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Strong Heroines: Guest Post by Mary E. Pearson

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Today’s guest post comes to us from one of the very first YA authors I read as an adult and one that Kimberly admires: Mary E. Pearson. She’s talking about strong heroines, particularly in science fiction and fantasy. 

Mary E. Pearson is the  author of The Kiss of Deception and many other award-winning books for young adults. You can learn more about Mary and her books here.










March is National Women’s History Month and this year’s theme is about weaving women’s stories into the “essential fabric of our nation’s history.” There are so many strong, amazing women who helped build this country and often they’ve been left out of the historical record.

  

The National History Women’s Project aims to correct that and says, “Accounts of the lives of individual women are critically important because they reveal exceptionally strong role models who share a more expansive vision of what a woman can do. The stories of women’s lives, and the choices they made, encourage girls and young women to think larger and bolder, and give boys and men a fuller understanding of the female experience.”

I think this applies to fiction too. I love reading about strong women. Why shouldn’t I? They are a part of our lives. They are everywhere. Our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and colleagues. They inspire us, hold us up, and help to move us forward in our own dreams. They help us to see all that we are and all that we can be, in spite of our flaws, our weaknesses, and fears. The stories of strong women, both in history and in fiction, need to be heard! And heard by both our daughters and our sons.

I’ve had some incredible strong women role models, one of whom was my grandmother. She didn’t take crap from anyone. Maybe it stemmed from an oppressive childhood. She grew up in in a small town in Arkansas, and though she fell in love with one boy, her father forced her to marry another—a man actually—much older than she was. He was “wealthy.” He owned the only car in town which was a big deal back then—at least to her father.  It was a loveless marriage and two children later she walked out, defying both her father and her husband. Being a single mother during the Depression wasn’t easy, but somehow she kept her children fed, including the “love child” that came along later. Yes, scandalous for her time, but she made no apologies. She moved forward.

That’s what I’ve seen with the strong women in my life. They may get knocked down; they might make mistakes along the way, but that doesn’t stop them. They move forward drawing on their own unique strengths and the ones they’ve gained on their journey—and there are so many ways to be strong. One way of course, is through plain physical power.  I know a lot of women with incredible physical endurance—and ones who can pack a wallop! But there are many shades of strength, including bravery, compassion, intelligence, perseverance, vision, curiosity, cleverness, ambition, resolve, and so many more.  

I love seeing the whole spectrum in so many amazing heroines. In celebration of Women’s History Month, I’d like to share a few of my favorites from recent reads:

Sybella


Oh Sybella, how I ached for you.  From the time she was introduced in the first book of the series, I was pricked with curiosity about the depth of her story.  When at last it unfolded in Dark Triumph, I was undone. Yes, it is a fantasy novel, but Sybella’s story cut me to the quick with its gritty realism. Sybella somehow finds the strength to reach deep and overcome a lifetime of betrayals. She broke my heart and then pieced it back together again with hope. I loved all the female protagonists in the His Fair Assassin series by Robin LaFevers, but Sybella’s strength melted into my core.

Charley


Charley is fun. She is clever. She is strong.  She’s the kind of girl you want for a best friend—whether you’re a guy or a girl. She is resourceful, and has a sense of humor even as she is desperately trying to survive after being thrown into the most dire of circumstances on an island—without food, water, or clothes. Yes, she is naked, which she notes with all the shock and horror that my own seventeen year-old self would have had. Charley, the main protagonist in Lynne Matson’s debut, NIL, has stuck with me and still makes me smile when I think of her. She is a survivor.

Cress


Humorous like Charley, Cress is a different kind of survivor. She’s on an island of another sort, a prisoner in a satellite high above the earth. Locked away from almost all human contact, Cress uses her imagination to survive. She is a dreamer and envisions a different life from the one she has had. Yes, Cress is flawed and naïve—what else could you expect from someone who has had to endure a life of isolation—but she is also skilled at things like hacking computer systems and when she realizes how she has been used, she puts those skills to good use. In her naivety Cress is so different from the other heroines in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles, but that is what captured my heart too. Her world has only been seen through the lens of a netscreen and from that she pieces together some semblance of a life—until she has the opportunity to grab for another.

Celaena


She’s a bad ass. There is no other way to say it. Dangerous and driven, violence is all Celaena has ever known. She was raised to be an assassin—and she’s damn good at it. But besides setting her adversaries on edge with her knife skills, she can do it with her humor too. That’s my kind of girl. She lets no strength go unmined. My grandmother would love her. So do I. I’ve only read the first book in The Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas, but I can’t wait to see what mayhem Celaena stirs in the rest.

For the sake of space, I’ll have to use shorthand here, but more strong heroines I loved were Kestrel from The Winner’s Curse (clever and calculating!), Wilhelmina from The Orphan Queen (courageous and determined!), Rosie from The Vault of Dreamers (curious, creative, and brave!) and . . . okay, there are a lot of great heroines out there.

Even though all the stories I’ve mentioned are fantasy, I think the fantasy elements help illuminate the very real strengths in all of us. All these incredible heroines had tough choices to make, just as we all do every day, and they meet the challenges of their fate and circumstances through trial and error, calculations and intelligence, missteps and perseverance, vision and triumph—and plenty of badassery. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

The NWHP says, “There is a real power in hearing women’s stories” and I couldn’t agree more. The female voice, experience, and perspective is unique, and reading about it enriches all of our lives, girls and women, boys and men alike.
There! Go link arms with one of these women and let them take you on a powerful journey.

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Kiss of Deception is available now. The sequel, The Heart of Betrayal, will be available July 7. 

Appropriate Literature: Guest Post by Elana K. Arnold

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Today’s “About the Girls” guest post is from author Elana K. Arnold. She’s here to talk about the idea of “appropriate literature” and how that applies to girls, girls reading, and feminism. 

Elana K. Arnold has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from UC Davis. She writes books for and about young people and lives in Huntington Beach, California with her family and more than a few pets. Visit Elana at www.elanakarnold.com.
















A few days ago, I got an email. This is what it said:

“My 13 year old daughter is interested in reading your books. I research novels before she reads them to ensure they are age appropriate. Can you please provide me with information regarding the sexual content, profanity, and violence so I can make an informed decision.”

The subject of the email was: Concerned Mother.

I’m not proud to admit that my first reaction was a twist in my stomach, a lurching sensation. Was I attempting to lead her daughter astray, were my books nothing more than thinly disguised smut, or pulp?

And I wasn’t sure how to respond. Yes, my books have sexual content. They have profanity. There is violence. But my books—like all books—are more than a checklist, a set of tally marks (Kisses? 6. Punches thrown? 4.) 

Then I began thinking about myself at thirteen, about what was appropriate for me in that year, and those that followed.

When I was thirteen, I read whatever I wanted. No one was watching. Largely I found books in my grandmother’s home library. I roamed the shelves and chose based on titles, covers, thickness of the spines. I read All You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But were afraid to ask). I read The Stranger. I read Gone with the Wind. And I read at home too, of course, and in school—Anne of Green Gables and Bridge to Terabithia and Forever.

Those early teen years were steeped in sex, even though I wasn’t sexually active. In junior high school, there were these boys who loved to snap the girls’ bras at recess. I didn’t wear a bra, though I wished desperately for the need to. I was sickened by the thought that one of the boys might discover my secret shame, reach for my bra strap and find nothing there.

So one day I stole my sister’s bra and wore it to school. All morning I was aware of the itch of it, its foreign presence. I hunched over my work, straining my shirt across my back so the straps would show through.

At recess, I wandered dangerously near the group of boys, heart thumping, hoping, terrified. Joe Harrison did chase me—I ran and yelped until he caught me by the arm, found the strap, snapped it.

And then his words—“What are you wearing a bra for? You don’t have any tits.”

The next year, there was a boy—older, 15—who didn’t seem to care whether or not I needed a bra. We kissed at a Halloween party, just days after my thirteenth birthday. I was Scarlett O’Hara. He was a 1950’s bad boy, cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt. He was someone else’s boyfriend.

The next day at school, a well-meaning girl whispered to me, just as class was about to start, “If you’re going to let him bang you, make him finger bang you first. That way, it won’t hurt as much.”

Later that year, before I transferred schools when my family moved away, my English teacher told me I was talented, and that he would miss me. Then he kissed me on the mouth.

The next year, a high school freshman, I was enrolled in Algebra I, and I didn’t think I was very good at it. Truthfully, I didn’t pay much attention to whatever the math teacher/football coach was saying up there, preferring to scribble in my notebook or gaze into half-distance, bringing my eyes into and out of focus.

On the last day of class, the teacher called me up to his desk. “You should fail this class,” he told me. “You went into the final with a D, and you got less than half of the questions right.”

I had never failed a class. I was terrified.

“But,” he went on, smiling, “I’m gonna give you a C-, because I like the way you look in that pink leather miniskirt.”

At fifteen, a sophomore, I took Spanish. I raised my hand to ask a question, and the teacher—who liked the students to call him Señor Pistola—knelt by my desk as I spoke. When I finished, instead of answering me he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear a word. I was lost in your beautiful eyes.”

I wasn’t having sex. I had only kissed one boy. But still, I was brewing in it—sex, its implications, my role as an object of male desire, my conflicting feelings of fear and excitement. 

Recently, I taught an upper division English class at the University of California, Davis. The course topic was Adolescent Literature. Several of my book selections upset the students, who argued vehemently that the books were inappropriate for teens because of their subject matter—explicit sexual activity, sexual violence, and incest. The Hunger Games was on my reading list, too, a book in which the violent deaths of children—one only twelve years old—are graphically depicted. No one questioned whether that book was appropriate. Of course, none of the characters have sex. Not even under the promise of imminent death do any of the featured characters decide to do anything more than kiss, and even the kissing scenes end before they get too intense.

So I think about the mother who wrote me that email, asking me, Are your books appropriate for my daughter? I think about the girl I was at thirteen, and the girls I knew. The girl who told me about finger banging. The other girls my English teacher may have kissed. The girls who had grown used to boys groping their backs, feeling for a bra strap, snapping it. 

I think, What is appropriate? I want to tell that mother that she can pre-read and write to authors and try her best to ensure that everything her daughter reads is “appropriate.” But when I was thirteen, and fourteen and fifteen, stealing my sister’s bra and puzzling over the kiss of the boy at the party, the kiss of my teacher in an empty classroom, what was happening to me and around me and inside of me probably wouldn’t have passed that mother’s “appropriate” test. Still, it all happened. To a good girl with a mother who thought her daughter was protected. Safe. 

And it was the books that I stumbled upon—all on my own, “inappropriate” books like Lolita and All You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex—these were the books that gave me words for my emotions and my fears. 

Maybe the books I write are appropriate. Maybe they are not. But I think it should be up to the daughters to make that decision, not the mothers. Censorship—even on a familial level—only closes doors. We may want to guard our daughters’ innocence, we may fear that giving them access to books that depict sexuality in raw and honest ways will encourage them to promiscuity, or will put ideas in their heads.

I don’t think our daughters need guardians of innocence. I think what they need is power. 

Let your daughter read my books, Concerned Mother. Read them with her. Have a conversation. Tell her your stories. Let her see your secrets, and your shames. Arm your daughter with information and experience. 

Give her power. 






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Infandous is available now. 

About The Girls: Year Two

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Tomorrow kicks off our second annual “About the Girls” series here at STACKED. It’s nearly two weeks of guest posts about girls, girl reading, and feminism in honor of Women’s History Month. We dedicate so much time to boys and their reading and interests but spend hardly a fraction of the same time considering the question “what about the girls?” That’s what this series hopes to address. If you missed last year’s series, spend some time with it.

I didn’t prompt my guests with anything. I left it open to them to decide what it was they wanted to talk about when it came to girls, girls reading, and feminism in YA. Each guest came up with something entirely unique and yet, the entire series builds upon itself. There is a lot to think about and discuss with each of these posts, which range from discussing the role of abortion within and outside of YA fiction to girls who kick serious ass in science fiction. As with last year’s series, I hope readers walk away with a lot to think about when it comes to teen girls, their reading habits, and their interests, and I hope that every reader walks away with at least one new book added to their reading lists. I spent a long time making decisions on who to invite to this series, as I wanted a wide variety of voices, experiences, and backgrounds at the table.

Because I envision this series as a conversation, I open up the floor to readers and other bloggers to feel free to write “about the girls” in some capacity before March ends. Those who do and would like their work shared, feel free to pass along links to me. I would be thrilled to round them up into another post for STACKED readers to check out. You can talk about favorite female characters, favorite female authors, or about anything girls or girls reading related. The only “goal” is that it be an answer to that question, “what about the girls?” It’s my hope to post a few times outside the guest posts with pieces of interest or connection to this series as well.

We’ve seen a lot of discussion about sexism and about girls and feminism in the last few months on social media. But rather than dive into specifics, I wanted to instead highlight what I think is an important and worthwhile campaign happening on April 14: #ToTheGirls. The campaign, run by YA author Courtney Summers, is about telling girls how important they are and why they matter. All it asks is on that date, you share something to the girls and tell them why they matter, why their voices are important, and that they’re loved. It’s easy, simple, free, and it can make a tremendous impact on girls who hear that message. All of the details are here. If you’re on social media, I encourage you to take part.

Read these posts. Think about them. Talk about them. Share them. Get ready to get invested in girls, girls reading, and their complex, challenging, and rich lives.

Advocating for and writing about girls is a radical act

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I’ve been thinking about this tweet a lot the last couple of weeks.

 

After AO Scott wrote about the death of the patriarchy and the death of adulthood, peppered with some disdain for YA, it’s hard not to see that the act of writing about and caring about girls is anything less than survival writing.

 

It’s a radical act.

 

Scott and fellow “adulthood is dead” author Chris Beha believe that our media and culture aren’t encouraging people to behave in certain, pre-defined ways that signify adulthood. That people — “people” meaning anyone who isn’t a middle age, straight white male — keep seeking out entertainment and experiences that keep them in some state of arrested development. YA books, of course, are a medium undermining the patriarchy and delaying maturity.

 

Last week, news came out that two female librarians were being sued to the tune of over $1 million dollars for character defamation for speaking out about a male colleague who, over the course of many years of his career, caused discomfort among many females in the field. The lawsuit claims the women “have caused him to be regarded with feelings of hatred, contempt, ridicule, fear, dislike, approbrium or disesteem. The defendants’ statements are clearly defamatory and impossible to justify.”

 

Rabey and de jesus, the two female defendants in the case, spoke up where other women in the field have not. This act of speaking up is radical. They spoke up on behalf of other women who couldn’t find their voices to do that. Murphy’s lawsuit, as much as it claims to be about defamation of character, isn’t that.

 

It’s about power and putting fear into not just Rabey and de jesus, but it’s an act of creating enough fear that other women won’t speak out against him or others. It’s about keeping them quiet.

 

At the same time this lawsuit unfolds, YouTube personality Sam Pepper released a video featuring him pinching girls’ butts without their permission. After mass uproar within the community, the video came down, but in its wake, more women spoke up. Laci Green detailed Pepper’s creepy behavior, and as this things go, she received a series of messages from Pepper meant to put her right back in her place.

 

One reason that YA books bear the brunt of cultural criticism and become a popular whipping boy in mainstream media by people who couldn’t be bothered to read beyond the few books on the New York Times List or those books that became box office hits is that it’s a field that’s seen as a women’s field. Like librarianship, writing for teenagers is something that women do, something that the luxury of time and love of fantasy worlds — whether real fantasy or imagined fantasy is up for debate — afford them.

 

YA stories, at least the ones critics are familiar with, don’t leave room for boys and boyhood. They don’t wrestle with the big questions of life. They aren’t handbooks to adulthood or compasses for morality. They’re frivolous works so many adults gobble up by the armload because adults can no longer grapple with the Big Important Questions Of Life as found in tomes of literary excellence.

 

To bear witness to other adults enjoying the act of reading and finding stories that satiate them is to bear witness to the dumbing down of culture.

 

An email came through on a small, private listserv I’m a part of a couple of weeks ago from a librarian tasked with running a book club as an elective in her middle school. The students, 8th graders, are all girls, and the first title they picked was Speak. The librarian was told from above she needed to pick something less controversial, and when her students discussed other options, they picked Before I Fall. She knew that wasn’t going to fly with administration, either, so she came to the listserv asking what could be done.

 

It’s interesting that the books these 8th grade girls want to read in this private (and Catholic) school involve two huge issues: sexual assault and bullying. These are topics these girls are seeking out to talk about and because of administrative push back from the top, they’re not able to do so in a safe space, in the presence of a professional who knows how to handle conversations like this.

 

This is no fault of the librarian. It’s the fault of adults who are failing to have these conversations with teens. When our educational system is founded on teaching the classics and heralding the value of those Tomes of Literary Importance, readers who want more — who deserve more — have to go elsewhere.

 

Meanwhile, some readers are “so sick” of rape books in YA and it’s a topic that’s already been done.

 

What can we make of readers who are desperately seeking out these books in a culture that doesn’t want to talk about them or, worse, is “so sick” of talking about them and seeing them? What can we make of readers — girls — who are constantly reminded that their interests are either controversial or silly?

 

This isn’t the fault of educators; it’s a weakness in the system of belief that the road to successful adulthood is through the voice and experiences of the straight white male. It’s the fault of a society that values and encourages a certain prescribed path and any deviation from it is, in fact, a failure of the individual, rather than a failure of such a singular, privileged perspective.

 

Bucking that norm is an act of survival. Choosing to write and to talk out against those in power is an act of radicalism.

 

The reason we need another rape book, the reason we need to talk about books like Speak or Before I Fall or Pointe any other number of books tackling tough issues through the perspective of teen girls is because that’s where teen girls find their voices. That’s where they’re able to see both the mirrors of who they are, as well as the windows into the worlds of those who look like them and those who don’t look like them.

 

Earlier this month, nude photos of many well-known Hollywood women were stolen and put onto the internet for public consumption. This was no leak; this was theft. The purpose of this theft was to prove power — the power that our world has over women, the reminder that no matter how successful, how admired, how talented you are, there’s always a way the world can bring you down. That if you’re a woman, you’re part of a man’s world, no matter how much of a stake you put into the ground, no matter how much you make your own.

 

And this week, just months after a vile, repugnant rant against successful women in the book world, Ed Champion harassed another female author, threatening to release the name of the person who had nude photos of her. And he did, before his Twitter account was suspended.

 

There’s no dead patriarchy in these acts. If anything were true about either Scott or Beha’s essays to be pulled in here, perhaps it’s about what adulthood looks like. Does adulthood mean reminding women that their bodies are always up for consumption? That they’re afforded no privacy?

 

Is it that when a man has power and is invited to speak on the library conference circuit, he’s free from being called out for behavior that’s left colleagues uncomfortable?

 

Is it that men are allowed to grab girls’ bodies without their permission for laughs and video hits, then follow up just criticism for that behavior with threats?

 

Girls shouldn’t fear for their lives when they’re just living them. Girls who are impassioned about their worlds, who want nothing more than to engage with their world, learn about that world, build empathy for this place and the people around them, who use their knowledge and their passion to give voice to their beliefs shouldn’t worry about their bodies — or their lives — being at stake for doing so.

 

And yet, because we’re asking for and raising our voices without waiting for permission to do so, it happens.

 

The reason there’s fear that “adulthood is dying” isn’t that the patriarchy is dead. Far from. It’s that voices are being discovered through media like YA fiction, sharpened and raised. Girls are finding good things are out there for them, but getting to those good things requires claws. That being unlikable isn’t a character flaw or a death sentence, but instead, a state of being, a way of pushing through, of building confidence.

 

Speaking up, advocating for, listening to, and writing about girls is an act of radicalism. It’s about building an adulthood recognizing that the world is layered and colored with millions of shades of gray and accepting that with better nourishment — including rape stories, bullying stories, sweet or sultry romances, magical tales — the better our world reflects us, rather than us trying to reflect a singular, reductive, and fabricated idea of the world.

 

Let’s encourage those fears expressed by Beha and Scott are things we get to see happen. Writing about girls and believing women is everything that they’re afraid of.

 

***
When I speak about girls, I hope it’s clear that I also speak in defense of all along the gender spectrum who are marginalized.

 

Further reading: Anne Ursu talks about the power of empathy, about how Beha and Scott fail to understand that that’s the driving purpose behind literature, including — and especially — YA fiction. Sarah McCarry digs into whose pleasure is really at stake when it comes to the “death of the patriarchy” and YA fiction. Spend some time, too, with Robin Wasserman talking about “Girl Trouble.”

 

 

On Girls, Girl Reading, and Girls in YA Fiction Beyond STACKED

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I’ve been talking a lot about girls and girls reading, as well as girls in YA fiction, over the last year. And while talking on the blog is important, I also think it’s important to take these conversations to other venues in order to keep the discussion fresh, vibrant, and engage new voices and ideas. 

So with that, I’m really excited to share two pieces of news. 
First, I will have an article in August’s issue of VOYA all about girls and girls reading. In it, I talk about why having this discussion is important and how as youth advocates, we can be better leaders and facilitators of girls reading. It includes a look at ten titles out in the last year that feature really interesting female main characters. I love all of the books I got to talk about and think they offer some really great ways into the conversation about girls, about female characters, and about girls and girls reading. 
My second piece of news is one I am also extremely excited about. 
The call for conference proposals for the Wisconsin Library Association meeting went out a few months ago, and I knew it was time to propose something for my own state’s meeting. The event’s only about a 2 hour drive, and I have never presented in my own state (a scheduling snafu last year meant the plans to do one before didn’t work out).
But this year, I’m presenting, and I am thrilled to be co-presenting with author Carrie Mesrobian.
We’ll be presenting on Wednesday, November 5 in the late afternoon and the title of our presentation is “Good Girls, Bad Girls, Real Girls: Teen Girls in YA Lit & In Your Library.” 
If you’re around the Dells area or you’re going to WLA this year, I hope you come and hear us talk.