Quoted: Strong Female Characters? Yes please!

We love reading books with strong female characters and we suspect many of you do as well given the #readwomen hashtag and certain controversies from recent memory that have received so much attention. This doesn’t mean they need to be wielding katana swords like Michonne in The Walking Dead or kicking butt like Buffy. While Joss Whedon does tend to write towards the Buffy end of the spectrum, we do appreciate his sentiment in this quote. Plus it gave us an excuse (not that we really needed one) to put together a list of complicated, resilient, and, yes, strong female characters. 

Livvy’s son Daniel disappeared eleven years ago and now her younger brother Stephen is dying. After being tested to see if she could be a viable bone marrow donor and possibly save Stephen’s life, Livvy discovers she has no idea who she is. From BC to England, Livvy sets out on a journey to not only restore some balance to her life but also heal.Utterly on her own for the first time, Miramar Woo sets out for university in Ottawa. In the wake of her father’s recent death, she has left a home she no longer recognizes: her siblings have been swept up into a life of fame and fortune with their special “gifts” and her mother is fighting off mental illness. Over the next four years Miramar explores new things beyond her sheltered upbringing, discovering maybe she is closer to the kick-ass kung fu heroine of her heart rather than the obedient sister and daughter everyone has always seen her as.Jolene and Roxanne, two contemporary Indigenous women, are intertwined in this story of resilience and survival. Jolene, dealing with memories of trauma and abandonment, gives her babies up for adoption; Roxanne with loss and her inability to give birth. They meet years later as their coping mechanisms—the Ojibwe sweatlodge and painting—thrust them together.McWhirter has created a world comprised of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties in prose that is sharp and shot through with poetry. The women are tough and independent, and know what they’re about.This historical novel follows Annette Gershorn as she and her family live through some of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous events. Growing up in 30s era Winnipeg was not easy for the Gershorn’s but when they move back home to the Soviet Union things go from bad to worse as they live in Stalinist Russia and are threatened by anti-Semitism.Danielle Byrd gets an all too familiar feeling when the group of Canadian human-rights activists she is with are taken hostage in El Salvador; she was an embedded journalist with a guerrilla faction during the country’s civil war twenty year’s earlier. Desperate to see her mother returned home in one piece, Danielle’s daughter, Aida, travels to El Salvador to find her.While the Sun is Above Us takes us into the lives of innocents in a land of war. Sandra travels from Canada to the Sudan as an aid worker but gets unwittingly caught up in a violent local conflict and Adut is captured and held as a slave. Hope endures for both Sandra and Adut when chance brings them together in a brief but profound moment that changes both their lives forever.