A Spoonful of Awesome: Can we share some living lady author love?
I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff about awesome ladies on my dash lately and I feel the need to spread the love for three of my favorite lady authors who are still alive and putting out books. I can and have reread their books over and over.
Robin McKinley has been one of my all time favorite…
Adding to this. I could try to impress ya’ll with my highfalutin literary taste, but I won’t, because my one true love is and always will be genre fiction.
Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire is a pretty recent discovery of mine, recced to me by my friendly neighborhood bartender, because I am the kind of nerd who exchanges books with her bartenders. Two pen names, same author; Mira Grant has a trilogy of books set after the zombie apocalypse, which I find fascinating because they’re set in a world where humanity kind of picked itself up and brushed itself off after the dead began to rise. There’s some truly fascinating world-building, and a lot of thought has obviously gone into what the world would look like post-zombie, and how the lives we live would change. These books also make me bawl. A lot. Seanan McGuire writes urban fantasy, and her characters are fantastic - flawed and complicated and occasionally supreme screw ups. I love urban fantasy, but I feel like a few too many authors follow the Hamilton school of writing, wherein the central female protagonist is perfect and a BAMF and never really makes a mistake. That’s not a problem Toby Daye has. I also get an added little tickle of pleasure reading these books, because they’re set locally, so I sit there going, “I went to school there! I’ve been drunk shopping at that Safeway! Awesome!”
Sarah Rees Brennan makes the list because I love, love, love her characters. This is an author who isn’t afraid to make her female characters characters, capable of doing all the cool things male characters can do, but all the terrible things too. Her ladies are never relegated to the sidelines, but they also never perform flawlessly. I don’t think I can express how much I dig that. Again, she does some very nifty world-building things, and writes YA urban fantasy.
Kate Ross is sadly no longer living, but she’s contemporary and makes this list because the four novels she wrote before she passed are some of my favorite books. Her Julian Kestrel series is flawlessly researched and just really freaking smart. The historical setting is beautifully drawn and engaging, the mysteries Kestrel solves tense and intriguing, and the characters are wonderful. For anyone concerned about the series ending with unanswered questions, there may be a few, but the forth novel does a good job of wrapping up most of them, particularly the questions revolving around the somewhat enigmatic main character. If you like Dorothy Sayers, you’ll probably like Ross.
I found this and all the reblogs (hints: Tamora Pierce, Holly Black, Diana Wynne Jones, Megan Whalen Turner, Robin McKinley 5eva) made me excessively happy. And herein a compliment to me and my ladies, so: awesome all around!
