6 Books with the Fiercest Female Characters

The stories in this collection have titles like “An Apology of Sorts to June” ; “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans” ; “Marcy Breaks Up With Herself.” These are women I’d like to do tequila shots with. The ferocity of language, the badassery of these characters pushes against traditional boundaries in a way that reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s pleasure in subverting the status quo. The book sets down its own set of rules and is HOT. The flaming eye-balls on the cover are just the beginning.

“You probably can’t tell by looking at me now, but once, back in my twenties, I slept with the Devil.” The narrator presents this premise as so very matter of fact, and there’s something absolutely compelling in that. Lima’s Devil is not who we thought he was, not who we expected him to be. He loves disco and a good story. He’s a muse. There’s a magical quality to these stories and at the same time, the narrator’s journey feels so utterly true.

Have you ever felt as if you were running full speed towards the edge of a cliff, about to run off that cliff at very high speed, with the sure realization that your life will never be the same, that your viscerally-laced actions, actions that feel inevitable to you in the moment but which you know will require significant payment of some kind in the very near future, have to happen now, or else never? I felt my heart rate increasing every time I sat down to read this book, I felt myself holding my breath a little too long before I turned each page. I felt like I was crawling on all fours to the final page.

The genre here intrigues me. If it were not for one tiny word on the book’s back cover, Fiction, I would not have been so sure. Translated from Russian, the text weaves beautifully crafted sentences with rich family and national history. Is this fiction? How much of this is fiction? The book is a love song to generations of the narrator’s family tree and the struggles, the opportunities, the loves and the losses they endured. The author’s use of language, analogy, metaphor, and word choice is exquisite.

There’s something particularly melancholy about the myth of Los Angeles, something about the myth of the American Dream-gone-noir that electrifies stories about Southern California. In this collection, Sather writes characters who know this particular brand of darkness, like the woman who steals a designer handbag from a dying friend’s closet and blames the home healthcare nurse. There’s something tarnished in these stories, a kind of rawness that people in real life try to keep hidden.

Kingston’s story, which is the story of her childhood, the story of her ancestors, the story of China, the story of myth-making, flows in and out of a ghost world. It’s impossible to know how much of her narrative derives from memory, how much from imagination. But it doesn’t matter. This blending of myth and memory, of fiction and fact, reads as much like a fable as a memoir. From her memories and from ancient myths, Kingston has crafted a beautiful web.