{"id":29602,"date":"2019-05-14T08:13:52","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T12:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=29602"},"modified":"2019-05-14T08:13:52","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T12:13:52","slug":"warrior-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=29602","title":{"rendered":"Warrior Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"When the Wonder Woman<\/em> movie came out a couple of years ago, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I’d been expecting an hour and a half of battle scenes, which\u00a0usually leave me cold.\u00a0But in addition to\u00a0appreciating the fact that there was a lot more story in Wonder Woman<\/em> than I expected, I also finally understood\u00a0what generations of boys and men must experience when they watch superhero movies: the chance to project themselves into the action and feel the thrill of\u00a0triumph as personal.
\nThe fight scenes in Wonder Woman<\/em>, while still never going to be my favorite part of a movie, were\u00a0ten times more interesting and fun to\u00a0watch because there were women doing the kicking and leaping. It felt\u00a0unexpectedly empowering.
\nSo why does the current trend of girls with weapons on\u00a0fantasy covers make me a little uneasy?
\n
\n\"\"
\nStrong girls in literature saved me as a child. There weren’t so many fantasy heroines to relate to back then, but there were outliers and stubbornly-themselves girls, girls who created their own definitions of what it meant to be a girl.
\nI must have read\u00a0Tolkien’s\u00a0Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy eight times as a teenager. The\u00a0Two Towers<\/em>\u00a0was always my least favorite of the three because so much of it takes place on the battlefield.\u00a0There are entire chapters I pretty much skimmed. Still, I did slow down\u00a0to read battle scenes whenever Eowyn, the shieldmaiden who disguised herself as a man in order to fight for her people, appeared on the scene. I hated the violence, but I loved her strength.
\nAs an adult, I continue to read and love strong-girl books. The heroines in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books are fantastic; Alanna is one of the all-time great knights. There are loads of iconic figures of strength in YA\u2014Cimorene, Katniss,\u00a0Tiffany Aching, and so on\u2014and they are brilliant to read. I think I’m having trouble with all the weaponry.
\nThere are a LOT of girls armed with swords and knives on book covers these days.\u00a0I love the strength and action of these heroines, I love their fierce capacity for protection and self-protection. I think what gives me pause is that, increasingly, we seem to be equating power and strength with weapons, battle, and conquest\u2014which feels a little like giving in to centuries-old male visions of strength and power\u2014power over<\/em>, strength that requires someone else to fall\u2014rather than celebrating the creative and constructive versions of those qualities, and what they look like in actual women.
\nAdmittedly, a book jacket showing collaborative teamwork would be a snooze, and it’s hard to convey strength and leadership brilliance without using these easy symbols. The books\u00a0above, by and large, look like great reads, and I love that girls can project themselves onto\u00a0badass, take-action heroines. It’s just that, in a society already plagued by devastatingly real violence, I find myself yearning for new definitions of what “badass” looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A bookseller reflects on the new crop of weapon-wielding heroines on book jackets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}