkrigg Court at Comic-Con last fall but didn't get around to reading it until just this week. It's not a brand-new comic book (the first volume was published by Archaia in 2008) but I hadn't seen much about it before. Antimony Carver has just started school at Gunnerkrigg Court, which appears to be much more than just a school. Almost immediately strange things begin to happen, like the second shadow that starts following her around. Antimony becomes good friends with fellow classmate Kat Donlan and together they explore the bizarre world of Gunnerkrigg, which is inhabited with robot birds, body-stealing demons and dragon-slaying teachers. There's a lot of humor that's just a little off-kilter, and you never know what to expect next. Antimony, unfazed, takes it all in stride. You can actually read the whole story online as well, so I won't do a more detailed review here — just go check it out! Volume One: Orientation
Target age: middle grades
The Touchstone Trilogy
I've mentioned this trilogy before as one that really hasn't gotten the attention it deserves—and may not because of the way it's been marketed in the U.S. It's a story about the tribes of little people who inspired the legends of fairies and leprechauns, and there are several amazing female characters in it, both human and non-human. More detailed review here.
Target age: middle grades to teens
Smile
Did you have to get braces as a kid? I did — and I had a lot of teeth pulled to make room for them. But that hardly even compares to what happened to Raina Telgemeier when she was in sixth grade. Smile is Telgemeier's comic-book account of her middle school and high school years, a coming-of-age story told through the trials and tribulations of extreme orthodontics. Here's a full review.
Target age: teen
Plain Kate
All of the books listed here are ones I'd recommend—but this one may be one of my personal favorites. Plain Kate is the orphaned daughter of a woodcarver and a pretty good carver herself. But with the hard times come whispering suspicions of witchcraft, and Kate makes a plan to leave her town and strike out on her own. She meets a real witch, falls in with the Roamers for a while and discovers her own gifts. It's beautifully written and the story is haunting. Please read the full review here.
Target age: teen
I hope that's enough to get you started! Coming up next: more picture books, classics, scifi and comics.
The Secret Garden
This is a book that my wife read when she was young (along with Burnett's equally famous A Little Princess
Her Uncle Craven, while rich, also has nothing to do with Mary and for the first time in her life she is mostly left to her own devices. She explores the manor and the grounds, and eventually discovers the secret garden. It was once the favorite garden of Craven's wife until she died a decade earlier; since then it has been locked up, the key buried, and nobody has set foot in it. When Mary discovers the key and finds the ivy-hidden door, she feels as if she's entered an entirely new world.
In the meantime, there are two boys who also play a significant role in the story. Dickon is the brother of one of the manor servants, and he has a way with animals and plants. Mary enlists his help in bringing the garden back to life. The other is Colin, the sickly (and equally spoiled) son of Craven, who is treated as an invalid and sees himself as one. It takes the spoiled Mary to finally shock him out of his tantrums, and they begin an unlikely friendship.
Ultimately the story is about two kids learning the power of optimism, physical activity and the magic of gardens. Near the beginning of the story were some bits about India and the natives that made me cringe a little, but other than that I felt like the book holds up pretty well — sure, it's set a long time ago in a very unfamiliar setting, but my daughter really enjoyed listening to it and my feeble attempts at a Yorkshire accent. And something that I appreciated as a parent was having a literary example of what a spoiled child is like—it has come up more than once in discussions with our daughter later on when she's acting particularly self-centered. But you don't need to tell your kids that.
Millicent Min: Girl Genius
Millicent Min is a kid following the Doogie Howser archetype: even before the story itself begins, you get to know her through her resume. That's right—she's 11 and a half and has a resume which includes TV appearances (Leno, a PBS Special on gifted kids), news articles and a long-term objective to be awarded the MacArthur Grant, among other things. And the opening line is spot-on:
Millie has just finished her junior year of high school, and is taking a poetry class at the community college over the summer—for fun. (It was a compromise with her parents, who felt college was a little too much for an eleven-year-old, but they agreed as long as it wasn't math-related.) She carries a briefcase, her best (and only) friend is her grandma and she's terribly embarrassed by her parents.
The book chronicles Millie's summer: she makes her first college friend who, it turns out, was only interested in having Millie do her psych homework for her. She is forced to join the summer volleyball league by her parents ("Where exactly does volleyball lie in the realm of my intellectual pursuits?") and finally does make a new friend, Emily, who doesn't know that's she's a genius. Oh, and she's been hired to tutor Stanford Wong—that shameful Chinese kid who's about to repeat sixth grade if he doesn't pass English during summer school.
The book is cute, and you can probably guess at the sort of lessons Millie learns over the course of the summer: that Emily isn't concerned about her IQ, that Stanford isn't as much of a jerk as she thinks he is, that there's more to life than school. (Come to think of it, those are all lessons somebody should have shared with Amy Chua.) While it's probably not going to be on a list of great works of literature, it's a pretty solid middle-school book and Yee has fun with what could have been just a caricature.
As a bonus, the copy I had came with a little bonus section called "After Words" including a Q&A with Yee, some examples of cryptarithms (Millie's favorite puzzles) and some of Millie's favorite Latin insults. There's also an excerpt from Yee's companion book, Stanford Wong Flunks Big-time
Note: I received a review copy of this book.
Smile
Ah, adolescence. A time of confusing emotions, shifting friendships and finding drama in just about everything. It's a few years of your life that are hard enough as it is, without something that screams for attention like, oh, knocking out your two front teeth.
This is, in fact, what happened to Raina Telgemeier in the sixth grade. While racing her friends after a Girl Scouts meeting, she tripped and smashed her mouth on the pavement. What followed was years of oral surgery, braces, headgear, even a retainer with fake teeth attached ... and that's just the teeth.
Raina also had all the other stuff to think about: "friends" who make fun of her, mixed feelings about boys, an obsession with "A Little Mermaid" and gradually discovering her own talents. It's a somewhat painful book to read, both because of the orthodontics and the emotional journey. But Telgemeier balances the tears with humor. The drawings are cheerful, a semi-realistic style that occasionally shifts into hyperbole, and they match the story really well.
I certainly hope my own daughters have an easier time when they reach adolescence, but I know there are no guarantees. But at least I know of at least one book I can recommend to them when they reach it.
Note: I received a review copy of this book.
Plain Kate
I can't remember where I first read about Plain Kate and I wish I could, because the reader said some great things about the father-daughter relationship and the nature of art, much more elegantly than I'm able to. But it was enough to spark my interest, and Arthur A. Levine Books was kind enough to send me a review copy.
As I mentioned before, this may be my favorite book on this list (though there are a few close seconds). It starts off in the medieval village of Samilae, where Kate's father is the master woodcarver. Kate is too young to be an apprentice yet, but already she has the makings of a master carver herself—which causes the superstitious villagers to suspect her of witchcraft. But then comes the skara rok, the bad time, and people died. They called it the "witch's fever" and despite the fact that Kate's own father died from it, suspicions grew stronger.
Finally, after the whisperings led to an outright attack, Kate decided it was time to leave Samilae and strike out on her own—though she has nothing much besides her carving knife and a gray cat named Taggle. Impulsively, she strikes a deal with the mysterious stranger Linay, who offers grant her heart's wish and a few needed supplies in exchange for her shadow.
Plain Kate is beautiful and it's tragic. It is about learning who you are, making hard decisions and not taking the easy way out. If you're looking for a strong female character, Kate is a perfect fit—she's skilled and smart, and as a young girl has to rely on something other than physical strength to find her way through a hostile world. For a time she travels with the Roamers, a band of gypsies, but they begin to mistrust her when it's discovered that she has no shadow. And as for Linay, he has his own sinister purposes in mind and Kate struggles to find a way to stop him.
I could go on and on about what I like about Plain Kate, but I'll keep it to these things: first, I love the world that Bow has created for Kate to live in. There's a familiarity about it, a sort of aged feeling that makes you believe it when the characters talk about customs and old rules and the ways of magic. There is a cost to things—the sacrifices that Kate and others make are not made lightly and are definitely not cheap. And then there's Taggle, who is perfectly cat but also much more than a cat. I don't think I've enjoyed a cat in a book so much since Neil Gaiman's Coraline
For an example of Bow's writing and to get a taste of the book, you can read the first chapter on her website—and then be ready to go get a copy because you'll be wanting more by the end of it.
