holdouttrout

This month the nice people at

celebrate_women are...Celebrating Women! There are weekly prompts, and this week's is "role models."

You can kinda do anything you want for it, so I'm gonna just see what happens.

Today, I'd like to talk a little about my first role models from literature. I think that starting life out with good stories about girls who accomplish great things is never a bad thing.

Hah! This means I get to expound on Young Adult lit again, doesn't it? *grins*

One of the very first stories I remember loving as a child was The Farthest Away Mountain, by Lynn Reid Banks. I didn't realize it at the time, but the heroine, Dakin, is a slight Mary Sue. She is pretty, smart, brave, and resourceful. And she marries a prince at the end. Kind of. On the other hand, the lack of ambiguity is appropriate to the age level--I sure didn't care when I first (or third, or ninth) read it. I think Dakin is a good role model because she pays attention and uses the information she's been given to solve the problems that come up.

Another book with a heroine I remember was Dragon's Milk, by Susan Fletcher. Okay, okay. The main character, Kaeldra, has green eyes, fair hair, and can talk to dragons, but I mean--green eyes! I have green eyes, and so this book kindled many a fantasy about Dragons and Adventure and Destiny. Kaeldra is often terrified, but maintains her wits and works to overcome her impossible situations as she risks everything--first to get dragon's milk to heal her foster-sister, and then to save the dragons, who have been nearly exterminated.

(As an aside--it's probably a bad idea to look up reviews of books that were your favorite as a child, because someone invariably puts them down as childish and flawed. Argh!)

I just read this book for really young readers called The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert N. Munsch. It's an illustrated book about a princess all set to marry a prince until a dragon carries him off and burns her castle down. She goes to rescue him dressed in the only thing she can find--a paper bag--and manages to be very clever, only to get snubbed by the prince because she doesn't look like a proper princess. She dumps him. *grins* I wish I'd had this book when I was a young girl. It's tongue-in-cheek, and might have counteracted all those fairy tales I read with their happily-ever-after endings. ;-)

Probably my favorite role model and heroine is Nita Callahan, from So You Want to Be a Wizard, by Diane Duane. Now, I know people's mileage varies with books, but the Wizard series? YA lit doesn't get much better than this. Nita is a true heroine--she starts out looking for a way to fight back against the kids who are bullying her, and ends up being a part of something much larger than she thought. And then she turns right around and says, "Okay, what now?"

To be fair, I'm not entirely sure whether my role model is Nita or Duane. I STILL want to be Nita. I think she's awesome, even if she's still in high school (she's 13 when the books start). But I've MOSTLY given up on the idea that I'm going to find a Wizard's manual in the used book store, and decided a while ago that being an awesome author might be okay instead. ;-)

Oh! And one of the things I REALLY love about the books is the idea that even people who aren't wizards have a say in the fate of the universe. So you have these other, secondary characters, and, yeah, you have some black and white good vs. evil stuff--but the ordinary people make their own kind of difference in the world. And that's hard to beat.

You can read the first chapter here.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find more "grown-up" examples of role models, just for variety...