I am sad that I've read all but one of the books on your list (the one is the MZB). Am I running out??

I *hope* not. . . but they definitely are kind of a rare breed. The combination of it still being kind of rare for books to pass the Bechdel Test AND the fact that it seems like SFF as genre doesn't focus on friendship very much (too many lone heroes, too much plot at the expense of character development, and the greater likelihood of the emotional core coming from a romance instead of something platonic) I was really wracking my brain on this list and sad as well that I couldn't come up with more.

That's funny - I consider the fantasy genre pretty strong on friendship, what with all its motley bands of adventurers willing to risk their lives for one another. The idealized True Companions thing was part of what drew me to the genre as a young teen. Definitely those books are more about plot than character, but outside of fantasy you hardly see those kinds of relationships depicted at all - mainstream fiction is all about family and romance, and anything else is a minor subplot at best.

Though I also had a hard time coming up with many True Friendships between women - motley bands operate far too often on the smurfette principle. In several of the books on my list the friendship, while important, isn't really the emotional core of the book. Take Cold Magic for instance - Kate Elliott once wrote a whole essay arguing that Cat and Bee's relationship is the most important in the trilogy, but Cat's romance with Andevai is the most dynamic relationship and gets the most page time. I feel for Elliott on that - a new, tumultuous, sexually-charged relationship will gobble up page time much more quickly than an established, stable, platonic friendship - but then I see books like Lord of the Rings that consist almost entirely of male-male friendships, and I wish authors would do the same with female characters.

Quest fantasy isn't really my subgenre, so I don't have a breadth of knowledge of the bands-of-adventurerers type of books. But then, part of the reason it isn't my subgenre is that it does seem to go with the smurfette pattern more often than other subgenres, and I get plenty of male-male friendships in the rest of my media consumption.

I *did* debate whether or not to add Slow River to the list -- I ultimately decided against it because while there are a lot of important female friendships in the book, it's ultimately mostly about the single main character and all the relationships in her life (which, since she's a lesbian, are mostly with women) rather than about a specific friendship or two.

(I also debated voting for Cold Magic for the same reason you mentioned -- while Bee is definitely important to Cat, the books are about Cat's relationship with Andevai) but since it was already on the list I voted for it too.)

The MZB is worth checking out! They stand up better than a lot of her Darkover novels, though they're still dated, and pretty much the entire point of the three books in the omnibus is watching the female main characters build friendships with each other and other women. That's something I wish we had kept a bit better from second-wave feminism, that focus on the importance of women-based networks, instead of making room for women in men's spaces. (Not that that *isn't* important, obviously, but it feels like there's a gap, in focusing just on that, where we've given in to the idea that men are necessary to legitimize things, make them real and important.)

Would that omnibus make sense without reading any of the others first? I've been meaning to try MZB again - I've only read The Mists of Avalon, and that when I was too young to appreciate the themes, so all I remember is the icky sex and someone getting married solely to avoid embarrassment at a party.

It's really interesting for me, as someone too young to remember the culture of the 80s, to read feminist or supposedly-feminist fantasy that was published then. On the one hand there are books like The Ladies of Mandrigyn, which holds up really well today (though it would also be fair to say it has some male-protagonist-legitimization going on), and on the other hand there are books like Daggerspell by Katharine Kerr. She has a reputation as a feminist and yet the book features an Exceptional Girl who's cooler than and isolated from all the other women because she knows how to fight, and most of the action is among men. There seem to be a lot more female protagonists in fiction today, but otherwise I'm not sure we've made a lot of progress - there are still a lot of Exceptional Girls.

As far as adventure fantasy goes, I find it less satisfying these days. Partially because it's often shallow and formulaic, but also the price of the True Companions thing seems to be isolating the characters from family, sometimes from any social structure at all, so that they often seem to exist in a vacuum. Which teens like because that's what they want, I suppose. But good friendship stories can be done without killing off the family and putting the world in jeopardy.

Jerr has a reputation as a feminist? I mean I love those books to death, but I would never tag those really as feminist books. Then again, there are people who label Ann Bishop as feminist and well, I'll leave it at that.

Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship wrote: "Would that omnibus make sense without reading any of the others first? I've been meaning to try MZB again - I've only read The Mists of Avalon, and that when I was too young to appreciate the theme..."

It definitely works without reading anything else -- the Darkover series is spread out over like thousands of years so most of the books stand alone entirely or (as in this case) only a few of them make up a small arc of their own. There are some characters that pop up in the third book of the omnibus that are from other books, but you won't be missing out by not knowing who they are. (Though they're from my other favorite omnibus, The Forbidden Circle, which has polyamory!)

The way quest stories isolate people from family and social structure is one of my biggest issues with them, one of the reasons I just can't ever seem to relate -- like, I have issues with my family, but they're a HUGE part of what makes me who I am, so all those orphaned characters who leave their small towns without a backward glance or who seem to have sprung fully-formed onto the world at adulthood just don't make *sense* to me.

(And Oh. My. God. how I have come to hate the Exceptional Girl. You're right, that's probably exactly why I bounced off of Kerr when I gave that series a try.)