Top Ten Favorite Kick-Ass Heroines

Posted on October 30, 2012 by christinasr

Favorite kick-ass heroines? Wow. When I read that topic, I was just lost. Don’t they belong in YA novels or in urban fantasy or something like that? I suddenly couldn’t remember having read a single book with kick-ass heroines in it. Or do I? Maybe a kick-ass heroine doesn’t have to be someone who kicks down bad guys and fight for her life day in and day out. Maybe kick-ass can mean something else – or someone else. I don’t know. I don’t think that I need to read certain genres to read books with kick-ass heroines in them – it is just that impression the term ‘kick-ass heroines’ gives me. Anyway, my list tries to incorporate some more unusual kick-ass heroines… I don’t know if I succeeded or not – we’ll see.

As usual, the Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Ronja from Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter by Astrid Lindgren. Yes, Ronja, the girl from the children’s book. Her father is strong and a leader of men. But he has no chance against Ronja. When he doesn’t want her to hang out with the son of his worst enemy, she packs up and leaves his castle and goes to live in a cave. She trains horses, she heals horses, she teaches her father about friendship. She’s tough and loving and she’s the literary character, I named my first child after.
Offred from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Offred is a woman living in a dystopic world where women who can have babies, are valuable and are kept as a kind of breeding cows for wealthy men in power. Offred still remembers her life before, her life with her husband and daughter – and she does what she has to do to live.
The mother from Room by Emma Donoghue. This mother has been kidnapped, kept in a single room for years, raped over and over. She has a son by her rapist – and she manages to bring her and her child away from the kidnapper and to safety. Even though things get complicated in the outside world, she’s still pretty amazing for doing what she had to to rescue her child.
The mother, Eva, from We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Eva fights the worst kind of demons – her own self-doubts, her failure as a mother. And she really has some huge doubts to fight after her son turned out to be a high school killer. We get to know her through the letters she writes her husband, detailing her life and her thoughts as her son was born and grew up.
Alexia Tarabotti from The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger. Alexia is special – she has an ability to turn werewolves and vampires human just by touching her. She has an even bigger ability to get into trouble. But whatever happens, she always comes out on top – although not always with her dignity intact. But give her a parasol and she’s ready for everything.
Hermione Granger from The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling. Hermione. Oh, nerdy geeky Hermione. She’s just a book nerd as first but she sure shows every desired kick-ass heroine ability in the later books.
Lauralanthalasa (Laurana) from The DragonLance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and others. Yes, I know I said I would avoid this kind of kick-ass heroines but I just couldn’t. I could have chosen a lot of different female characters from this shared world series – Tika or Goldmoon just to mention a few – but I chose Laurana, the Golden General. This beautiful and very spoiled princess who falls in love with a half-elf and has to work extremely hard to make it through various challenges and hardships to win the man she loves. She goes on to fight as a general for what she believes in and to stand by the side of her son when he needs her the most – playing a huge part in several resistances, always fighting for her beloved Elven people.
Katniss Everden from The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. How could I not mention Katniss? She fights against unbeatable odds and comes out on top. She’s tough, she’s taking care of her family and the people she loves. She’s both clever and sneaky – and lucky! She fulfills every part of the kick-ass heroine job description!

Related posts:

January 2012 – Monthly Wrap Up

Posted on January 31, 2012 by christinasr

So January is over and it’s been a good month. Especially with regard to reading. My goal for this year was to read 52 books and in January, I’ve read 5 books which means that I’m not only on track – but ahead of the game.

Allmost all of last year, each day I logged into Goodreads I was greeted by a sign telling me how many books I was behind so to actually be ahead, is really nice.

The year started really well with 3 5-stars reads – then a very solid 4-stars read and then a book, that was a bit of a disappointment.

Yiyun Li: The Vagrants. A wonderful book with a very gripping rendering of life in China in 1979. Heart-breaking. 5 stars.
Donna Tartt: The Secret History. A very intelligent book about a group of very intelligent Classics students who re-enact a Bacchanal with – in their view – troubling consequences. 5 stars.
Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin. A very disturbing read where a mother in letters try to come to terms with her son being a high-school killer. Definitely not a book for new mothers! 5 stars.
Stephen King: 11.22.63. King’s take on the JFK assassination. A really great time-travelling book where King explores the America of the late 50s-early 60s. Very compelling read. 4 stars.
Chan Koonchung: The Fat Years. A book that could have been so much but failed to live up to it’s potential. Still inspiring a lot of thoughts though. 3 stars.

I’ve read 2200 pages – the longest book this month was Stephen King’s 11.22.63 checking in at 740 pages. On top of that I’ve read one e-book: The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung.

I’m also on track with challenges, I think. I’ve read 4 books for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge where I’ve signed up for 25. And I’m doing even better on the Chunkster Reading Challenge. I am committed to read 6 chunksters and I’ve already read 3.

See more on my challenge page.

For February, I first of all want to finish Terry Pratchett: Unseen Academicals. But then I really want to spend some time reading Charles Dickens since on February 7th, it’s the 200 years anniversary for his birth as well as watching some Dickens related movies and TV. But more on that later.

Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin (Review)

Posted on January 15, 2012 by christinasr

We were so happy. Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? (p.14)

Before reading this book, I would have said that there are things you just don’t get until you have kids of your own. Apparently, I was wrong. Lionel Shriver doesn’t have children but still she gets it. She gets all those emotion that a mother goes through. The highs and lows.

After I had kids, I’ve been asked several times if I could understand when parents shook their kids so hard that the child were damaged by it. And I always say ‘yes’. I know that your kids can drive your crazy and maybe you suffer from lack of sleep and then suddenly, you snap. I have never done anything to my kids – but I did break the glass in our wood burning stove once while being really sick and still having to take care of a very demanding kid. Things happen. So I understand that you can get the urge to do something to your kids but I still think there’s a long way from getting the urge to actually doing it.

This is the story of a mother, a reluctant mother. She never really wanted to have children but she did want to give her husband a child. They had a boy – and right from his birth, there was no connection between mother and the infant boy, Kevin. Kevin grows up and well, he’s a troubled kid. He’s bored by everything, he doesn’t care about anything. Until the day he kills 7 of his fellow students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker.

Since the entire novel is written as a series of letters from the mother to the father, from Eva to Franklin, we get Eva’s side of the story. And since Eva never really liked Kevin, she might not be the most reliable narrator. Franklin, on the other hand, doesn’t want to see what Eva sees. Or – again – that’s what Eva says.

What we do know is, that there are some serious incidents where Kevin is involved in some way or another. A part of a wheel being loosened on another boy’s bike, a girl who suddenly scratches all over in her sores, he destroys Eva’s carefully wallpapered room – and it just goes on and on.

Eva always blames Kevin for everything. She has no real contact with him – except when she gets so exasperated by him that she throws him across his room and breaks his arm. In some ways, he respects her for that and respects her for not trying to hard – which is his issue with his dad. I’m not sure how I feel about the father. He really wanted to be a father and I think he deep down know that there’s something off about his son. But he doesn’t want to admit it, he sticks up for his son always and that makes him seem a bit naive or at least blinded by his love. As Eva sees it, standing on the outside looking in, Kevin’s enthusiasm towards his dad is fake all the way but Franklin doesn’t see it and I think Kevin hates him for that.

Kevin is an amazing character. He is so well-written that he almost jumps out of the pages. You almost worry that because you are reading this book, he might be in your house, doing something to your kids. He is so real. Shriver has done her homework. She knows about all the school shootings and she has Kevin take a stand and make sure that his claim to fame is special.

This is a very tough read. It’s hard to read about a mother having such trouble bonding with her child. I think there is a misconception that you automatically love your kid from the second it’s born. And not only love it but love it more than life itself. I didn’t feel that way immediately and I’ve talked to many others mothers who didn’t get that feeling immediately either. I think some mothers feel a failure because they don’t get that rush. Eva being one of them.

For me, maybe because I’m the mother of two girls, the hardest parts to read was about Eva and Franklin’s second child, Celia. And especially Celia’s relationship with Kevin. Celia is very different from Kevin. She’s a curious child, a careful child who scares easily. A soft and sweet little girl who needs her parents a lot – and especially her mother. There are some heart crushing incidents in the story of Celia. There were parts of this story that I could hardly bear to read. But in the end, I just had to know what happened and read the last 100 pages or so in one sitting. I had to know. And it blew me away.

This is a book that asks whether nature or nurture is most important. Can a child be bad from birth or is this caused by the upbringing? The book doesn’t give any answer to this. Instead, it does one of the most important things a book can do. It makes you think.

Title: We Need to Talk About Kevin
Author: Lionel Shriver
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Year: 2011 (originally 2005)
Pages: 482 pages
Stars: 5 out of 5 stars

Book shopping in Paris (part 2)

Posted on October 31, 2011 by christinasr

On this our first whole day in Paris, we made it to three book stores. The first of these was Village Voice. I had really looked forward to this store and knew it was one of the stores I wanted to go to. And it really is a good store. So many great fiction novels – especially contemporary.

I really think this is a great store and if you happened to live in Paris for a while, this would probably be the go-to store. Not only does it have all the new books and also a bit more of literary fiction than some stores, it also has a lot of great events happening. At least they look great on the website. Still, I only bought two books here – although they have some books that I kind of wish I had bought too now … as well as I wish I had bought the Granta (Theme: 10 years after 9-11).

Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin

I’ve been wanting to read this book for so so long so when I saw it, I picked it up immediately. This is a book about a high school shooting with the main focus on the mother who never really wanted to be a mother and now have to come to terms with what role she played in his act. At least that’s what I think it’s about – we’ll see when I get to read it what it’s really about.

Amy Waldman: The Submission

I heard about this on the New York Times Book Review podcast and it sounded very interesting. It’s about 9-11 but not really. After a terrorist attack, a jury have to decide what memorial to build. After choosing the best one, they open the envelope and realize the architect is an American Muslim – and that kicks off a heated debate. I can’t wait to read this – I hope it will have a lot of insights into the America of today.

If you think you’ve read about these books before, it’s because I made a mistake and thought I had bought these two at Shakespeare & Co. So I’ve corrected the first Book Shopping in Paris post with the 4 books I bought at Shakesspeare & Co. so please check it out as well.