Women s History Month Books with about strong female

							Women’s History Month
Books with/about strong female characters
List Prepared by Penni Cyr, Librarian
Moscow High School
Updated March 2004
        Check OPAC for availability—not all books are in the MHS collection.
        *=available in the MHS Library

33 Things Every Girl Should Know About Women’s History - ed. Tonya Bolden
       The pieces collected have the spicy flavor of rabble-rousing. But instead of a radical call
       to arms, readers will find more of a call to self-esteem, self-respect, and a summons to
       keep their eyes on a bright future.

*The Awakening – Kate Chopin
      Twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few
      acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in
      conventional Creole socie ty.

*Autobiography of a face – Lucy Grealy
      In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable
      strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Grealy captures what it is like
      as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more
      than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and
      secretly to be perfect.

*The Bean Trees (and others) – Barbara Kingsolver
      Turtle leaves Kentucky to make a home for herself in Arizona and unexpectedly becomes
      the mother of a 3- year old American Indian girl.

*Beloved – Toni Morrison
       In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the
       Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its
       fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family;
       nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her
       own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.

*Beauty – Robin McKinle y
      A retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

*The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (and others) – Laurie King
      Sherlock Holmes takes on a young, female apprentice. In the early years of WW I, 15-
      year-old American Mary Russell encounters Holmes, retired in Sussex Downs where
      Conan Doyle left him raising bees. Mary, an orphan rebelling against her guardian aunt's
      strictures, impresses the sleuth with her intelligence and acumen.

*The Bluest eye – Tony Morrison
       Poor, black, and ugly, she lives in a store front and shares a bedroom with her brother,
       her crippled mother, and drunken father.
*Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
       When Elaine Risley returns to her hometown, Toronto, for a retrospective show of her
       paintings, she finds more than critical acclaim. Local streets, long-gone landmarks, and
       elements in the paintings themselves trigger memories of her transient childhood
       traveling across Canada with her father; of adolescence marred by the cruel teasing of
       three friends; and of love affairs with her first art teacher and mentor.

*Clan of the Cave Bear – Jean Auel
       Young Cro-Magnon orphan Ayla is adopted into the Neanderthal Clan of the Cave Bear
       and grows up mothered by medicine woman Iza and protected by magician Creb.

Color Purple – Alice Walker
       This is a novel about two black Southern women, sisters who are separated at
       adolescence and for the next 30 years never forsake their devotion to each other.

Cool Women - ed. Pam Nelson
      The roster of female role models in Cool Women is extremely eclectic, spanning history
      and national boundaries to include Cleopatra and Amelia Earhart. Mexican freedom
      fighters stand side by side with Soviet WWII fighter pilots, Mother Jones, and Rosie the
      Riveter. Editor Pam Nelson places emphasis on women who overcame their own fears to
      go beyond society's expectations and succeed on their own terms.
       0965975401

*Ellen Foster – Kaye Gibbons
       In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old
       Ellen.” Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her
       abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled
       from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her
       own hands and finds herself a place to belong.

*Eva – Peter Dickinson
       After a terrible accident, a young girl wakes up to discover that she has been given the
       body of a chimpanzee.

*Five finger discount – Helen Stapinski
        Helene Staphinski tells about growing up in a family of swindlers, bookies, crooks, and
        murderers.

Fried green tomatoes – Fannie Flagg
       Set in a small Alabama train stop town (Whistle Stop) in the 1930s, where the social
       scene centers on its one café with Evelyn Couch, a younger woman who is looking for
       meaning in her life. Various women's voices tell anecdotes of Whistle Stop, as the
       chapters jump back and forth through time.
*Gathering Blue – Lois Lowry
       Lame and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously removed from her squalid village to
       live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to
       do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.
*Girls of summer: the real story of the All-American Girls professional baseball – Lois Browne
       This is the true-life story of the All- American Gir ls Professional Baseball League which
       was the basis for the hit movie, A League of Their Own. Browne's colorful true story
       ensures a unique place in history for the women who played their hearts out on fields
       across America.

*Girls of summer: the US women’s soccer team and how it changed the world – Jere Longman
       This is the story of the United State women's soccer team's defeat of China in the 1999
       Women's World Cup, with a penalty-kick shoot out.

Girls think of everything: Stories of ingenious inventions by women – Thimmesh, Catherine
        An outstanding collective biography of women and girls who changed the world with
        their inventions. Thimmesh surveys unique and creative ideas that were both born of
        necessity or were simply a product of ingenuity and hard work.

*Gutsy Girls: Young Women Who Dare - Tina Schwager & Michele Schuerger
       Twenty- five young women share their adventures in such activities as skydiving, building
       homes, and mountain climbing, demonstrating the value of courage, commitment, and a
       positive attitude.

*Hannah’s daughters – Marianne Frediksson
      This story sweeps through 100 years of Scandinavian history, and follows three
      generations of Swedish women - a grandmother, a mother and a daughter - whose lives
      are linked through a century of great love and great loss.

*Home before dark – Sue Ellen Bridgers
     Returning with her migrant family to her father's childhood home, a fourteen-year-old
     struggles with her new stationary life.

*The house on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
       Esperanza Cordero, a girl coming of age in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, uses poems
       and stories to express thoughts and emotions about her oppressive environment.

*In the time of the butterflies – Julia Alvarez
        The four Mirabal sisters sacrificed their safe and comfortable lives in the name of
        freedom. They were Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies,” and they tell their stories of hair
        ribbons, secret crushes, gunrunning and prison torture as they describe the everyday
        horrors of life under the Dominican dictator Trujullo.

*Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
       In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a
       governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret.

Kay Scarpetta series – Patricia Cornwell
      Thriller novels about a female forensic pathologists.

Kindred – Octavia Butler
      Kindred utilizes the devices of science fiction in order to answer the question "how could
      anybody be a slave?" As a twentieth-century African-American woman trying to endure
      the brutalities of nineteenth-century slavery, Dana answers the question, "See how easily
       slaves are made?" For Dana, to choose to preserve an institution, to save a life and
       nurture victimization is to choose to survive.

*The lovely bones – Alice Sebold
       A fantasy-fable; told by Susie who is in heaven. As Susie looks down from heaven, she
       tells a tale that is both haunting and full of hope - the story of her murder and her family's
       struggles accepting her loss.

*Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
     The slow but inevitable moral degeneration of a weak woman. Describes the patient
     rendering of the squalor and narrowness of provincial life and of its effects on the
     woman's mind.

*Map of the world – Jane Hamilton
      A piercing picture of domestic relationships under the pressure of calamitous
      circumstances, the book poignantly addresses the capricious turns of fate and the
      unyielding grip of regret. Alice and Howard Goodwin and their two young daughters live
      on the last remaining dairy farm on the outskirts of Racine, Wisconsin.

*Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
     This book presents the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geishas. It is
     romantic, erotic, and suspenseful and completely unforgettable.

*Midnight Hour Encores – Bruce Brooks
      A sixteen-year-old cellist and musical prodigy travels cross-country with her father, a
      product of the 1960s, to meet her mother, who abandoned her as a baby.

*One child – Torey Hayden
      Hayden recounts her battle to uncover the keen intelligence and touch the emotions of a
      troubled, sexually molested six- year-old girl who abused a younger child and was placed
      in her class for retarded preadolescents while awaiting space in a state institution.

Out of control – Norma Fox Mazer
       Perhaps it wasn't exactly a rape, but Valerie knows that those few moments when she was
       cornered in the school corridor have changed her forever. The nightmares may fade, but
       she'll never regain her trust in a safe world.

The night the white dear died – Gary Paulsen
       An Indian brave stands poised to shoot a white deer drinking from a pool of water in the
       moonlight. It is only a dream -- a recurring nightmare that haunts fifteen-year-old Janet
       Carson -- but it is a dream that will change her forever.

*Plainsong – Ken Haruf
       Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant 17-year-old with no place to turn. Her life parallels 2
       others in much the same way any small- town lives would—until teacher, makes them
       intersect.

*Rapture of Caanan – Sheri Reynolds
      Although the church's beliefs and practices may seem extreme (sleeping in an open
      grave, mortifying the flesh with barbed wire), its members are complex and profoundly
      sympathetic as they wrestle with the contradictions of Fire and Brimstone's theology, the
       temptations of the outside world, and the frailties of the human heart. Talk of damnation
       weighs heavy on the mind of 15- year old Ninah Huff. To distract her from sinful thoughts
       about her prayer partner James, Ninah puts pecan shells in her shoes and nettles in her
       bed, but concentrating on the Passion of Jesus cannot, in the end, deter Ninah and James
       from their passion for each other.

What girls learn – Karin Cook
       Karin Cook depicts the inner lives of girls on the verge of adolescence with tremendous
       insight, and in Tilden, she has found a narrator both eloquent and observant. What Girls
       Learn explores notions of family and femininity and the transcendence of love, even in
       the face of loss.

*Where are the children – Mary Higgins Clark
      Nancy Harmon had fled first marriage and the deaths of her two children. She changed
      her looks and left California for the wind-swept peace of Cape Cod. Now she was
      married again with two more beautiful children, and the terrible pain had begun to
      heal...until the morning when she looked in the back yard for her little boy and girl, found
      only one red mitten, and knew that the nightmare was beginning again...

Persian Pickle Club – Sandra Dallas
       Set in Depression-era Kansas and made vivid with the narrator's humorous down-home
       voice, it's a story of loyalty and friendship in a women’s quilting circle.

*Pope Joan – Donna Woolfolk Cross
      This is a work of historical fiction where, in the Dark Ages, a woman sat on the papal
      throne for two years. She was born in Ingelheim in A.D. 814 to a tyrannical English
      canon and the once-heathen Saxon woman. Women are not educated, but Joan’s brother
      teaches her to read and write and her intelligence and persistence carry her far.

*The red tent – Anita Diamant
       The story of Dinah, a tragic character from the Bible whose great love, a prince, is killed
       by her brother, leaving her alone and pregnant. The novel traces her life from childhood
       to death, in the process examining sexual and religious practices of the day, and what it
       meant to be a woman.

Silence of the Lamb – Thomas Harris
       This book takes us inside the world of professional criminal investigation. This book
       gives us the opportunity to live inside the minds of both the crime fighters and the
       criminals as each struggles in a prison of pain and seeks, sometimes violently, relief.

*The silver kiss – Annette Curtis Klause
       A mysterious teenage boy harboring a dark secret helps Zoe come to terms with her
       mother's terminal illness.

*Sisterhood of the traveling pants – Ann Brashares
       Four best girlfriends spend the biggest summer of their lives learning about themselves
       enchanted by a magical pair of pants.

*Speak – Laurie Anderson
      A traumatic event near the end of the summer has a devastating effect on Melinda's
      freshman year in high school.
Someone like you – Sarah Dessen
      Quiet Halley and popular Scarlett have been friends for years. They balance each other
      perfectly-- until the beginning of their junior year. Then, Scarlett's boyfriend is killed in a
      motorcycle accident; soon after, she learns that she is carrying his baby.

*Staying fat for Sarah Byrnes – Chris Crutcher
       The daily class discussions about the nature of man, the existence of God, abortion,
       organized religion, suicide and other contemporary issues serve as a backdrop for a high-
       school senior's attempt to answer a friend's dramatic cry for help.

*Their eyes were watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
       A novel of high poetry and its female hero which invests in black folk tradition. A
       woman is on a quest for her own identity and her journey immerses her into black
       traditions.

Things I Have to Tell You - ed. Betsy Franco
       Poems and Writing by Teenage Girls that includes more than 30 poems by adolescents
       into a poignant collection of prose and poetry.

*To kill a mockingbird – Harper Lee
        Jean Louise relates her impression of the time when her lawyer-father, Atticus Finch, is
        defending a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during
        the 1930's.

Turtle moon – Alice Hoffman
       This story combins aspects of a suspense thriller and a romance, and includ s such surefire
       elements as an abandoned baby, a youngster on the verge of juvenile delinquency who is
       reformed, two dogs and a supernatural character who provides the requisite touch of
       fantasy.

Waltzing the cat – Pam Houston
       Relationships and extreme adventures collide with deadpan humor and female wisdom in
       Pam Houston's story of eleven interlinked stories. We follow roving photographer Lucy
       O'Rourke as she survives a home life where her parents engage in rather peculiar feeding
       rites for the family cat in the title story.

*Where the heart is – Billie Letts
      Seventeen year old Novalee Nation, who is 7 months pregnant is heading to California
      with her boyfriend, but ends up getting stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma,
      with just $7.77 in change.

Women of the American Revolution - Mary R. Furbee
     This collective biography captures highlights from the lives of six women who played
     vastly different roles in the American Revolution: Abigail Smith Adams, Peggy Shippen
     Arnold, Esther DeBerdt Reed, Deborah Sampson, Mercy Otis Warren, and Phillis
     Wheatley.