Action Heroine Fans discussion
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Currently reading a book with an action heroine?
message 351:
by
Werner
(new)
Jan 28, 2015 06:18AM
Yesterday, I started reading
, by our own Deborah Cannon. I've had that one on my to-read list for quite awhile.
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I just finished Imperfect Sword. It has a very good action heroine in Roh Morgan. although she's a secondary character. She's a bit of a loose cannon and very impredictable in her actions and motivations. You would want to start with Tarnished Knight to get a better handle on her.
The second and third books of David Baldacci's Will Robie series (The Hit and The Target) star Jessica Reel, one of the best action heroines I've personally ever read. In Book 2 she starts out as sort of an antagonist but there's more to her character than meets the eye. Throughout the rest of the series, she's still technically the "secondary character" but splits the "screen time" about 50-50 with the male lead. It's actually been close to a year since I've read the series but I really enjoyed it. Baldacci does a really great job writing female characters in general. Tammy Salyer's Spectra's Arise trilogy is another great sci-fi series with a female lead. I just finished reading all three books - Contract of Defiance, Contract of Betrayal, and Contract of War) last month and really enjoyed the action.
My own novels star Ziva Payvan, more of an anti-heroine who ends up being forced into the role of heroine more often than she'd like. I'm currently working feverishly on Book 3 and really love writing her character.
E. J., I've just added your series opener, Dakiti, to our group's bookshelves. Best wishes for success and fulfillment with your writing!
Awesome, thank you! I hope anyone who decides to pick it up enjoys it :)
You're welcome, E. J. It certainly looks intriguing!
I'm not currently reading it, as I didn't think to post it here, but one of the first books I read this year was Sleepless. I found Santos an appreciable heroine and quite enjoyed the book as a whole.
On the edge of "action", but I am currently reading Northanger Abbey and loving the heck out of it. Just about every page makes me laugh. I saw the movie starring Felicity Jones awhile back. I remember liking it, but it's been long enough that I don't recall many specifics.
While I wait to take part in our group's upcoming common read (starting later this week!), I'm passing the time reading in the short story collection
. It's the second installment in Esther Friesner's distaff-based sword and sorcery anthology series, begun with
(which I've mentioned in this group before). If you like mostly humorous fantasy with sword-swinging heroines, that's a series you have to check out!
A couple of days ago, I started reading
, by our own Lance Charnes. It's an action-adventure/espionage novel that's been mentioned before on our discussion threads (and always very favorably!), so I've been champing at the bit to read it for some time!
I've looked at that one a few times Werner. If you finish before i get to it I'll be interested in what you think.
I'll probably finish it sometime early next month, Mike.
It's not even on my near horizon. I'd just like to get to it, LOL.
I recently finished Reprobate, the first in a series about a female assassin who prefers knives and edged weaponry. The stories take place in the modern era. I was introduced to the author via another forum and the first book in the series is currently available for 99 cents on Amazon.http://www.amazon.com/Reprobate-Katla...
The story takes place in Amsterdam (the author lives there) and sometimes gets a bit bogged down in details about the area (street addresses I can't pronounce is info I don't need) but the heroine is cool, calculating and VERY competent. The blind man who 'witnesses' one of her kills is a peculiar and fascinating character. This was Halm's first book and is better than the average e-book first time indie author. He takes his craft seriously and listens to reader feedback. I suspect his subsequent installments may flow a bit better. Not a quick read but not difficult either.
The series Dwight is referring to in the previous message is the Katla Kill Files, by Martyn V. Halm, who's a Goodreads author. For readers who want to try it out for free before buying, Halm offers a free e-story on Amazon, Locked Room: A Katla KillFile. Personally, I only gave that one a single star (my review is here: www.goodreads.com/review/show/1053266606 ). But that's mostly due to factors related to my own personal tastes; our fellow group member Nancy really liked it, for instance, and I'm sure others would too. Dwight, I completely agree that Halm "takes his craft seriously and listens to reader feedback." (Even though my review had more criticism than praise, he was kind enough to "like" it --which speaks of a lot more professionalism than some BBAs on Goodreads who stop just short of demanding firing squads for negative reviewers!) And while Katla's too amoral for me to really like her, she's every bit of "cool, calculating and VERY competent."
My thanks to David and Werner for the information about Martyn Halm's books. I like lots of local details so I'm going to try it out.I just finished reading Steel Beneath the Skin by Nail Teasdale.
The heroine, Aneka, is basically a human who has been turned into a robot. (Don't ask.) She returns to the living after a thousand years in stasis. Sex is much more open then. The first set of people she meets contains several women who prefer women but are bi, and all of the explicit sex is FF. Nothing about the FF detracted from the story for me. In fact, it was a positive because most sci-fi books are M/F (as am I.) Not all, but most.
The drawback was the lack of any unexpected plot twists. Basically it just sets the stage for what appears to be a long series.
My apologies if this book has been review frequently here before. I couldn't figure out how to search the group's bookshelf for a particular book or if that is even possible.
Jon, to my knowledge, nobody's ever mentioned this book in this group.To check the bookshelves, click on the bookshelf link at the top of this page (to your right as you face the screen, among the list of links right under the group's logo picture). When the main bookshelf comes up, there will be a search box to the left that says "add books." Type in the title you want to look for, and click the Search button. If we already have it, the resulting hit will be accompanied by an "edit" button; otherwise, the button will say "add to group shelf" (or words to that effect). Hope this helps!
I just finished Slow Bullets. It's not an action book, but it has a lead female character who was a soldier and who becomes the leader of a group of people on a dying transport spaceship. She's a strong lead character.
Thanks, Werner. Good instructions.Here is another book that I found excellent. It is the story of a man who becomes the manager of a WV coal mine and the big city woman who marries him knowing nothing about his life or work ... and how she proves herself tough enough. Wonderful story. The same author (Homer Hickam) has written a series of books about a man who becomes stranded on a pacific island during the coast-watcher days of WWII.
The Red Helmet:
Homer Hickam is an Appalachian-born author who grew up in Coalwood, WV, which isn't far from Bluefield College, where I'm one of the librarians. He's written a number of books, both fiction and nonfiction, that take place in Appalachia; and because of our location, we have several of these in the library. But we don't have The Red Helmet, and I'd never heard of it until now. Now I want to have it ordered for our collection! Thanks for letting us know about it, Jon.
I wish more people knew about Homer Hickam. I first read one of his Pacific Island stories by chance, which led me to his other books. I didn't savor the rocket books, but the Coast Guard / Ocean / Pacific and coal field books are excellent.I think I've reread Red Helmet twice; I imagine I've got another couple of readings in me.
I may have once again failed in my big plans to do the Common Read. But I am about half way through The Clan of the Cave Bear - I daresay Ayla qualifies as a "female heroine". What a terrific book! I don't know how scientifically accurate any of it is, but Auel's descriptions are vivid and powerful - the Mammoth Hunt scene is particularly good.
I watched the film the other day on a whim, touching off a short Darryl Hannah marathon weekend (Cave Bear, Splash, Reckless, Attack of the 50ft Woman, and a re-watch of Roxanne). I figured the book would be a good next step. I was right.
This year's common read largely fizzled, and I'm not sure why. Very few people read or attempted to read the book, and hardly anyone commented about it. I'm not sure if this was a fluke, or an indication that the group is tiring of doing common reads. :-(Derrick wrote: "I daresay Ayla qualifies as a 'female heroine.'" Well, Derrick, pretty much ALL heroines are female. (Okay, I knew what you meant, but I couldn't resist that --sorry! :-) )
Seriously, yes, Ayla is a strong, smart, capable lady with heroic qualities that command admiration. Her cultural situation doesn't place her in a combat role; but even in the male-dominated Clan, she earned the status of "the woman who hunts," and she shows her mettle with a sling. She's absolutely one of my favorite fictional heroines (my wife feels the same way) and The Clan of the Cave Bear got five stars from me.
IMO, the quality of the later books in the series (I read the first five) is a bit uneven. I gave The Valley of Horses (which really showcases Ayla's survival skills) four stars, and would give The Mammoth Hunters five, if I ever get around to doing a review of it. The Plains of Passage shows a marked drop in quality, from carelessness in world-building and from trying to stretch 100 pages of material into 784. Auel rebounded and was more like her old self again in Shelters of Stone, which I think would have made a good conclusion to the series. But in my wife's opinion, the author dropped the ball badly again in the last volume (which I did not read), The Land of Painted Caves.
Derrick wrote: "I don't know how scientifically accurate any of it is...." That's actually one of Auel's strong points. Of course, all we know about either Neanderthal or Cro Magnon society in the Ice Age is what can be inferred from physical remains; but Auel thoroughly steeped herself in an exhaustive study of every known fact about the period. Her inferences all are based on something (except for the idea that Ice Age people didn't connect sex with pregnancy, which doesn't have a real basis and which I think is implausible).
I'm about half way through a good read about a young woman, a pickpocket, who is "discovered" by a group who want to use her skills for good. Kayli meet strong woman criteria for me so far. The book is The Academy Thief by C. L. Stone.
I just finished CLAN tonight, and I appreciate the insights on the future books and the author's research. I have plenty of other stuff to read before I think about picking up the second book, but it's good to know at least the next two are worth tackling.
For all practical purposes, Derrick, you could almost skip the fourth book, The Plains of Passage, and then quit with the fifth one. The fourth book is literally just a transitional volume designed to get the main characters from one end of Europe, where they've been doing interesting things, to the other end where they can resume being interesting. The only part that's up to Auel's usual standard is where they run into a tribe that's been taken over by a male-bashing female leader with a philosophy of gender feminism run amok, and her very own theory of how to ensure that all future babies born into the tribe will be female. That's really the only interesting section, unless you're fascinated by lectures on the natural history of wooly mammoths, etc.... :-)
Derrick: I had the same impression of the Clan series, except that it has been so long I don't remember in which the story crafting began to lose steam. I'd definitely heed Werner's sage advice.
:-)On a side note, several times while reading the book, I nearly jumped up and ran to Sprout's for some bison meat or a big steak. So much talk of savory meat throughout.
Whoda thunk? There are more good books about strong female characters than time to read them. Here is one I came across today. I've just started. If it doesn't fit, I'll come back and say so. The book is:Indivisible Line by Lorenz Font, described in the blurb in part:
Business owner Greg Andrews wants to escape his philandering wife and his life in general. Leaving New York City to join a hunting expedition in Alaska, Greg’s plans are turned upside down when he is shot on Gwich’in land and ends up on Sarah’s operating table. In the absence of a qualified doctor, Sarah must operate to save his life. She refuses to wait for the consent of their tribal leader, and her father banishes her from the tribal land in punishment.
Sarah, mentioned briefly above, is the lead female.
Strong female characters are actually fairly common in literature, if we consider strength in terms of strong character, moral courage, endurance of hardship and adversity, willingness to risk social disapproval to follow a dream, etc. Even heroines who are physically quite frail can (and do!) display that kind of strength.The heroines our group particularly focuses on are the ones who can handle physical challenges which demand some degree of physical endurance or competence in addition to moral strength. This often takes the form of combat with human adversaries (or monsters, aliens, etc.), but can take the form of wilderness survival, tasks demanding physical strength, etc. Ayla, for instance (see above), saves a toddler from a hyena, and survives alone in an Ice Age wilderness for, I think, something like a year. That focus is reflected in our group name, Action Heroine Fans (rather than simply Strong Heroine Fans, for instance --though most of us certainly ARE fans of strong heroines of all stripes.)
Not fiction, but I just finished Strayed, Cheryl's WILD, after enjoying the movie so much. Fantastic. I cried a couple of times.
Derrick, when I click on the link in your post above, the lady's profile says she "hasn't written any books," which is obviously incorrect (and violates basic logic, since it's an author profile!). :-( Do you have a link for Wild?
When our fellow group member E.J. Fisch recently made a copy of her SF series-opener
free on Kindle for a day, I jumped at the chance to snag one. I've just started reading it today (if I like it, I'll be buying a paperback copy!).
I've been reading the first in an old series of books by veteran SciFi author Anne McCaffrey, Freedom's Choice.
The action heroine, Kris, is a human who is taken slave along with thousands of others by human-like (but bigger) aliens as hostage for Earth's good behavior. Kris escapes (no spoiler - it is in the blurb), with others including one of the bad guy aliens, and the group is forced to live or die on an unoccupied world. The writing is akin to Heinlein's good stuff rather than more modern writers.
So far (I'm 70% done) excellent.
Jon, according to the Goodreads description, Freedom's Choice is actually the second book in the Catteni series. They list Freedom's Landing as the first.My wife is a big fan of McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series (more so than I am), but we've never explored much in the author's other series, although Barb owns a copy of the third book of this one, Freedom's Challenge. Maybe we should check out the Catteni series!
My bad. I'm reading Freedom's Landing; why I put down Freedom's Choice is probably best known by the moths cleaning out my skull memory by memory, brain cells by the dozen.
You mean, I'm not the only one who occasionally makes absent-minded misstatements? That's a relief! :-)
I am currently rereading the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. Kahlan Amnell is a strong female character. I remember now why I never read all the books in the series. The later titles try to bring a reader current with the story and that annoys me. I don't like having to read a synopsis of previous books through the voice of the main character telling a secondary character stories about their life. That gets old. I have three more lined up to read and I may not make it through them because of this. Is that fickle? I feel the excitement of devouring the next book to find out more about the fantasy yet become annoyed enough to rage quit at the ever present recap of books that came before...
Angela: I don't think that is fickle.Except in one respect. When the books in the series are first being published by an author who takes time to write them, it may be a couple years between books. Some reminding of who the characters are and what they've done may be necessary for readers who've forgotten some details.
I think a fair compromise is a "the story so far" section at the beginning. Yes there are more literary ways to fill in the gap, but ...
A worse problem is that which occurs when an author tries to stretch a short series into a never-ending series. The plot bogs down, snappy writing disappears and tension flees. Tom Chancy's books are an example. So too David Weber's Harrington books or Christopher Nuttall's Arc Royal books.
I could never get into Tom Clancy books and I love spy books. I'm more of a Robert Ludlum fan. I loved Marie St. Jacques in Bourne Identity. The film did not do her justice. The most remarkable change is that she was no longer smarter than Bourne. What made the relationship between Bourne and Marie so compelling in the novel was that she was frequently able to put the pieces of the conspiracy together before he could, and consequently set him on the right path. I think she worked for the Canadian government or something. In the movie, she is a ragamuffin strolling around Europe living off her friends. She was just along for the ride. :(
Yesterday, I started reading a spin-off novel from the 90s TV series, Xena, Warrior Princess,
by Ru Emerson. It's one I'd picked up from BookMooch some time ago; and right now, I wanted a relatively short, quick and lightweight read that I could finish by next month, when one of my other groups will be starting a common read that I plan to participate in.
I finished The Great Zoo of China a couple of days ago, and it definitely has an action heroine in CJ. This is full on blockbuster style action and you may have to suspend disbelief, but no the dragon aspects come off as fairly plausible, and CJ is awesome.
Last year on this thread, I mentioned Mark of the Lion, the first book of Suzanne Arruda's Jade del Cameron mystery series, set in colonial Africa soon after World War I. Barb and I have just started on the second installment of the series, Stalking Ivory, which finds Jade (nicknamed Simba Jike, "Lioness," by the natives) photographing wild elephants for her magazine --and stalking the poachers who in 1920 were already slaughtering these animals for their ivory.
Charles wrote, "Sounds like a good concept."Yes, the setting is a time and place that hasn't been used much in English-language fiction (so still has a degree of freshness for most readers), and which presents a lot of possibility for danger and adventure. Jade's backstory is realistic and convincing for that era, in terms of explaining the forming of a character like hers, and she's wonderfully realized here.
According to Amazon/Kindle, the kindle edition of Mark of the Lion
is $11, which is too pricy for me. It also indicates that there are now 6 books in the series. I put a used copy ($4 inc shipping) in a cart; whether I buy it remains to be seen.)
Jon, you sound like me --someone who doesn't have an unlimited book budget. :-) When the cost of a book is an issue, and I'm not sure a particular read would be worth spending much money on, I find the public library a great resource. Even if they don't have the book I want, they can usually get it by interlibrary loan. Of course, that may not work with indie and small press books, which often aren't in any, or hardly any, libraries. But quite a few U.S. libraries will have the books in this series; you won't have to buy them to read them.
Well Werner the library is a good idea. However, I just purchased 4 used books for a total of $16; $4 each. In each case the cost appeared to be less than Kindle. The first two I will be reading are: Mark of the Lion
by Suzanne Arruda and the second book in Anne McCaffery's sci-fi series about a fighting heroine. Freedom's Choice
Joanne is a member of the police department but her job is fixing police vehicles. Returning from vacation, she sees a brutal attack from the window of her descending airliner. I didn't realize when I bought it (or maybe it was free that day) that there were paranormal forces involved. Not my preferred villians but the book is enjoyable so far. Urban Shaman
Jon, I hope you enjoy Mark of the Lion as much as Barb and I did!
Our fellow group member David Wittlinger recently gifted me with a review copy of his debut novel,
(currently only available in e-book format), and I started on it last night. Right now, I'm just three chapters into it, but the hook is in! David warned us up front, on another thread, that the book contains some explicit sex and bad language; but I'm not too morally outraged yet. (Okay, the villain's conduct IS morally outraging; but I'm counting on him getting his comeuppance in the end. :-) )
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