Monday, March 31, 2014

Celebrating amazing women for Women's History Month

There are all kinds of ways to honor Women's History Month. Here in the publishing world we like to honor it by reading books about amazing women—whether real, fictional, historical, or contemporary.

In taking a look at all our JVNLA books centered around amazing women, we realized we simply had too many to list...so we created a Pinterest board! Check it out below.

One of the highlights on the adult fiction side is the prehistorical novel of a young woman, Ayla, who must learn to survive among a people who look and speak entirely unlike her in The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel (Crown; 1979, 2010). It's the beginning of a six-book saga that dramatizes the story of human survival itself.

On the adult nonfiction side, there's Natalie Zemon Davis's Women on the Margins (Harvard University Press; 1997, 2003) about the lives of three women from the seventeenth century whose daily dilemmas and turmoils reveal what it meant to be a woman during that period of history, and which also shed insight on women's lives today.

For the kids' fiction side, there's Passion Blue by Victoria Strauss (Skyscape, 2012) about a seventeen-year-old girl in Renaissance Italy who wants to find true love but is forced to enter a convent. She ends up falling in love with painting instead and journeys toward self-discovery.

Then on the kids' nonfiction side, there's the Newbery Honor Book and Boston Globe-Horn Award-winner Upon the Head of a Goat (FSG; 1981, 2004). Written by Aranka Siegal, this memoir tells the story of her childhood in Hungary as World War II starts, her father begins serving on the Russian front, and eventually she and her family are taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Click below to see the full Pinterest board!


These books are timeless, inspiring reads, so pick them up now--or any other month--and dive in!