[more badass heroines, please]

So we could have the conversation about what I'm meant to have been doing, or we could have the conversation about how I read all three of Kristin Cashore's YA novels in the last two days. Three awesome stories set in incredible interconnected worlds with fascinating and different female protags. More, stories that are deliberately working to be inclusive, representative, feminist, and sex-positive, among other things. Oh, they're not perfect, but every now and again there were little tiny lines that just made me ridiculously happy about the level of thought being put into the interactions between the characters. All three of the protags are fantastic examples of strong female characters who are not Strong Female Characters. As someone who has been watching various YA summaries scroll by on a few lists lately and bemoaning the fact that all of them seem to be "Young woman discovers she is Supernaturally Empowered and Very Important to Random Magic Community... and then boys!!1! help her!" - these were great reliefs. Grateful hat tip to sophia_gratia for the rec.

They are all in some ways very similar narratives, and the protags face very similar challenges, structurally. They are mostly dealt with differently, though, and were frankly such a pleasure to read that I forgive them. :P

fox1013, you must have talked about these before? :D