I am a girl, and have always been a avid reader, though I am pretty particular about my books. I mainly like fantasy. But a problem I have come across is that I am running out of strong female main characters!!!! I know, I know, things are getting better, but you have to admit, the majority of MAIN characters, I mean heroes, in this genre, are male. Guys are fun to read about, too. I LOVE Eragon, and Harry Potter. But....come on!!! We need more strong girls!!! Not just female main characters, but STRONG female main characters!!!! I have a couple books to recommend, but the purpose of this thread is to see more books like this, so we can all enjoy them.

Here are my favorites:

Tithe
Black and White
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Abarat
Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen
Most Tamora Pierce books


Your recommendations are much appreciated!!!! :)

A few books I can suggest with strong female leads are:

Crown Duel- Sherwood Smith

Through Wolf's Eyes-Jane Lindskold (and the rest of the books in this series)

The Black Magician Trilogy- Trudi Canavan

They're all fantasy and series that I enjoy. I highly recommend these books.

It's weird, but all my favorite books have main characters that are guys and the books were written by guys.
Personally, (please don't judge me for this, most of the time i think women are waaay better) i think male authors write better books, but i don't really care if the main character is a guy or a girl.

I am a girl and i love books. My favorite type of books are fantasy because they are fun and they are not real. I really dont like biographies because they are so boring and it is about a real person so if they die then I feel really bad. But if someone dies in a fantasy book then it is still sad but less sad because you know that a real person did not die just a fake one!OH a really a good book is umm well you probably havent seen it but the Frog Princess series.

I also noticed this. It realy sucks, its like men don't think women can be strong enough to be a main heroen.

I agree with you on the Abhosen series.
I recommend The Silenced.
It's a wonderful dystopian story that has really good plot twist.
And a very, very strong and confused female character.

I don't know... To me, all females seem to be written the same, even the strong ones. Girls are too confusing to write about realistically, in my opinion.

There are a lot of books with the main character being a girl just go look in the library. I haven't found many that are that exciting to read as they are mostly about the same things.

A few books I might reccomend though would be:

• ttyl and ttfn are both good books by the author Lauren Myracle. (there is a third in the series I just don't remember the name) Warning: it is written in chat speak as it is a type of collection between three girls IMing. (I thought the plot was rather good though.)
• The Vampire Kisses series is all-right. (So far I've read only one book though)
• The Morganville Vampires series is also well written with a female as the main character. (I've only been able to find the first book of the series. It was rather good and I can't wait to find the rest.)

How about the book Ophelia by Lisa Klein or White Oleander by Janet Finch? :]

Strong Female characters? I have two series to recommend. First: Talking with Dragons (and the sequels like Walking with Dragons... I think that's one of the titles. They're all Something with Dragons). It starts off with a stubborn princess who doesn't wan to be like her older sisters: waiting in a tower for some prince or knight to come rescue her so she takes advice from a talking frog (learned it from a frog prince) and goes to make her own life.

The other is the Black Unicorn and it's sequels the Golden Unicorn and the Red Unicorn. This one's about the daughter of a powerful witch who decides that living in a magical oasis in the middle of a desert is boring and sets off to find her own adventure. I really enjoyed both series and wish I had bought them instead of just borrowing them from the library.

I think the reason most male writers have male main characters (and most female writers have female main character) is because most writers follow the rule of "write what you know" and well... men know men and women know women.

It seems like you lean towards fantasy.

Seconding The Black Magician Trilogy as well as the ...with Dragons series. (Those are by Patricia Wrede)

I would also add The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, both by Robin McKinley

If you liked Tithe, why not read Valiant and Ironside? Valiant came before Tithe and Ironside comes after it.

Oh please read: The raging quiet by sheryll jordan.
|it;s amazing.

heres a reveiw if your interested:
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/printed-book...ordan/1032392/

If it is Fantasy that you like, and are looking for stronger female characters, the series called 'the Wheel of Time', by now deceased Robert Jordan, and being continued by Brian Sanderson. The books get a little bit over-detailed in the later books, but remain nonetheless enjoyable.

Another fantasy book that I've read once a while back with a strong female character, and a main one, is 'the Dragon and the Unicorn', the first part of a series of books by A. A. Attanasio. I cannot say anything about the others books, but what is apparently the first part of it was quite enjoyable, and not at all typical fantasy, at least as far as I've read.

You want strong female characters? I present to you Max from Maximum Ride, and Rosa from Vampire Academy. Both are sorta fiction with a modern twist. Amazing though. I highly recommend both of them!!!

I don't have any recommendations as of yet but I do agree with you that it can sometimes be hard to find a solid heroine who doesn't come across as just another princess to be rescued.

I'll try not to let that happen with my books...

( when I get the time to write them )

I think the real problem is finding believably strong female characters. Most of the ones that I've read don't seem to have any femininity to them at all. Personally, I think that's just as bad.

That being said, Greg Keyes' Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone has quite a few main characters, three of them being strong females that I found believable enough to like.

The Naming, which is the first book in the Pellinor Quartet, is extremely good. At first the character may not seem very strong, but throughout the books there is a lot of character development, so it's all good. ^^

There are lost of strong woman heroines out there, actually, it just takes a little searching for. I would recommend more books, only I don't have any of them near me at this point, and therefore cannot for the life of me remember a single other title. ^^;;

Y'know, I actually don't mind the lack of female characters. And this is a girl speaking. xD I simply enjoy male lead characters more, and the vast majority of books I read and become obsessed with have males as the protagonists.

My best friend, on the other hand, loves stories with girls as the main character. She would be better suited to this thread, so I'll ask her about a few that haven't been named as soon as she gets on-line.

I'm wondering if anyone would consider The Golden Compass series as having a strong female character, though? It's been a while since I've read them, but I believe I'm right in saying that. Hard to tell.

Also, The Scarlet Letter. xD Though a difficult book to read, you have to admit Hester's a pretty strong female character, especially when you really look into the book for the meanings and connections and such.

Diana Wynne Jones tends to have strong female characters. I recommend Howl's Moving Castle especially.
I also recommend the series I'm currently reading, The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. It's the 'true story' of Alice in Wonderland.

If you want strong female leads I would recomend the following 2 authors

Jean M. Auel, with her Earth's Children book series, the books are:
The Clan of the Cave Bear
The Valley of Horses
The Mammoth Hunters
The Plains of Passage
The Shelters of Stone
The sixth book--as yet unreleased
(They are the story of Ayla an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl who is adopted and raised by a tribe of Neanderthals and who later embarks on a journey to find "the Others" (her own kind)),-- descirption taken from Wikipedia

Kristen Britain, with her Green Rider series, the books are:

Green Rider
First Rider's Call
The High King's Tomb
and a fourth book in the works
these are the story of Karigan G'ladheon.

personally I think these are very good and I'm surprised they were not yet mentioned,and both fit into the strong female lead you are looking for.

A really great series that the main character is a girl is the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson. I think there are at least 7 books in the series.

I don't know if I can recommend much by the way of fantasy, but here are some books with memorable female protagonists. The main character from Four And Twenty Blackbirds. That's more of a horror-mystery than a fantasy, but still a good book. The character is remarkably strong- she carries a knife and fends off her male attacker single-handedly several times throughout the book.

There's also this one 'grave' series about a woman who can sense the dead. I wish I remembered it, but it always has titles like 'Grave Sight' and 'Grave Surprise'. Also horror-mystery, but do ghosts count as fantasy?

The Golden Hills of Westria has a very strong female character, but she's the childhood friend of the main character, a male, rather than the main character. It's fantasy, though. If I repeated anything anyone's already suggested, my apologies, I didn't read all the posts.

Ummm...the only book I can think of right now where there a strong female characters would be Armageddon's Children by Terry Brooks. Its a fantasy Series. Its a book written from the views of various characters, so you get main characters that are male and female.

Personally I have to disagree. I like my main characters being guys, but I read too much fiction from teen writers so they're cliché and usually about teenage girls, druggies, parental problems/ abuse, or some girls in high school that find their love that happens to be a vampire. =/

But, if you like fantasy and a strong female character then might I suggest Jones' Howl's Moving Castle maybe? ( ._.')