Female Friendship

[osprey_archer]

goldjadeocean linked an excellent article about feminist characters (summary: Strong Female Characters (tm) are a good starting point, but we need lots of different kinds of female characters in fiction); and within that article there's a link to a topic that is, if possible, even closer to my heart: Feminist SFF: Female Friendship.

Which argues that, yo, SFF novels need more female friendship. To which I would add, most kinds of novels need more female friendship! The only novels that have anything like a sufficiency are children's novels.

Specifically children's. YA novels, in contrast, tend to suck at female friendship.

Although there are some good ones. Jaclyn Moriarty's Year of Secret Assignments is particularly awesome in this regard - all of her books are, but Secret Assignments especially so. Also Michelle Cooper's Montmaray Journals: the most important relationship is Sophie's friendship with her cousin, Veronica. And - maybe I should make this a separate post.

But its worth noting that when I wanted to read books that had tons of female friendship, I turned to girls' literature from a hundred years ago. A century past, people! We should be able to do at least as well!

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Amen. I really liked both Alex's and Rose's posts.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

And your Penpal novel will fight the problem! :D

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

God willing!

[ladyherenya]

I've been meaning to comment on this for ages. Those two articles are fantastic - lots to think about. Thank you for sharing.

I'd like to see a list of books you think do female friendship well! I agree that there are not enough of them.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I will work on a longer list, but as a short beginning: pretty much all of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books do female friendship well. She wrote children's books - have you read any of her work?

I think her most famous book is The Egypt Game, which is awesome - it's about two girls (and various other friends who they gradually accrue) and this game they play, pretending they're in ancient Egypt.

And then there's the Greensky Trilogy, where a friendship between two eight-year-old girls is the mechanism which saves their country. I love the first two books - they take place on a planet with gravity so low that people can float places! Like flying squirrels! - but the third isn't quite as good.

But probably my favorite of her books is The Changeling, which doesn't have any literal changelings but is nonetheless awesome. It's about the friendship between Ivy and Martha, who at first seem unlikely friends - Martha is the daughter of upstanding, respectable people, where Ivy comes from the worst family in town - but they're drawn together by their mutual awesome imaginativeness. It's delightful.

[ladyherenya]

I stumbled across a few of Snyder's books in my early teens - Spyhole Secrets, Cat Running - but none of the ones you mentioned. So thank you, I'll look out for them!