Fantasy novels featuring strong women (or women that aren't constantly abused)

[Freehold DM]

Has Queen of the Depths been mentioned? Great look at an evil cleric.

[Freehold DM]

Mistborn is also a good series.

[JGray]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned pretty much every book Tamora Pierce has ever written. She's the queen of strong female warriors and there's plenty of drama and, yes, sex without constant threat or rape or abuse.

[Hama]

SuperSlayer wrote:

Check out the awesome Pools Trilogy.

Book one is "Pool of Radiance"
Book two is "Pool of Twilight"
Book three is "Pool of Darkness"

One of the best D&D trilogy fantasy novels I've ever read.

Dude. What. Those books should be forgotten. The author should die in shame, even if they were a 6 year old.

[Captain Marsh]

This is going to be a bit of a weird response, given some of the framing of this, but I want to suggest that people read the R. Scott Bakker cycle "Prince of Nothing" cycle.

Bakker's work has gotten pretty unfair treatment in places for being misogynistic - a claim that I find preposterous. Bakker's novels are complex, adult, and occasionally very, very dark.

These are not YA books. And they describe a society which is roughly on par, I would say, with the Near East in the 9th or 10th century. Women are not equal, their lives are often brutal and terrifying.

But the women in his novels are also the most complete, complex, dynamic female characters I've ever encountered in fantasy fiction, with the possible exception of Ursula LeGuin's stories. They are powerful, intensely driven, ambitious, flawed.

If, on the other hand, what you want is a fictional fantasy narrative where women are equal in what we might think of as a modern sense - don't go near this series. Really. Some of what happens to Bakker's female characters is stark and even disturbing (though never gratuitous).

But the same is also true of many of the men in Bakker's cycle. There is, for example, a fascinating juxtaposition of two of the main characters, a female courtesan and a male wizard. Both, by the lights of their society, are 'damned' and live largely as tolerated outcasts - useful and necessary but loathed.

Finally, I would say that Bakker's fantasy cycle is one of the only works in the genre that treats honestly the racism, discomfort with women, and aversion to sexuality that runs through much of our genre. Bakker sort of drags that stuff out into the open and wrestles with it in really interesting ways.

So again -- not a read for that afternoon when you're wanting your woman wizard to be the butt-kicker in the story...but really worth picking up.

[Mikaze]

Captain Marsh wrote:

These are not YA books.

Conversely, books that don't wallow in grimdark are not necessarily YA novels.

Cynicism and grittiness don't necessarily bring maturity or quality to the table either.

pet peeve, especially when it comes to the subversion of recommendation requests

[Joey Virtue]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned I didn't feel like going through all the posts. But I recently read a series on kindle unlimited called the muirwood series pretty good with a strong heroine

[motteditor]

Ceres Cato wrote:

This is something my fiancee thinks as well. On of the most recent novels I've read was The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett, which featured the rape of a woman without any reason whatsoever. That was a major cause for anger.

In his defense, Brett has male characters get raped too and his female characters are certainly very strong (though I don't discount your concerns about some of the scenes).

I'll add Brandon Sanderson's books, which seem to feature strong female protagonists without sexual abuse tropes. I'm finishing up his Mistborn series, which is OK, but his Stormlight Archive series is one of my favorite things right now.

[Lord Fyre]

Ummm ... "Red Nails" by Robert E. Howard.

[havoc xiii]

Has anyone mentioned the Noble Dead series?

Spoiler:

Her mother was raped but its the only occurance that I can recall ever happening in the series.

[Charlie Brooks]

Am I allowed to plug my own book? Because while Greystone Valley skews toward a younger audience, one of the main goals in writing it and the stories around it has been to provide positive portrayals of women.

[Hama]

Why not?