In 1987, Congress declared March as “National Women’s History” month. In honor of Women’s History month, I’ve selected a few of many books with amazing, strong female leads. Celebrate women of courage and vision by checking out one of these popular titles.
Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent tells the story of Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, a woman mentioned only briefly in the Bible. The Red Tent follows Dinah on her journey from childhood in Mesopotamia to womanhood in Canaan and her experiences in the Red Tent, where women bonded in times of birth and menstruation and shared their stories and secrets, before she became a renowned midwife in Egypt.
Set in a Puritan colony, The Scarlet Letter is an American tragedy with adulteress Hester Prynne at its center. Despite her community’s condemnation, Hester shows strength throughout her punishment, and through her story, Nathaniel Hawthorne examines the concepts of sin, conscience, revenge, survival, and redemption.
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge unfolds in 13 linked stories set in a small coastal Maine town, at the center of which is Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who is as vicious as she is compassionate. Each story reveals a little bit more about the complex puzzle that is Kitteridge, and another slice of life in Crosby, Maine.
Marie Ndiaye’s Three Strong Women follows three West African immigrant women in France who discover their inner strength through their tribulations as their lives begin to intertwine. Powerful and thought-provoking, Three Strong Women explores human suffering, vulnerability, and strength.
The satirical, classic Margaret Atwood novel The Handmaid’s Tale paints a portrait of a horrifying, future world where women are under subjugation in a military dictatorship based on theocracy. Protagonist Offred is a “Handmaid,” essentially a concubine whose only official use is to give birth to children of the ruling class, and The Handmaid’s Tale is her story of indoctrination into life as a handmaid and her unorthodox relationship with a high-ranking official.
Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a story of hope set in a dystopian America where environmental and economic problems have led to humanity’s decline. When 18-year-old Lauren Olamina, the daughter of a minister, loses both her family and home, she sets out on a journey with other refugees and fights for her survival while starting a new faith.
“Jandy Nelson’s writing is poetic and mesmerizing. More importantly, Nelson weaves a novel that seeps into your bones like fire on a cold day . . . I’ll Give You the Sun is a novel that promises a story like nothing else and then delivers it.”
“The Hunger Games,” a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed.
Scottish Highlands, 1945. Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an “outlander”—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding clans in the year of Our Lord . . . 1743.
Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
