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The Wrath & the Dawn
Renée Ahdieh
In this A Thousand and One Nights retelling, the fate of a kingdom rests on a single, terrible curse and the will of a resourceful young girl. Woven throughout this dangerous romance is a discussion of sacrifice and rulership that will leave you reaching for the conclusion.
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The Best of All Possible Worlds
Karen Lord
This is a devastating, epic love story about the destruction of a world and the struggle that follows—for allies and assistance, for the survival of a people and their culture, and for creating home again when there’s no going back.
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And I Darken
Kiersten White
While not exactly a retelling, this one takes a familiar historical figure and reimagines him as a girl. In this tale, Vlada is an unapologetically ambitious princess, unwilling to part with her hard-won power—not for love, at least. It’s the first in a trilogy that’s absolutely gripping.
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Featured Book
Seafire
Natalie C. Parker
My love of science fiction and fantasy came early in life, through copious helpings of bedtime stories and a family tradition of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. My frustration with the genre also arrived early. As an opinionated sixth grader, I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and my disappointment over the lack of girls on the page was directly proportional to how much I’d otherwise loved the tale. My solution, at the time, was to read even more science fiction and fantasy, but I began to seek out the women.
I discovered Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler and Mary Stewart, then Marge Piercy and Anne McCaffery—only a few of the authors who laid the foundation of women in science fiction and fantasy. The tradition continues to grow and develop in beautiful, exciting ways, and my short list of 10 is just a sample. Each of these books has inspired me, and so they’re all, in a way, a part of my own upcoming futuristic fantasy novel Seafire.
Featured Image: Matt McCarty; Author Photo: Georgia Shae Photography
