In seventh grade, I broke my finger pretending to be a Harlem Globetrotter with the neighborhood boys. Until then, I'd been their equal in sports, but suddenly their shoulders were battering rams, and I was the house of straw from the Three Little Pigs. I hated being a puny, weak-armed girl. But then I saw Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton going mano a mano with aliens and cyborgs, and I realized that I didn't have to be a damsel in distress. Those ladies can pummel any guy on the planet — or in outer space. Here are three books with girls who know how to fight.
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Fight Like a Girl: 3 Girls Who Pack a Deadly Punch
The Devotion of Suspect X
by Keigo Higashino and Alexander O. Smith
In The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, the action begins with a death blow. When Yasuko's ex-husband threatens her daughter, she kills him in a rash act of self-preservation. Enter her neighbor, Ishigami, a math genius who is unfulfilled by his job as a high school teacher and also by life in general. He has a secret crush on Yasuko, and desperate to help her, he devises a plan to dupe the police. This book isn't so much a whodunit novel, but a howdunit, as the professor and Yasuko compete in an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse.
Mice
by Gordon Reece
Speaking of cat-and-mouse, even shy, harmless girls have a breaking point. In Mice by Gordon Reece, 15-year-old Shelley and her mother have both been bullied — one by the mean girls at school, the other by an ex-husband. Faced with a fight-or-flight decision, the two women run away to a new home in the country where a new bully finds them. This time though, Shelley fights back, and the pastoral setting of their Honeysuckle Cottage becomes tinged with blood. In the aftermath, she and her mother must deal with the consequences and decide whom they wish to be: frightened mice or ruthless survivors.
Bloody Jack
by L. A. Meyer
Bloody Jack — or Bloody Mary? L.A. Meyer's novel takes place in 18th-century England where orphaned Mary Faber cons her way onto the Dolphin as a ship's boy. She has her first period, joins The Brotherhood of Ship's Boys on His Majesty's Ship the Dolphin and gets their tattoo. She kills pirates, all while disguised as a boy. Her life gets even more complicated when she falls in love, but Mary, or Bloody Jack as she is known on the ship, is delightfully resourceful and somehow manages to put the girl back in tomboy.