Following a Google link for dreary work reasons, I happened upon this post from April last year:
Last week, I started a list of Cool Girls from Kid Lit. Here is what I specified for "cool" criteria: "they should be smart and strong and independent, people who would make good role-models for girls today."
I love the idea, so I'm starting my own:
1. Jo March, Little Women
My absolute heroine. Feisty, independent, stubborn, romantic and indefagitably loyal and honorable. Cutting off her hair ('your one beauty!') to save her family was such a marvellous gesture. And I liked that she had big fat flaws to balance her virtues. And, of course, she was a writer and loved books.
2. Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables series
All of the above qualities (second sentence). I liked Gilbert a lot more than Jo March's beaux (as they called them in those days).
3. Ramona Quimby, The Ramona series
A spunky little tomboy with a naughty streak who always made her parents and sister laugh with her malpropisms and misadventures. Her heart was in the right place, though.
4. Josie Alibrandi, Looking for Alibrandi
Hmmm ... spunky, smart, feisty (a pattern emerging?) and incredibly likeable.
5. Alice, Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass
As may be obvious from the blog title, I just love Alice to death. Of course, I also love Lewis Carroll's writing and the alternative universes he has created. The way he plays with language! Humpty Dumpty! ('A word means just what I intend it to. No more, no less.') The Red Queen! Richard E. Grant said recently that he read the book as a newcomer to England and immediately saw it as a delightful way of understanding the culture: they all play quite precisely by a set of rigid social rules or conventions, but the rules often don't make sense and the people are actually quite eccentric. But, okay, Alice ... she's adventurous, smart, stubborn and fiercely independent.
6. Judy, Seven Little Australians
It's a VERY long time ago that I read this, but I remember her being a Jo March-ish character, full of rebellion but actually incredibly decent. Pity about that father of hers ...
7. Dicey, Homecoming
Her flaky mother abandoned her and her brothers and sisters in a parking lot and 12 year-old Dicey kept them together and organised them to walk halfway across the country to find the grandmother they'd never met. With no money, no transport, no protection.
BAD role models
1. The Sweet Valley High twins, Jessica and Elizabeth
Every novel started with a description of their blue eyes, blonde hair and perfect bodies and by explaining that Elizabeth was the Good One and Jessica was the Bad One. Talk about madonna/whore syndrome all in one family ... Yes, I read these novels as a kid anyway. I had Barbies, too.
2. Veruca Salt, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
What a revolting little spoilt brat! But in such a melodramatic, pantomime villainess kind of way that I just loved her. Especially in the movie (the old one, that Roald Dahl apparently hated). What a brilliantly bratty song and dance routine she had ('I want it NOW!'). Sigh.
Feel free to add to this or argue ...
UPDATE:
Pippi Longstocking (thanks Lucy Tartan and Kirsty - how could I forget this one?!)
AND
Harriet the Spy (I wanted to BE Harriet the Spy - surely the girl grew up to be a killer journo - thanks Eleanor Bloom!)
AND
I've just remembered my favourite Judy Blume book, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. It's set in Miami Beach just after World War II. Sally is ten years old and she lives in a fantasy world in her own head, dreaming of being film star Esther Williams and spying on a man who looks suspiciously like Hitler, who she still fears may come to kill all the Jews in America.
From Judy Blume's website:
I was just seven years old when World War II ended, but the war had so colored my early life it was hard to think of anything else. No one I knew had actually experienced the war first hand. No bombs dropped on America; my family and friends weren't starving - we had cozy homes and enough to eat. And yet, as I listened to my parents whispering in the darkness, I couldn't help worrying that it could happen again. War. And this time the bombs could drop on our houses. Nevermind that Adolf Hitler was supposedly dead. I knew that he'd wanted to kill all the Jews in the world. And I was a Jew.
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself is my most autobiographical novel. When I was nine and ten I was a lot like Sally - curious, imaginative, a worrier. I was always making up stories inside my head. In my stories, which I never wrote down or shared, I was brave and strong. I led a life of drama, adventure and fame. I think the character of Sally explains how and even why I became a writer.
cross-posted at The Paper Drunkards
