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Top Ten Books for Readers Who Like Teenagers Effing Up The Patriarchy

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This week’s Top Ten Tuesday is a pick-your-own-topic: ‘Books for Readers Who Like ______’. I wasn’t planning to take part, but then Ming suggested that ‘Books for Readers Who Like Teenagers Effing Up The Patriarchy’ as an idea. I loved it, and told her so, and after a little bit of discussion we agreed to make this a collab. I’m going to list five books below, and once you’ve read this post you can pop on over to Rare Medium Well Done for the rest of the list.

So without any further ado:

Top Five Books for Readers Who Like Teenagers Effing Up The Patriarchy

My feminist badge collection from my teenage years

1. The Gemma Doyle Trilogy, by Libba Bray – Victorian girls with powers not only have to save the world, but also have to work out how to improve their own lives, which is possibly more difficult, living in the era that they do and being supposed to go straight from finishing school to marriage/drudgery.

2. Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City, by Kirsten Miller – a gang of delinquent Girl Scouts, led by the mysterious mastermind Kiki Strike, explore a hidden city below New York. At the end of every chapter there are useful lists, such as ‘How To Take Advantage of Being a Girl’ and ‘How To Kick Some Butt’.

3. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart – Frankie finds out that her boyfriend is in a secret all-male society at their school. He won’t even admit that it exists. Bored by this lying and shameless sexism, she decides to infiltrate it. Fun ensues.

4. The Forestwife Trilogy, by Theresa Tomlinson – Medieval teenager Mary de Holt doesn’t fancy getting married off to some old guy, so she runs off into the forest with her wet nurse Agnes, where they help heal the sick and rescue people from the patriarchy. Along the way she changes her name to Marian, learns archery, and spends a bit of romantic time with a dude called Robert who wears a hood. Also there are AWESOME NUNS.

5. Valiant, by Holly Black – this is more incidental patriarchy-effing but Val a) learns how to fight with a really cool sword and b) has to use these skills to save her love interest. Goodbye stereotypical fairy tale!

Now, please leave a comment and recommend me some of your own favourite books about teenagers who, when confronted with tedious stereotypes and boringly gender-conventional lives, refuse to put up with it. Or people in general!

Book Review: Good Bones, by Margaret Atwood

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Photo by Just Chaos

Good Bones is a collection of (very) short stories by Margaret Atwood, probably best-known and loved for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. I picked this up in hardback at a university book sale I organised a couple of years ago, having previously read The Handmaid’s Tale and Negotiating With The Dead, a collection of essays about writing. I was already part way through a book of short stories at the time so it went to the bottom of my TBR, until I pulled it out to read on the train in March. I don’t read short story collections very often but this year I’ve already read three. I think they’re a great way to have a break from teen/YA books that isn’t too long! I also think they’re fantastic for commuting, because if you know your reading speed and choose wisely, you can read a whole story or more during one journey. If I’m part way through a really good novel I find it really annoying when I then have to go do something else for seven or eight hours before I can pick it up again, but with short stories, I can finish one a couple of minutes before I get off the train. Perfect.

The first short story collection I read this year was Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, and Good Bones was quite similar in that there were often feminist messages behind the stories that I had to try to puzzle out. Again, this was a nice change from YA, which is usually quite straightforward. Not that YA novels don’t make me think, but it’s a different kind of contemplation. Usually I don’t have to wonder what a YA book is about, though I may ponder the issues raised in the story at length.

Good Bones is also quite a witty collection – some stories made me laugh, or at least had me smiling at their cleverness. I enjoy it when books make me smile whilst I’m on the train because other commuters always notice and I reckon it makes me seem mysterious but also happy!

My favourite stories were ‘The Little Red Hen Tells All’, which is a retelling of the children’s story about the little red hen who planted a grain of wheat, and ‘ Gertrude Talks Back’, which is from the point of view of Hamlet’s mother, but I liked all of the stories. Most of them are only three or four pages long, even in my little hardback edition, so they’re very quick to read. Unfortunately this makes some of them quite easy to forget, but on the other hand it seems to amplify the power of others.

I would recommend Good Bones to anyone who has enjoyed any of Margaret Atwood’s other works, anyone who likes short stories, and most especially to anyone who wants to try reading more short stories.