by Jennifer Harlow
When I moved to California and I had few friends
I got the bright idea to start a book club to meet people (and drink wine).
Then I got busy and remembered I'm basically an anti-social person so I
scrubbed the idea in favor of dealing with crazy people living under my roof.
Through the years I've gotten busier, and crankier, but sometimes I revisit the
idea (I do love wine). Then the laziness kicks in, as does a new season
of The Real Housewives and I don't read a thing let alone want
to talk to anyone. But if you are none of these things and like talking books
here is the list I came up with about fiction books featuring women who kick
ass. Now, I'm not talking just physically, though most do. No, the women in these
books all have one thing in common: grit. No matter what life throws at them,
be it zombies or snarky Mr. Darcy, they stay true to themselves and keep on
trucking. In ABC order (with the Amazon descriptions):
1.
13 Bullets by David Wellington
All the official reports say they are
dead-extinct since the late ’80s, when a fed named Arkeley nailed the last
vampire in a fight that nearly killed him. But the evidence proves otherwise.
When a state trooper named Caxton calls the FBI
looking for help in the middle of the night, it is Arkeley who gets the
assignment-who else? He’s been expecting such a call to come eventually. Sure,
it has been years since any signs of an attack, but Arkeley knows what most
people don’t: there is one left. In an abandoned asylum she is rotting,
plotting, and biding her time in a way that only the undead can.
Caxton is out of her league on this case and
more than a little afraid, but the fed made it plain that there is only one way
out. But the worst thing is the feeling that the vampires want more than just
her blood. They want her for a reason, one she can’t guess; a reason her
sphinxlike partner knows but won’t say; a reason she has to find out-or die
trying.
Now there are only 13 bullets between Caxton and
Arkeley and the vampires. There are only 13 bullets between us, the living, and
them, the damned.
JH pick because: Not only is Laura Caxton thrown
into this world of rabid vampires but she remains human and believable while
doing it.
2.
The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
In 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly
engaged in the study of honeybees when a young woman literally stumbles into
him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently
orphaned, the young Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock
Holmes--and match him wit for wit. Under his reluctant tutelage, this very
modern twentieth-century woman proves a deft protégée and a fitting partner for
the Victorian detective. In their first case together, they must track down a
kidnapped American senator's daughter and confront a truly cunning adversary--a
bomber who has set trip wires for the sleuths and who will stop at nothing to
end their partnership. Full of brilliant deductions, disguises, and dangers,
this first book of the Mary Russell--Sherlock Holmes mysteries is
"wonderfully original and entertaining . . . absorbing from beginning to
end" (Booklist).
JH pick because: Any woman who
can believably hold her own against Sherlock Holmes deserves a place
on this list.
3.
Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
Anita Blake may be small and young, but vampires
call her the Executioner. Anita is a necromancer and vampire hunter in a time
when vampires are protected by law--as long as they don't get too nasty. Now
someone's killing innocent vampires and Anita agrees--with a bit of vampiric
arm-twisting--to help figure out who and why.
Trust is a luxury Anita can't afford when her
allies aren't human. The city's most powerful vampire, Nikolaos, is 1,000 years
old and looks like a 10-year-old girl. The second most powerful vampire,
Jean-Claude, is interested in more than just Anita's professional talents, but
the feisty necromancer isn't playing along--yet. This popular series has a wild
energy and humor, and some very appealing characters--both dead and alive.
JH because
Anita isn't a Mary Sue. She's hard-boiled and not nice, which is refreshing.
4.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In the ruins of a place once known as North
America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve
outlying districts. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were
defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy
and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "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.
JH pick because: A teenager not focused on boys
but archery and saving her family is the definition of true grit.
5. The
Little Friend by Donna Tartt
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where
one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging
from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still
unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister
Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by
the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his
killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s
rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of
loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity
worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a
work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
JH pick because: Harriet is like a tougher Scout
trying to solve her brother's murder. I love tough little girls because they
become tough women.
6.
One For the Money by Janet Evanovitch
Stephanie Plum is so smart, so honest, and so
funny that her narrative charm could drive a documentary on termites. But this
tough gal from New Jersey, an unemployed discount lingerie buyer, has a much
more interesting story to tell: She has to say that her Miata has been
repossessed and that she's so poor at the moment that she just drank her last
bottle of beer for breakfast. She has to say that her only chance out of her
present rut is her repugnant cousin Vinnie and his bail-bond business. She has
to say that she blackmailed Vinnie into giving her a bail-bond recovery job
worth $10,000 (for a murder suspect), even though she doesn't own a gun and has
never apprehended a person in her life. And she has to say that the guy she has
to get, Joe Morelli, is the same creep who charmed away her teenage virginity
behind the pastry case in the Trenton bakery where she worked after school.
If that hard-luck story doesn't sound compelling
enough, Stephanie's several unsuccessful attempts at pulling in Joe make a
downright hilarious and suspenseful tale of murder and deceit. Along the way,
several more outlandish (but unrelentingly real) characters join the story,
including Benito Ramirez, a champion boxer who seems to be following Stephanie
Plum wherever she goes.
JH pick because: Though she's in over her
head, Stephanie keeps on going while keeping her humor.
7.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
The year is 1945. Claire Randall is traveling
with her husband when she touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles
that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is hurled back in time to a Scotland
torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord 1743. Catapulted
into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life, she soon
realizes that an alliance with James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, might
be the only way to survive. Thus begins a work of unrivaled storytelling that
has become a modern classic.
JH pick because: Even when thrown through time
into the primitive Highlands Claire holds her own with the clans and
her hot husband.
8. Pride and Prejudice by
Jane Austen
One of the most beloved books of all time, Pride
and Prejudice is Jane Austen’ s classic story of the love that blooms, is
denied, and finally flourishes between the prideful Mr. Darcy and the
prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet. A country squire of limited means, Mr. Bennet is
faced with the monumental task of marrying off his five daughters, including
his much-loved Elizabeth, while surviving the puerile antics of his wife, Mrs.
Bennet, the plotting of the untrustworthy Wickham, and the arrogant Mr.
Collins, who is entitled to inherit Mr. Bennet’ s property. Containing some of
the most memorable characters to grace English literature, Pride and Prejudice
is an enduring classic whose lessons of morality and responsibility continue to
resonate with readers two centuries after it was first published.
JH pick because: Elizabeth is her own person in
a time when that was beyong frowned upon. She sticks up for herself and those
she loves even when it costs her.
9. The Secret Diaries
of Charlotte Bronte by Syrie James
Though poor, plain, and
unconnected, Charlotte Bronte possesses a deeply passionate side which she
reveals only in her writings—creating Jane Eyre and other novels that stand
among literature's most beloved works. Living a secluded life in the wilds of
Yorkshire with her sisters Emily and Anne, their drug-addicted brother, and an
eccentric father who is going blind, Charlotte Bronte dreams of a real love
story as fiery as the ones she creates.
But it is in the pages of her
diary where Charlotte exposes her deepest feelings and desires—and the truth
about her life, its triumphs and shattering disappointments, her family, the
inspiration behind her work, her scandalous secret passion for the man she can
never have . . . and her intense, dramatic relationship with the man she comes
to love, the enigmatic Arthur Bell Nicholls.
JH pick because: This book started by love of
all things Bronte. I love her tenacity, spirit, and strength even when she
loses everyone she loves.
10. The
Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Clarice Starling, a precociously
self-disciplined FBI trainee, is dispatched by her boss, Section Chief Jack
Crawford, the FBI's most successful tracker of serial killers, to see whether
she can learn anything useful from Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Lecter's a gifted
psychopath whose nickname is "The Cannibal" because he likes to eat
parts of his victims. Isolated by his crimes from all physical contact with the
human race, he plays an enigmatic game of "Clue" with Starling,
providing her with snippets of data that, if she is smart enough, will lead her
to the criminal. Undaunted, she goes where the data takes her. As the tension
mounts and the bureaucracy thwarts Starling at every turn, Crawford tells her,
"Keep the information and freeze the feelings." Insulted, betrayed,
and humiliated, Starling struggles to focus. If she can understand Lecter's
final, ambiguous scrawl, she can find the killer. But can she figure it out in
time?
JH pick because: Clarice was one of the first to
face off against a serial killer and the boys club of the FBI.
So those are my top picks. Which ones would you
add to the list? Who’d I forget? What to you is a kick-ass chick?
And check out my own kick ass chick Bea in her latest adventure To Catch a Vampire out NOW!!!!!!!
