Good books with more than one heroine

This thread is intended to offer an antidote to "Highlander syndrome" -- the tendency of many classic fantasy novels to show us one, and only one, active and vividly drawn and sympathetically portrayed female character amongst a throng of men. This is typical of quest fantasies involving a team of heroes, in which only one girl is allowed on the team (and this one girl, since she is the sole representative of the female gender, is all too often depicted as strong and kick-ass to the point of hyperbole, with little room left for intriguing flaws). But it can show up even in novels which feature a female protagonist. This heroine may be quite compelling in and of herself, with a full range of virtues and flaws, but if she is the "woman struggling to prove herself and make it in a Man's World" (tm), then the vast majority of her meaningful interactions will be with men, and if another woman with the potential to match her strength happens to show up in her story, said other woman is more frequently an enemy than an ally.

Even before I knew there was a term for it (and I have a fellow FF poster to thank for teaching me the term), I'd noticed it -- too many books giving us heroines who are awesome in isolation, with other female characters coming into the picture only briefly, and usually portrayed as weak and shallow to contrast with the heroines' awesomeness. These heroines surrounded by men may be impressive indeed, but "Highlander syndrome" carries with it the unfortunate implication that active energy and intelligence and complexity may be found frequently in men, but in a woman these qualities are an anomaly. Both male and female authors are often guilty of this (e.g. Vin in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn and Sonea in Trudi Canavan's Black Magician Trilogy, both of whom are the Only Strong Heroine, neither of whom have female equals as allies).

So I'm devoting a thread specifically to classic fantasy (and some sci-fi) novels that defy "Highlander syndrome" by giving us more than one impressive female character. (By "classic" fantasy I mean books that have a more traditional/historical fantasy setting. I'm not really interested in urban fantasy. I don't care for it.) Special points to the books that pass the Bechdel Test, although that's not 100% essential for inclusion here.

Some books that get it right:

Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar, in the omnibus Cordelia's Honor, with Cordelia herself, her tough-but-tender right hand woman Droushnakovi, and even the "traditional" women Alys and Kareen, all getting their chance to be awesome;

Sharon Shinn's Gillengaria Series (Mystic and Rider et. seq.), in which women of many different kinds are shown to be smart and powerful;

Bujold's Chalion books, with their female friendships; in Paladin of Souls even the whining antagonistic chatelaine gets her chance to shine in the end;

Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy, in which Althea Vestrit is strong from the beginning, but multiple women around her, including her small-minded and often cruel niece Malta, discover their own strengths and emerge as heroines by the end.

What are some more books that give us more than one heroine worth rooting for?
(No urban fantasy, please.)

The Silvered by Tanya Huff. Main two protags are a young male werewolf (basically) and a young female mage, but there are multiple other strong female characters, who are both mages and were-folk alike.

The Stepsister Scheme and others in the series by Jim C. Hines. ALL of the main characters are women, and all are talented and smart in their own very specific, very different ways. Also includes lots of "female other" characters, whom I know you enjoy.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. Again, multiple women who are all very different but very strong in their own special ways.

The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle. Nearly all main characters are women, with a few exceptions.

Just a few to get you started...

Thanks for this post. I'm with you! It really bugs me that there's often only one female character. In "TV Tropes" terms, it's called "The Smurfette Principle."

(See: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSmurfettePrinciple )

This is all too prevalent in urban fantasy, where you get the bad-@$$ female character surrounded by men (with whom she fights or flirts or both) and only occasional flat, often catty female supporting characters.

Other Beagle titles I would suggest: Tamsin (the titular character as well as the narrator are female and The Last Unicorn (again for the titular character as well as Molly Grue).

I'll try to pop back in with more when I'm not right about to go to bed. :)

The Belgariad and the Mallorean with Polgara, Ce'Nedra, Velvet and the various queens amongst others.

Sisters of the Raven and Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly feature mostly female protagonists and no Highlander syndrome.

IIRC, several female characters were given key roles in Mists of Avalon.

The first book that pops to mind is urban fantasy - the series starting with Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews.

Would Wheel of Time count? I've only read the first two (I didn't like them enough to continue), but I seem to remember multiple female characters.

All of the witches books by Terry Pratchett meet this. Most of the important characters in that arc are female, and they are all presented well.

In Reckless there are two heroines, Fox and Clara. The book mainly takes place in an alternate world based off fairy tales.

Dealing with Dragons has both Cimorene and Kazul. I should point out that Kazul is a dragon, so this may not be what you are looking for.

In Ella Enchanted, the main character has a female best friend whose name I cannot recall. The same goes for The Goose Girl. Both are fairy tale retelling.

6: Dealing with Dragons definitely does count; Kazul is unmistakably a heroine. There's also Morwen, though she doesn't get much play until Book 3.

In Discworld, certain books of the Night's Watch -- Feet of Clay and especially The Fifth Elephant -- would also count; the former introduces Cheery Littlebottom, and in the latter, Angua, Cheery, and Sam Vimes' good-natured Valkyrie-esque wife Sybil all have their moments. I mention these because the Night Watch books are my favorites of Pratchett's, Sam Vimes being my favorite character.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents has two intriguing heroines in Malicia and Peaches. The fact that Peaches is a rat in no way stops her from being a gal we can root for.

I suspect most of Tamora Pierce's books would count as well; for one thing, Alanna, the first of her "she-roes," figures prominently in the stories of the younger heroines. At least 85% of what Mercedes Lackey has written could also be mentioned here, The Wizard of London giving us at least three strong heroines, and female Heralds being plentiful in Valdemar.

Thanks for the quick responses, guys! I look forward to seeing what else we can come up with.

Ah, a thread after my own heart! There is a conspicuous women-shaped hole in a surprising amount of fantasy societies once you start looking- it's one of those things that's hard to unsee. I found a great example of the problem while browsing upcoming releases; witness this from the blurb of an upcoming Guy Gavriel Kay book, River of Stars:

"Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor—and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has."

Let's see: Mother? Doesn't seem like it. Sisters? Nope. Female friends? Of course not. Her story is about being the daughter of her awesome father, being "captivating" to another man, and alienating women because she's like a man and close to the emperor (because women don't do anything except fight over the attention of men, right?)

Now the male protagonist in the same book:

"Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate of Kitai. That moment on a lonely road changed his life—in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later—and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles towards the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north."

Let's see... his story is about being an effective bodyguard, being an outlaw, and getting caught up in politics and war. Mother, sisters, female friends or colleagues or acquaintances or superiors? Nope. Father, brothers, male friends in his story? Nope, this paragraph is all about him and his choices.

Now, this may tell more about the writers of the blurb than the book, which isn't out yet, but even if it is just the blurb, I find it disappointing that the protagonist alienating other women is being used as a selling point. Sigh.

I would also unfortunately unrecommend Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark, which I reread this year. The core concept of the Hames, separatist societies of women warriors who take in abandoned babies and can summon "shadow sisters" in moonlight, sounds like it would fit exactly into this thread, but unfortunately it's very much exceptionalist about its heroine, Jenna. In the first dozen or so pages, Jenna's adoptive mother alienates her shadow sister and the rest of the Hame with her monofocus on raising Jenna, and then when she dies according to the book's prophecy, Jenna is raised as a "child of the village" with no adult woman allowed to get close to her, the priestess of Great Alta set against her, and the rest of the girls unable to keep up with her skill in any discipline. Her friend Pynt, who basically hero-worships Jenna, is set aside as soon as a boy comes along and Jenna falls in love with him, and Pynt is pretty much written out all together at the end- the rest of the story revolves around the boy's political difficulties. I would have thought it would be really hard to write an all-woman society without any significant friendships or other relationships between women, but unfortunately this book managed it.

As for recommendations, I know I've pushed many of these before, but:

Jane Fletcher's Lyremouth chronicles, starting with the duology The Exile and the Sorcerer and The Traitor and the Chalice. The two leads are Tevi, a swordswoman from an island where women have enhanced strength thanks to a potion prepared in a magical chalice, and Jemeryl, a sorcerer who is currently posted at a remote village to serve its people as part of her training. Tevi's home society is not at all a happy utopia; the chalice's potion only works on women, and the women are warlike, macho, and extraordinarily heteronormative, with fragile men placed on the metaphorical pedestal- Tevi is an outsider, unable to live up to her mother and grandmother's skill in battle and interested only in women romantically. Confessing the latter to the wrong person gets her exiled to the continent, where she eventually meets Jem, who has alienated all of the villagers she's supposed to be serving by keeping to her tower and working on her magical studies and experiments instead of mingling with them. Jem and Tevi then try to figure out the origins of the chalice that gives Tevi's people their super-strength. The other two books in the series are also mysteries; in The Empress and the Acolyte, Jemeryl is studying under an Empress, Bykoda, who rules with an iron fist using magic- the Empress has foreseen her own inescapable death by murder, and asks Tevi and Jem to find the culprit and avenge her, and in The High Priest and the Idol, a former lover of Jem's, also a sorcerer, has gone renegade- he has found a way to nullify magic, and intends to do so in order to bring about equality between sorcerers and ordinary mortals, prevent more sorcerous wars, and prevent despots like Bykoda from carving out their own empires and basically enslaving the normal mortals under their rule.

Laurie J. Marks' The Watcher's Mask follows a two-souled woman, Alasil/Jamil. Alasil is a spy, and Jamil is an assassin, both of them in service to the Emperor- but then they find themselves having blackouts where neither of them can account for their actions. An athletic competition is due to take place in the capital soon, and a runner from the Asakeiri tribe that has refused to submit to the Emperor's rule is gaining a lot of popularity with the people- Alasil/Jamil is sent to visit the Asakeiri tribe and kill her, but the (also female) head of the Asakeiri has other plans for them. This is a lovely standalone book that does not end the way one might expect. The blurb on Amazon is inaccurate, but also somewhat spoilery. Unfortunately, this one is long out of print, but it's one of the best random purchases I've made.

Definitely Tamora Pierce, but I would especially recommend her Circle of Magic Quartet. It's for a younger audience than her Alanna books, but it's my favorite of her work- the series follows four children, three girls and a boy, from troubled backgrounds as they are trained in their particular forms of magic: Sandry, who has the magic of thread and spinning; Tris, a weather-mage; Daja, who has magic dealing with metal and the forge; and Briar (the lone boy), who has plant magic. There's a second quartet, The Circle Opens, that splits the kids up and follows each of them, a book after that that brings them back together, and a side-story focusing on a different character, but I think the first quartet remains the strongest of the series.

Patricia Wrede is most well-known for her Enchanted Forest Chronicles, but she also wrote five books set in the land of Lyra. Caught in Crystal follows Kayl, a retired swordswoman who was formerly part of a "Star Cluster" of the Sisterhood of Stars (an adventuring party of four women that includes a swordswoman, a sorceress, a demon-friend, and a healer). She left the Sisterhood after a disastrous journey that killed half of her Cluster, and fifteen years later is now a widow and mother of two, running the inn that she and her husband had built. A Sorceress from the Sisterhood comes looking for her, and circumstances send Kayl on the road with her children again to face the truth of what happened at the Tower. We have Kayl, the arrogant Sorceress Coranna who doesn't get along with her, Kayl's daughter Dara who starts learning magic from Coranna (and is mentioned in passing as the creator of the titular Raven Ring in a later Lyra book), and Kayl's old team-mate Bethelmy who's a demon-friend, not to mention the Sisterhood in the background- no shortage of plot-relevant women here.

There are a few older sword and sorcery books with a duo of leading women:

Mercedes Lackey's Tarma and Kethry (The Oathbound etc) are the popular choice here, but they haven't yet made it out of my TBR pile so I can't offer more specifics. Phyllis Ann Karr's Frostflower and Thorn (who, aside from the two novels, were also recurring characters throughout Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthologies) are along the same lines.

I really enjoyed the lesser-known Silverglass quartet, which follow the freelance swordswoman-adventurer Corson and the noble lady and sorceress Nyctasia who is on the run from her political enemies; Corson is initially hired to kill Nyctasia by these same enemies, but Nyctasia buys her off and hires her for protection instead. The first book is by far the weakest; the later books give the story more depth, and introduce other characters, like a branch of Nyctasia's extended family who runs a winery. (Nyctasia's branch of the family looks down on them because their money comes from trade.)

Anne Logston's Shadow books are also sword-and-sorcery, somewhat. Shadow's friendship with Lady Donya, the daughter of the High Lord of the city she lives in, plays a big part in the first book, and the second, Shadow Hunt, is basically all about Shadow's uneasy relationship with Blade, an immortal assassin who's framed Shadow for a theft to get Shadow's help against a magician who holds power over her. There are other books set in the same universe, including a third Shadow book that I haven't been able to track down. Her style reminds me a lot of Sharon Shinn, so I think fans of Shinn's work might like her books.

>6 pwaites: Wheel of Time occurred to me too, but from my memories I don't think that there's actually much interaction among the women, just between the women and the men (eg love interests). The whole "women are weaker than men with the Power, but they can become stronger through the power of cooperation!" rubbed me the wrong way a bit too, as well as the three boys (Rand, Mat, and Perrin) all being ta'veren, but Egwene not- the actions of the women in the story are definitely important, but I would argue that they are objectively "less special" than the leading men. I've been wanting to give at least the earlier books a re-read, though, because I think they did have a large impact on my taste in the genre when I read them at a young and impressionable age.

> 6,8 Yeah, certainly wouldn't have nominated WoT for this thread, as far as I remember the women seemed to all be some sort of whiny, pushy or full of tics, but part of it may be my general dislike for the series speaking.

>9 Jarandel: Yes, certainly by the time I finally stopped reading six or seven books in, all of his female characters seemed like the same person... I got the distinct impression that Jordan was of the "women are mysterious alien creatures that men can never understand" school.

I don't know about his upcoming book, but usually G. G. Kay writes lovely complex books with both strong women and men.. his Fionavar Tapestry series has two female protaganists who are friends and plenty of other strong women around. And Tigana has two strong women as main characters as well.

Sorcery and Cecelia seems an obvious fit here.

The Secret Country trilogy by Pamela Dean

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull involves a female protagonist with female sidekick and is my favorite urban fantasy.

Oathbound by Mercedes Lackey

Connie Willis' Blackout and All Clear books.

The Steerswoman's Road by Rosemary Kirstein has two strong female companions.

For that matter, the first two Narnia books involve two sisters and two brothers.

and if you don't mind some light farce, The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy has one (strong-minded mostly) princess per prince.

>11 merrystar: That's more in line with the positive reviews I've heard about Kay (not that, unfortunately, quality writing always precludes this particular problem). Good call also on Sorcery and Cecelia and the Steerswoman books. You've also reminded me that I need to pull War for the Oaks out again for a reread, I haven't read it in ages.

With the Narnia books, though, given the way that Lewis sets up Susan as no longer a friend of Narnia by the end of the series (due to her interest in boys and fashion), I would personally exclude it for the same qualitative reasons I exclude Wheel of Time, though it is a technical pass. However, like with Jarandel's dislike of the WoT above, this may be my indifference to the Pevensie children showing; I read The Magician's Nephew first, and the rest of the series never lived up to its magic for me- I'm not sure I even read any of the other books beyond The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe all the way through when I was younger, though I do remember skimming them.

I definitely second The steerswoman's road by Rosemary Kirstein. It has 2 very strong female characters, whose friendship is an important part of the story. They are difficult to come by, but very good.

On top of that, I'm thinking of Kushiel's dart. The main heroine Phedre and the queen Ysandre are friends and are both strong characters.

The black jewels trilogy by Anne Bishop also fits; Jaenelle has several strong queens as friends. Most of those are not described in detail, but a few of them are (Karla for instance).

Just went through my bookcase and found another one: The hidden city by Michelle West and sequels. The main character is Jay, she has a group of homeless kids around her, some of which are female, and some of which are very strong (Duster!). Throughout the books, she also becomes friends with the female ruler of House Terafin.

Robin McKinley usually has a whole cast of wonderful, strong female characters. I'm thinking particularly of Sunshine (title character), who has the support of several compelling men and women.

The Blue Sword likewise has men and women, strong in different ways, contributing to the heroine's success. I believe I read that McKinley wrote The Blue Sword as a rebuttal to the "helpless women abducted and raped who then fall in love with their captors" genre. She does write mainly for YAs, but I discovered her in my 40s and I find her writing more satisfying than a lot of adult fantasy.

14: I never turn my nose up at YA except for all the Twilight clones, and McKinley emphatically does not write Twilight clones. I once had the "difference" between YA and adult fantasy explained to me at a DragonCon panel: it could be summed up in a single word -- hope. And who doesn't want that? Good writing is always worth reading, regardless of the audience toward which it is marketed.

Though I have great affection for both The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, my favorite of the McKinley books I've read so far is Spindle's End, a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth that does away with the heroine's passivity. (Passivity is never an interesting quality in any character, male or female.) This book also defies Highlander syndrome, with three major heroines I can remember -- Katarina the fairy, Rosie the princess who'd rather be a veterinarian, and Peony the princess who should have been -- and a sizable cast of minor female characters, both good and bad.

On the YA front, StarCrossed is quite good, I think. The friendship that develops between our (female) protagonist and another strong female character is pretty key to the story (and very Bechdel-friendly). There's also an evolving relationship with a male character, but it's about on par with the f/f friendship in terms of importance to the plot.

The starring roles in Chaz Brenchley's Outremer series are pretty evenly divided between 2 girls and 2 boys.

Patricia McKillip has the Cygnet duology with action alternating between two women, Meguet and Nyx.

Midori Snyder's Queen's Quarter series - four heroines at the center of a rebellion.

This thread must live!

A couple of recent reads that might qualify here:

Wolfwalker, which I have finished, and Shadow Leader, which I'm close to the middle of, have two fascinating female characters at their center. One of them isn't human, but for me, that's not a problem. There are two other human females we see a lot of, but they haven't really impressed me so far; they seem designed to be "girly" to contrast with the tougher and more independent-spirited heroine. Nothing is wrong, per se, with being "girly" -- the "girly girl" may sometimes be written as having strength of her own -- but these two are written as not just less tough and less strong than the men around them, but less intelligent. Still, Dion and Hishn carry the story.

Kate Forsyth's The Tower of Ravens has a full cast of females worth keeping an eye on, including Nina, the leader of the company, and Blackthorn, the gorgeous winged mare. I particularly appreciate that Nina is both leader and mother. Even though I haven't read it yet (though now I certainly intend to), I understand that The Witches of Eileanan series also has more than one heroine worth rooting for, though in its case, unlike the later series, pretty much all of them are human. (The female Other in this series is eeeevil; the ripple effects of her evil are in evidence in the later series, so I already know quite a bit about her.)

Martha Wells' Raksura series (The Cloud Roads, et. seq.) has a plentiful cast of female characters, both good and evil. My only issue is that, in the second book The Serpent Sea, the females are minor characters, with the exception of Jade. I wish in particular that Balm, a female fighter who was hypnotized by evil in the first book and now is desperate for some way to redeem herself, had played a bigger role. I always hope characters like that will get their chance for redemption and am disappointed when they don't. Still, Wells is an author whose work I'm very interested in exploring further.

Aside from Peter S. Beagle and Jim C. Hines, who are some other male authors who excel at writing multiple heroines? Female authors cannot be relied upon exclusively to get the job done. Sniffing around this site and Goodreads has certainly shown me that there are many female authors -- with good reputations, too -- who don't put female characters at the center of their stories, who are simply more interested in the situations and struggles of male characters. (Has Naomi Novik, for example, written a novel -- not a short story, but a novel -- with a female protagonist? Carol Berg, too, has a reputation for preferring to center her stories around men, though on occasion a female lead may creep in. Then there's Sarah Monette, whose works tend to focus on two heroes in love with each other, with women playing comparatively minor roles.) I don't begrudge them this; certainly ANY writer, male or female, should write about what, and whom, he or she is most interested in. But I have noticed that while we barely raise an eyebrow when female authors center their works on male protagonists, we have a harder time trusting male authors to get their female characters right. This hardly seems fair, or even really accurate. If some female authors find male characters more interesting and write them accordingly, why wouldn't we believe that some male authors might actually be interested enough in female characters to write them with complex and individual shadings, and might even write more than one of them in the same book?

Robert Jordan, as I understand it, wouldn't really qualify; he has a reputation for really liking his gender stereotypes. But Charles de Lint, Guy Gavriel Kay (despite that disheartening blurb for River of Stars), and Jim Butcher, for example, seem genuinely invested in most of the female characters they create. Who are some others, and what are some of their best works?

I have to admit that I just don't read that many male authors overall these days. I think part of it is because I don't see many male authors (published, at least, which must be taken into consideration) who work in the particular subgenre of fantasy I tend to prefer, small-cast, character-driven fantasy set in a created-world. I find from the unscientific sample of work I find while browsing at the library or in a bookstore that blurbs on books by male authors tend to focus on lone, awesome male protagonists (see eg Harry Dresden), who often have trouble around women or are motivated by the deaths of a girlfriend, wife, daughter, etc, or there's an ensemble cast with the token single "strong woman" who I can predict is going to be revealed to be "secretly vulnerable and emotional" and probably need to be rescued by the end of the story.

Of course, to be fair, many works from female authors I pick up on a shelf have as their protagonist that same strong but vulnerable woman type, so this could be just the trend in the genre. As you say, the gender of an author has little to do with good representation of women. I read a comment by a female author recently in a discussion on the rarity of multiple female protagonists where she noted that she too had done this, with two men being the main characters of her space series and having more men than women in her ensemble cast- she then wondered if this was due to some "biological tendency to focus on men as being more important than women"- head, meet desk. (Unfortunately, I had already bought the first book in the series, The Courtesan Prince- it has slowly slipped down in priority on my TBR pile...)

I really enjoyed Mark Anthony's Beyond the Pale- it's a portal fantasy focusing on a man and a woman who (separately) cross over into a fantasy world. They do not end up romantically paired off, and they in fact end up in different parts of the world until near the end of the book, so Anthony switches between them. Grace is an ER doctor who crosses over after a man is brought into the ER with a lump of metal in place of his heart, and she ends up in a kingdom where she's initially mistaken for a fairy queen- the king takes advantage of this and her lack of other alliances and recruits her to be his spy. She develops a friendship with one of the noblewomen (who has a congenital birth defect that makes her unable to use one of her arms), and from what I remember spends a lot of time interacting with other noblewomen. The other protagonist, Travis, travels with a (male) bard and a powerful sorceress.

There are five books after it in the series, which I haven't read yet, but I believe that Travis ends up in a committed relationship with a male knight in later books- I've gotten the impression that Grace remains single, but that may or may not be true. Overall, I've learned that any book or series where I see reviewers complaining about "political correctness" ruining their experience (ie giving characters who aren't straight white men equal screen time and importance in the narrative) is probably right up my alley. Anthony also writes under the name Galen Beckett- I have the first two books in that series in my TBR, but am holding off until I can finish the first.

Jim Grimsley's The Ordinary centers around a translator and an immortal wizard, both women, in a science fantasy setting. I found it a very enjoyable book except for the part where it sort of lacks an ending. It's set in the same universe as his earlier Kirith Kirin and later The Last Green Tree, but all three are standalone.

Chris Wooding's middle-grade anime-inspired Broken Sky series made a big impact on me when I was young- it has an ensemble cast that is fairly evenly split by gender. I'm not sure how well it would hold up now, but it follows a pair of fraternal twins, a brother and a sister, as their home is destroyed and they join up with the resistance movement to overthrow the evil king.

Fairly typical, but the thing that struck me when I was reading it was that the sister is the one who is in control of her magical powers while the brother starts off somewhat fumbling and that she's the one that becomes consumed with anger and vengeance and capable of violence (for example, she kills several of the king's soldiers during an escape in the first book, while her brother is queasy at the thought and thinks that those people have lives and families too). This strains their relationship greatly and they grow apart, and the narrative does not portray her as right, but neither is she made into a villain, which is what shocked me with the books when I was young. Female characters on the side of good are so rarely allowed to be angry or hate without their emotions being laughed at or invalidated as childish or unreasonable or "cute" or "sexy", see for example every time a male love interest tells a heroine she's cute when she's angry, or every time a male character laughs at the futility of a heroine's attacks.

This happens especially with attacks using physical force rather than with a ranged weapon or magic- because evidently in those fantasy worlds, biology is different enough than Earth's that not only do men have more height and muscle mass than women on average, meaning that in the real world some women will be stronger than some men, in the fantasy worlds they are completely unaffected when any woman, no matter how skilled or strong, attacks them using martial arts techniques, or with a sword, etc. It's either that or mysteriously nothing in these women's extensive training (or experience from years as a vampire hunter/mercenary/etc) prepared them to compensate for this- perhaps that's why female villains are also relatively rare, the heroines have been defeating them all off the page.

The Broken Sky books were originally intended as a trilogy, then intended as a 27-book serial with each of the trilogy books split up into nine "acts" (the first four or five of these were released like this I believe), finally released as nine books in the UK and seven books in the US (with the last three UK books bound into one volume for the US volume 7), and then republished recently in the UK as the trilogy format it was originally intended to be. Despite the fact that the republication provides the books in the format the author originally intended, I'd recommend the seven/nine book edition because it includes more artwork of the characters.

One final note, I'm not quite sure I'd agree on the Jim Butcher front, at least the Dresden Files books (I haven't read any of his other work). Admittedly, it's been a while since I read what I did of the series (the first three or four books) but I definitely remember being irritated by Harry's "chauvinism" and the way the female characters seemed to be twisted to make him justified (eg the tough cop, Murphy, who is irritated by Harry's opening doors for her etc needs to be rescued and also has the "secret vulnerability" thing going on, and besides her all of the rest of the female characters I encountered were either a. murder victims, b. really sexy but Harry is able to "resist temptation," or c. sexy and love interests.) If memory serves, there was also a magical love potion made of chocolate, romance novels, alcohol, and money somewhere in there (guaranteed to be irresistible to women, of course!), and bad things happening to Harry's girlfriend in order to serve as motivation for him. Like I said, though, I haven't read his other series, so I'm not sure if this kind of thing is endemic to his work or only present in the Dresden books- it may be a case of unquestioned replication of sexist noir genre tropes.

18: I was thinking more of the Codex Alera books, where Kitai and Isana are both impressive, and Lady Placida, when she does show up (admittedly she's a comparatively minor character), kicks butt. (I recall reading that Butcher based both her personality and her physical appearance on Bujold's Cordelia.) Amara is a bit of a whiner, and spends an awful lot of time in "oh-isn't-he-just-wonderful" mode with regard to her big strong husband, but even she has her awesome moments. Since I don't read urban fantasy, I haven't read The Dresden Files.

So it's a "biological" tendency to focus on men as more important than women? Here I thought that tendency was social, and that part of the challenge and invitation of fantasy was to play around with those social expectations! Silly me! I will be sure to avoid that author now. It doesn't hurt to have a list of authors and books to avoid, as well as one of authors and books to read.

It sounds like Grimsley and Wooding would be worth checking out. I would agree that there's a strong tendency to depict male heroes as still heroic even if they are willing to kill their opponents, whereas a woman, if she's willing to kill, must be evil. Even if she kills in self-defense, if she's on the side of good, she's expected to anguish about it.

Though I found the military tech talk in On Basilisk Station difficult to slog through, I have to give David Weber credit for eschewing Highlander Syndrome and giving Honor Harrington a fair share of female comrades and allies.

>18 sandstone78: Are those Broken sky books worth reading to adults? It is indeed rare for female anger to be allowed to stand as is...

Well, after a perusal of my shelves, I'm sad to say I'm pretty well stumped with regard to traditional fantasy. About the closest book I could come up with would be David Weber's science fantasy story, Path of the Fury, which has several strong females in various incarnations.

>19 kceccato: Interesting- perhaps the later Dresden books have improved too, then.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a computer programmer, and I have heard more than enough about the supposed innate superiority of men in my field to last me a lifetime; being a living, breathing exception to the rule has made me quite cynical about these sorts of claims. (In addition, my work over the past three years has been at a medical school as part of a team running a database for research neuroscientists' study data, so I have learned quite a lot about how functional brain imaging data is collected and studied- as one may expect, things are very, very rarely so clear-cut as popular science reporting makes them out to be.) I am lucky enough to not suffer from Highlander Syndrome in my work, either- I work with several other female programmers whose work I greatly respect, and I want the heroines I read about get to do the same :)

I looked up the quote because I didn't want to misrepresent the author's words- it can be found here. The phrase she uses is "some intrinsic bias in human nature towards focusing attention on men." Other commenters question her on this, but she did not return to answer them. The series looked like a space opera of the same tone as perhaps Catherine Asaro's Skolia books or the Liaden books, both the blurb of the book and the sample I read prominently featured a female character, and reviews praised the author's handling of gender and sexuality issues (one of the male leads is gay). I still intend to try the book, since I have already bought it, but I have lowered my expectations in that area appropriately.

It also came to mind that Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series (Jhereg and sequels) have a few major recurring female characters, though the main character is male. Unfortunately, this is one of those series where the earlier books set up a lot of mysteries and conflicts, but there is less and less plot advancement, character development, and explanation of these mysteries as the series goes on- I have not read the two most recent books published, though. This is another case where comments the author's made have diminished my enjoyment of his work- I stopped following his blog after he posted this witticism, which I found just needlessly hateful; a more recent post I saw while fetching that link about the personal and the political where he proposes the argument that women calling out individual instances of sexist behavior, ie talking about "their feelings," cannot solve "broad social problems" because it is not "objective" nor a "scientific approach" reinforces my belief that he just doesn't get it. (For example, isn't collecting and corroborating incidents of sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination a good way to understand the way these beliefs are expressed in society and therefore... er, a scientific approach?)

>20 zjakkelien: I haven't read them since I was in my early teens, so I can't honestly say. I was a less critical reader then, and somewhat enamored with anything anime-like; I hope to reread the books sometime this year, though I'm a bit afraid to find them less than I remember them. I picked up the The Weavers of Saramyr last year intending to read it, and I found the prose in the first few pages quite purple, and I checked out his graphic novel Pandemonium from the library as well, but found that the jokes fell flat for me; looking at the excerpt available on Amazon for the first Broken Sky book, though, I don't see the same irritations. I see on his blog he is going to release a "remastered" version of the series in ebook- based on my dislike of the direction he has taken his style since Broken Sky, I would personally recommend instead tracking down the original print versions if possible.

Runelords series by David Farland and Lord of the Isles by David Drake both have multiple strong female characters... first to come to mind since I pitted two female characters from their books in a versus thread lol.

In Game of Thrones there's many female characters and they all have different roles in the books that are important. I thought he did a really good job with it.

I would agree that A Song of Fire and Ice has many virtues; it's powerfully readable, beyond a doubt. But I am not sure it really belongs here.

The female characters are certainly interesting, but I don't know that I would call them heroines. They range from gray (Arya, Sansa, Danaerys, Catelyn) to pitch black (Cersei, Melisandre). None of them seem to have much kindness or compassion about them, with the possible exception of the physically strong but painfully naive Brienne (and, of course, we see how she's treated like garbage by every person she meets). There are no female "white hat" equivalents to Eddard or Jon or Davos.

Part of the proof lies here:
In all the pages of these books, is there a single example of a loving, loyal relationship between two female friends, or even two female relatives?

So while I'd agree that the books have plenty of female characters, I would dispute that they have more than one heroine -- or, for that matter, even one.

I dunno. Arya is definitely my hero.

27: Arya is my favorite among them.

How about Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion and the more recent sequels? There are a lot of strong female characters in those books, and Moon's science fiction also has them.

In science fiction, I'd recommend C. J. Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur and its sequels. In fact, Cherryh rather turns the phenomenon on its head as the Hana are an alien society in which the males are sex objects and protected and the females run the place--and the space-faring trading ships which is where we find Pyanfar and her kin. Great story.

Lots of great female characters in the Liaden books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller--Miri, Priscilla, Anne, Aelliana, Anthora, Nova, Natesa, and Theo.

I'm also a fan of Arya. She's infinitely sensible in difficult circumstances.

Marion Zimmer Bradley had multiple heroines in some of her Darkover books as well as in The Mists of Avalon. The Shattered Chain, Thendara House, and several others.

I've start reading Three parts dead today, and so far it is awesome! It has the most amazing world, a strange concoction of lawyers, magic and technology. Reasons to mention it in this thread? Well, it has a very capable heroine (with another plus, she is colored), and her boss is female (even more capable). The two of them are working on resurrecting a god and finding out who murdered him.

Rereading the original post, I see the request is for classical fantasy, and I guess this is more steampunk or something (I'm not always good at classifying books), but still I think this book is worth mentioning here.

>32 zjakkelien: The cover caught my eye on that one in the store, but reading the summary I was afraid it might get a little... weird, grotesque, and/or grim for the sake of being weird, grotesque, and/or grim, like say China Mieville, whose work I tried and bounced hard off of before, or other "slipstream" or "new weird" authors. Did you get that feel from it?

Well, I haven't read China Mieville, so I can't compare. Taking into account that I've read only about 20% so far, I don't think it is weird, grotesque or grim for the sake of being weird, and so on. It is definitely different. For instance, the fire god Kos provides energy to the city. One might think the energy goes into magical constructs, but this is only partially true. It also goes into technical structures like elevators. Because of this, the priesthood of Kos has functions like 'novice technician', 'technical cardinal', and 'machinist'. Worship consists of praying, but also of keeping steam machines running and polishing electrodes. All magic is done by using soulstuff, I guess a sort of life energy. Soulstuff can be exchanged and funnily enough, this makes lawyers particularly important, because they manage the contracts, and you certainly don't want loopholes when you're dealing in your own life energy...
The protagonist works for a kind of law firm, except they specialize in resurrecting the dead. So yes, I would call all of that weird, but it's not grotesque or grim. From what I can tell, the magic system and world is well thought through and fits together.

Personally, I dislike it when authors keep throwing magical creatures at you as if they could not choose and decided to have them all. One of the reasons I dislike Jim Butcher. But in this case, the different forms of magic and the magical creatures seem to be part of one construct, not loose items thrown together in a jumble. So I really don't think there's any weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and like I said, I don't think it's grim or grotesque at all.

I'm reading the Jean le Flambeur-trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince wich is officially sci-fi but as I don't understand quantum physics I just read it for fantasy and it works. ;) Both parts have more than one interesting and active female characters, including the song-born spacecraft. :)

I've just finished Silence in Solitude, which added a strong second female character as a counterpoint to our heroine- Aili, a planetary governor's daughter being held as a political prisoner for her father's good behavior. Aili was raised as a noblewoman in her very restrictive and gender-segregated society, and as such does not have the competence our pilot heroine does with things like guns, but this is not presented as a mark against her by the author- she's shown to be intelligent, practical, and capable.

She's also a chess prodigy, who was rated as capable of competing at the highest tournament level when she entered an open tournament, though gender restrictions prevent her from competing as most men do. (This isn't a major plot point, but she does pass coded messages through a correspondence chess game to a soldier loyal to her father, who she's sort of fallen in love with through their chess games.) I'm hoping that she has a role in The Empress of Earth as well.

>34 zjakkelien: That sounds promising. The kitchen sink effect is a little bit of what I was thinking of- the Mieville I tried to read, Perdido Street Station, was a gritty urban environment with rampant drug use and filth and crime lords and filth and the like, steampunk-like technology in conflict with magic, and various non-humans like half-dung-beetle people and half-bird people, so (without any real justification, but nonetheless) I've been a bit off of the whole "urban fantasy in an invented city" setting ever since.

>29 ronincats: Going back a little to @ronincats' comments on the Liaden books, since I've just re-read the Agent of Change sequence (and read through the three "Space Regencies" last year)- there are a lot of cool female characters in the Liaden universe, but I find that many of the authorial decisions kind of undermine their coolness. I hasten to add that I do not in any way think this has been any conscious agenda on the authors' part so much as it is a lot of insidious little things and unquestioned use of tropes that added up to annoyance for me as I was reading.

SPOILERS follow. Pretty much every non-Korval woman we see has had the plot arc "give up entire previous life to pal around with Korval lifemate."

Miri is on the run and decides to stay with Val Con instead of going back with the mercenaries, Priscilla is in exile and working awful jobs, Natesa apparently gives up her gig as a respected Sector Judge to be Pat Rin's bodyguard/second in command, Anne leaves her planet and her teaching position to live at Trealla Fantrol with Er Thom, Aelliana escapes her horrible family in Scout's Progress but then also leaves her teaching position in Mouse and Dragon (and becomes even more dependent on him by the end of that book)... and there's a pattern as well of the women's use of their talents happening offscreen.

Most egregiously, Aelliana's first courier run that takes place between chapters (shown in a separate, previously published short story short story) in Mouse and Dragon, the culmination of her pilot training and a major character moment, but also Miri's mercenary commanding (we see the aftermath, but not her in action during the battle), Natesa's various duties (in fact, I don't think we ever get Natesa's POV in I Dare), Anne's scholarship (we might see her grading papers once)... Priscilla fares a bit better in that we see her exercising her dramliz abilities several times (she's also probably my favorite besides Scout's Progress era Aelliana).

The relationships also aren't quite equal. We're told Pat Rin and Natesa are both about equal in gun skills, but I Dare objectively gives him a point higher score in their shooting competition. Aelliana has great natural piloting skill, but Daav has to teach her to bring it out. Miri gets into hand to hand fights, and at least twice the narrative calls out that she's using moves Val Con had taught her- not to mention the Scout skills and knowledge necessary to be delm that she gets from him, whereas he's not marked out as picking up any awesome skills from her during their lifemate skill exchange because I guess he knows everything she knows and more.

Anthora and Nova, being members of Korval to start, don't have this problem, but... look at the way they are handled in the books compared to Val Con, Shan, and Pat Rin. Val Con is a Master Pilot, Scout Commander, First-In, expert in a ton of languages, first person to capture an Yxtrang, and has all of his Agent of Change training that he subverts for his own use. Shan is a Master Pilot, Master Trader, Captain of his own ship, and a Healer well on his way to being some kind of powerful dramliz by the end of the sequence. Pat Rin isn't a pilot, no, but he's a crack shot able to practically take over a world. Nova is Korval's somewhat stuffy First Speaker, resident on the planet, until she turns the delm's ring over to its proper owner- she's also a pilot, and beautiful. Extremely beautiful. We're reminded practically every time she shows up that she's beautiful.

Anthora is the most powerful dramliz on the planet, and in fact the most powerful dramliz in recent history... but rather than being competent and owning her power with authority the way Val Con and Shan do, she's dreamy and scatterbrained, and when she gets captured in I Dare, the most-powerful-dramliz thing means about nothing and she only escapes with the help of her lifemate and a supernaturally talented cat.

Then, in the prequels, there's Kareen, who's very much the no-fun nagging woman trying to spoil poor Daav and Er Thom's fun, and she's also a Bad Mother to boot.

I do like this series and find it an engaging read because of the fun tendency towards witty banter and the genuine liking the characters have for each other, but these things irritated me as I was reading, and I wouldn't particularly recommend the Agent of Change sequence or the Space Regencies on account of the female characters. I have higher hopes for the Theo books and for Cantra in the Great Migration duology, but I haven't read those yet.

Charles de Lint's The Onion Girl and the Jack of Kinrowan duology, as well as several others. (Jack is a girl, by the way. )

Two dystopian near-future sci-fi (non-YA, non-romance!):
In Moxyland 2 of the 4 POV characters are female, and in Harmony there are two female leading characters and even most minor characters are female.

Peter V. Brett's books also have amazing heroines (Leesha, Inevera and Reena, at least).
There are 3 published so far (and I thought it'd be a trilogy, but there's going to be 5, so don't start yet if you don't like cliffhangers, hehe)

Having suffered through Highlander Syndrome with Magic Lost, Trouble Found, as well as, to a lesser extent, The Raven Ring, it's good to move on to a couple of other books in which interactions between major female characters are plentiful:

I'm just now getting into Stained Glass Monsters; I'm at 16% on my Kindle (I do miss page numbers), and so far there have been four, count 'em, FOUR important female characters introduced who seem to be on the Good side. They're all human, but hey, I can't have everything.

The Color of Distance, my sci-fi selection, has two point of view characters, one human, one alien, both female. The book also boasts plenty of minor female characters in various roles; the alien society depicted here is agreeably gender-egalitarian -- at least so far.

Dun Lady's Jess, which I finished about two months ago, has at least four major female characters in sympathetic roles. I also liked a fifth woman, but she turned out to be a more minor character than I'd hoped; still, four is a pretty good number of heroines to root for. And one of them is Other.

Another pleasant surprise I finished not long ago is Justin Macumber's Haywire, which passes the Bechdel Test with two important female characters, one of whom is genetically engineered so she could almost be considered Other. I was disappointed with the way the regular-human heroine was sidelined for the last third of the book, but still, it does count.

Then there's The Witches of Wenshar. I don't think Barbara Hambly does Highlander Syndrome; at least she hasn't in any of her books I've read so far.

I just finished reading Darkborn by Alison Sinclair. From the cover, I expected it to be fluffy, but it turned out to have quite some depth to it. There are two societies living side-by-side, the darkborn and the lightborn. The darkborn cannot stand the light, the lightborn cannot stand the dark. There are other differences as well: the darkborn shun magic and like women to be ornamental, the lightborn are fine with magic and see women as equal to men. Although this first book focuses on darkborn society, I was amazed with the number of strong women in it. The story is told from several perspectives, 2 male, 1 female, but to me, the true protagonist is the woman, Telmaine. Most of her life, she has conformed to society and therefore has had to hide her magic. Despite of that it is clear she had courage and strength, choosing to marry a psychiatrist whom her family does not approve of, and shepherding outcasts of society wherever she can. When events force her to use her powers, she does so with true courage and determination.
Despite the rules of her society, however, there are clearly other strong women around her. Her husband's sister, who has left society to become a doctor and mage. Telmaine's best friend is unfortunately rather dumb, but despite of that, she does not lack courage. Then there is another woman mage, and the lightborn assassin who lives next door.

Admittedly, Telmaine is not friends with any of the women mages (she has felt to scared to reveal herself to associate to closely with a mage), but she is in a process of transformation during the book and learns to come to terms with her own magic. I was definitely impressed with her, and what I also like is that the two men in her life (the other protagonists) may have been worried about her safety at times, but they also recognized her strength and ability and never belittled her or considered her less able for being a woman.

>41 zjakkelien:: I read this and the sequel last year and thought it was really good. I too was impressed with the treatment of women, how they managed to be strong and have agency despite living in a society where people are expected to conform to traditional gender roles.

Darkborn and Lightborn are both on my shelf. (I haven't acquired Shadowborn yet but I need to do that.) I will definitely give those a look.

I'm resurrecting this thread to say that I just finished the Kate Elliott trilogy that begins with Cold Magic. Its main characters are two female cousins who grew up as close as sisters. There are men involved (family, enemies, co-conspirators), but the two women are loyal to each other first. And there are non-human characters, and magic, and politics. Lots of cool world-building and many multi-racial people. Recommended!

I also liked the Darkborn series that was mentioned above.

44: I just finished The Spiritwalker Trilogy not long ago. You're absolutely right: heroines are plentiful. Cat and Bee are the main ones, but I'm also fond of the girl from Expedition (whose name is eluding me right now) who strikes out on her own to become one of the General's Amazons. None of the few female authority figures we meet are sympathetic, but then, NONE of the authority figures, of either gender, are truly sympathetic. All the characters are complex individuals.

I hope to get to know both Floria and Baltasar's sister better when I read Lightborn. I actually thought that Baltasar's sister was the most wholly admirable woman in Darkborn and wished that other characters -- her brother included -- had appreciated her more.

Other recent reads that merit a mention (for good or ill) here:

The Dark Hand of Magic represented, for me, a big step backward from The Witches of Wenshar and The Ladies of Mandrigyn. While the first and second books featured multiple sympathetic heroines, in the last book Starhawk was absolutely the only female character I did not hate. So I guess Barbara Hambly DOES do Highlander Syndrome on occasion (reversing my position from post 40).

Tanya Huff's The Silvered, however, is on the side of Good in this thread; powerful heroines abound, and we get to see the perspectives of two of them. Splendid book.

Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead also has multiple tough, competent female characters. Three of them are given point-of-view attention. And not a romantic plot in sight!

Jim C. Hines's The Stepsister Scheme certainly belongs in this thread. It's the first time I've read anything by a male author in which ALL the major characters are female.

Ben C. Dobson's Scriber has a male protagonist, but all his important relationships are with female characters, and many of them are impressive. His most important relationship, with female lead Bryndine, is not romantic, but is rather a strong, solid male/female friendship. So Dobson does a number of things right, as we can see.

Mark Anthony's Beyond the Pale has three interesting and powerful heroines.

Caught in Crystal, mentioned up-thread, has, as the earlier post states, a number of female characters who are important to the plot. I was disappointed, however, to find that only Kayl and Bryn are depicted sympathetically. All the female magic users -- including Kayl's "friend" Barthelmy -- are portrayed as arrogant, bigoted, and downright unpleasant; the only maybe-decent one is Kayl's daughter Dara, and Kayl most emphatically does NOT want her daughter learning any magic. It's good to remember the Frontier Magic series and A Matter of Magic and know that Wrede doesn't always paint female magic users in such a negative light.

Two books I've read recently that stand out in this regard:

Fire in the Mist -- Faia and Medwind. Though Faia is the protagonist, Medwind gets almost as much page time, and she takes the lead in the follow-up book, Bones of the Past (which I still need to read).

The Steel Seraglio -- Too many to count. Here we have an entire community of heroic women, though Gursoon, Zuleikha, and Rem stand out.

For straight-forward high-fantasy with a female protagonist and multiple female characters, some of whom have conversations and friendships, I would strongly recommend Michelle Sagara's Cast In… series.

Elizabeth Bear's The Eternal Sky series merits an emphatic mention here.

Let's see, we have Samarkar, Hrahima, Tsering, Edene, and Yangchen (thanks to Character Development), and I think the poetess (name escapes me at the moment) may qualify as well. Saadet is a villainess, but she's a complex one and sympathetic at the strangest times. These are just the ones whose point of view we get. Secondary and tertiary roles are plentiful, male and female.

But Michelle West's The Broken Crown may take the prize. So many women figure prominently in this story that I won't even try to name them all.

I admit I took against the Cast In... series for a couple of reasons: 1) In this universe, all dragons are male, and 2) I hear one of them falls in love with the central heroine, so we get that human gal/Other guy scenario that rubs me the wrong way of late. I had not heard it, like The Broken Crown, had a plentiful cast of sympathetic female figures. But I'll consider giving it a look.

Curse of the Mistwraith and sequels. Admittedly the brothers are the main heroes. But Elaine plays a massive part later on and there are a lot of powerful female companions amongst the clans.

>48 kceccato:. I think that the spoiler reasons for giving Michelle Sagara a miss are only half correct. From memory, all of the dragons mentioned fit your stereotype. However, the protagonist's love life is only a reason to avoid the novel if you yourself are looking for a little romance to spice up the series.

It's very much the story of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who fights her way into the fantasy equivalent of the police force, and who, partly through moral fortitude, and partly through various bad fantasy tropes, comes to the attention of more and more powerful folks, and gradually gains their trust and support. I'm not arguing that it's deep, or even entirely politically correct; just that it meets the criteria of avoiding the single female heroine syndrome.

BTW, I entirely agree that Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts series, is also a paragon of multiple strong female characters.

>12sandstone78.

Regarding Guy Gavriel Kay. Post-Fionavar, I read most of his works as having very strong female characters, and I would place his most recent novels in this category too.

However, Kay fails the Bechdel test from time to time. For instance, The Sarantine Mosaic has (from memory) at least five different very strong female characters, but we mainly see them from the POV of the protagonist, a male mosaicist. We know, indirectly, that the female characters interact, but we don't see it.

Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan has one very strong female character. This isn't Highlander Syndrome, per se; it's in the structure of the story, which a fantasy that explores religious zealotry and tolerance by retelling of the Christrianization of Spain. Each of the three main characters is from one the three stand-in religions (standing in for Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), and it so happens that the "Jewish" character is female.

A Song for Arbonne on the other hand has multiple strong female characters, and is indeed the story of how a country of troubadours and lovers and goddess worshippers overcome the aggressions of a male-chauvinist militaristic neighboring state.

Summary: from my perspective, GGK tends to write from a male POV, but he writes well and with feminist sensibilities.