Book Wyrms

The Guardian had a feature last week in which women discuss what book opened their eyes to feminism. It's a good read.

As for me: I've been a feminist at least since I was 5 years old* and, I grew up in a feminist household against which, aside from baseline adolescent obnoxiousness, I found little reason to rebel. (The world outside provided plenty of jerks--I didn't need to create them at home.) To probably-misquote Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, regarding England's ability to have liberty without formulating lots of theories about it first, "They like freedom because it's freedom." So it's not really until the past year or so that I'm actually READING feminist texts. (And I can't stress enough how great Manifesta is.)

So. My first influential book? Dealing with Dragons. But I don't like the new cover as much as the one from MY old copy:


Anyway. I reached this book in, I think, 4th grade? Patricia C. Wrede wrote the kind of stories I didn't know I'd been waiting for--smart, witty books with smart, witty heroines. There are four in the series. Dealing with Dragons, the first, introduces us to Princess Cimorene, who is sick and tired of being a princess--she has to take embroidery and country dance lessons, and generally sit around being silly and proper. Rather than moping, she sneaks in fencing, Latin, and magic lessons on the side (until she gets caught). When she discovers she's been betrothed to a really annoying prince, and after some advice from a talking frog, she runs away from home and becomes the personal assistant of a fascinating dragon named Kazul. (Kazul is also female, but gender differences are apparently irrelevant amongst dragons.) She then has adventures, kills things with swords, fireproofs herself, melts some wizards, helps some friends, and makes a lot of chocolate mousse. In future books she goes on to find love and all of that, all in the course of her regular adventuring, and all with a level head.

The books are great. The writing is vivid and mature, and often very tongue-in-cheek, with winking references to famous fairy tales. (In one book we meet a man who is clearly a Rumplestiltskin, but who has become SO overrun with kids he's changed his name to Herman, in the futile hope that mothers will manage to guess it.) Two of the books are from the POV of a woman, two from a guy, and all are filled with wonderful powerful female protagonists, all of whom are in someway unexpected, all of whom casually and simply deviate from whatever norms and stereotypes govern them.

If you like YA fiction, read them! If you know kids who do, give them as gifts!

And you can always throw in some Simone de Beauvoir while you're at it.



*More on this some day.