We recently discussed books with fantastic villains, and many of the books on that list were classics like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. As wonderful as the classics are, they don’t feature a lot of women front and center. And when women are involved, they tend to be frail, pious types who wait around for a man to save them.
Fortunately, times have changed. Now you can find plenty of books where strong women take the lead. In honor of the last day of Women’s History Month, here are 10 sci-fi and fantasy novels with strong female protagonists.
1) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
There are few strong female heroines as iconic as Katniss Everdeen. In the wildly popular Hunger Games series, she volunteers to take part in a deadly battle royale so her younger sister, whose name was picked in a random lottery, won’t have to go. This selfless act immediately gets the reader on her side.
Katniss has an intensely relatable voice as she reports all she does and sees in the Hunger Games arena. She makes one selfless choice after another, causing the reader to root for her all the more. With a background as an able hunter, she also has ample opportunities to show her archery skill.
2) The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
I already included this novel in a list of novels for fans of The Hunger Games. This fantasy story is a quieter one than The Hunger Games and much more character-driven. But Puck Connolly has ever bit as much grit and determination as Katniss Everdeen.
When she faces eviction from the house she and her two brothers share, she signs up to become a contestant in her island’s annual deadly Scorpio Races where the riders ride cannibalistic water horses. She is the first woman to join the races and makes the crazy choice to ride her own horse Dove rather than a water horse. Even as you question her sanity, you can’t help but admire Puck’s bravery.
3) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the older titles on this list. Atwood took the inequalities she saw between men and women and used them to create a fearsome dystopian society called the Republic of Gilead where women have been completely stripped of their rights.
The protagonist Offred leads us through this nightmarish society with her darkly humorous narration. She becomes a Handmaid, which is a sort of sexual servitude where she must produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Through it all, she clings to her memories of her old life with her husband and daughter and her will to survive.
4) Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
I included this title once before in a list of novels with delightfully unique worlds. Howl’s Moving Castle was published just a year after A Handmaid’s Tale and is considered a fantasy classic. A young hatmaker named Sophie is put under a curse that turns her into an old woman. And she is unable to tell anyone about her curse.
Sophie ignores her aches and pains and sets off on an arduous journey to find the Wizard Howl. When she catches up with his moving castle, she’s able to convince him to let her become his cleaning lady. She is a hard worker and is always the first to tell Howl when he’s doing something idiotic. Many would back down and accept defeat under such a terrible curse, but Sophie bravely soldiers on.
5) Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
This was one of my favorite books growing up. In it, Ella is “gifted” the curse of obedience. Whenever someone tells her to do something, she has to do it. She constantly rebels against her curse, and this leads her down a path to Lucinda, the fairy who cursed her.
Ella is an intelligent and ambitious heroine who is a delight to follow through her Cinderella-esque story. She does fall in love with a prince, but their romance is based on mutual respect for one another.
6) Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
This one was another high school favorite of mine. In fifteen-year-old Tally’s future, everyone gets an operation when they turn sixteen to be turned “pretty”. All imperfections are corrected so that every citizen is supermodel gorgeous. But then she makes a new friend named Shay who doesn’t want to be pretty. When Shay disappears and Tally follows her, Tally learns the truths of her not-so-pretty world.
One of the most admirable things about Tally’s character is how real she is. She starts out completely buying into the lies of her society. But when she begins to learn the truth, she has an open enough mind to be willing to let that truth in.
7) Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
Celaena Sardothien is a fascinating heroine since she is very morally gray. She is a trained assassin who has killed many. When we meet her, she has done a year’s servitude in the Endovier salt mines as payment for her crimes.
Despite her seeming lack of a moral code, you can’t help but be on her side as Prince Dorian convinces her to act as his champion in a competition to become the king’s new bodyguard. She is the only woman in the competition and consistently uses her skill to show up her opponents.
8) Divergent by Veronica Roth
This is another title I recommended to Hunger Games fans in the past. Like Katniss, Tris is put through a trial and taken from her home into a harsh reality. Though unlike Katniss, Tris actually chooses to leave her family. She grew up with her puritanical Abnegation family and everyone expected her to stay. But instead, she decides to live with Dauntless, a faction full of brave rebels.
Tris is a fantastic heroine who the reader can’t help but relate to. She cares deeply about her friends and falls into a romance that, like Ella and her prince in Ella Enchanted, is based on mutual respect.
9) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
A lot of the heroines on this list were chosen in some way to embark on their quests, and they are remarkably attractive or clever. Not Meg Murry. She’s just an ordinary teen with frizzy hair and a temper.
Being so flawed gives Meg space to grow throughout the novel. As she, her little brother, and a popular boy at school engage in one supernatural wonder after another on their adventure, we watch Meg grow from a surly teen into a young adult willing to fight to get her father back and banish evil.
10) Cinder by Marissa Meyer
This one’s another fairy tale retelling. In the future, New Beijing houses humans and androids while people die of a deadly plague. Cinder is a gifted mechanic, and also a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen, hated by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. When her life becomes intertwined with handsome Prince Kai, she finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle.
This is a cool sci-fi retelling with a marvelous protagonist at the center. As a cyborg, she doesn’t have the same rights as a normal person, and it’s easy to root for this underdog. Cinder’s feisty, intelligent, and relatable. Like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, she doesn’t always make the right decisions, but she learns from her mistakes.
If fairy tale retellings like Ella Enchanted and Cinder have inspired you to take a stab at writing a fairy tale retelling of your own, we’re having a short fiction contest tailor-made for you! All you need to do is craft a fairy tale retelling in a speculative fiction genre: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, paranormal, alternate history, etc. The submission period is March 7 through Friday, April 7, 2022. Submit here.
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