5 Kids’ Books That Are More Feminist than You Remember

Pippi Longstocking (The Pippi Longstocking series, by Astrid Lindgren)
Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking is just as feminist as you remember. The iconically braided girl lives in a little house in a Swedish village with her monkey, her horse, and her suitcase full of gold coins. Having grown up on her sea captain father’s ship, she has no knowledge of or use for social niceties, and tends to settle all disputes with friendly shows of force—nobody is stronger than Pippi but her own missing dad. Amid a sea of heroines who won over readers with their sweetness and light, Pippi blithely demands respect with her good humor, indomitable optimism, and ability to overpower grown men without breaking a sweat.

Lyra Belacqua (His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman)
All hail Lyra Belacqua, a dirty-faced badass who moves heaven and earth to chase her best friend to the literal ends of the earth after he’s stolen by a beautiful child hunter capable of unspeakable evil. Lyra terrorizes the scholars she’s raised among, starts turf wars with gangs of kids who are bigger and more numerous than she is, and plays pranks that, in at least one case, border on heretical. But her gender and her place in the world—as a little girl of uncertain parentage and unorthodox upbringing, kept largely in the dark about the wider world—never stops her from doing what’s right. She fights against parental figures, societal expectations, and evil itself, plunging herself into an epic, dimension-spanning adventure.

Karana (Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O’Dell)
Hatchet, schmatchet. (Just kidding. Hatchet is still awesome.) In this gut-wrenching adventure story rooted in real-life history, a girl’s attempt to reunite with her errant brother, who missed the ship taking their people from their tiny island home to the distant mainland, finds herself utterly alone after her brother is killed by wild dogs. She builds for herself a one-girl civilization, hunting her food with weapons she has made, building a house of bones, putting in stores, and making the island’s wild animals into her companions. She made suburban kids everywhere dream of leaving their lives of Delia’s catalogs and Full House reruns behind, in favor of a simpler, more badass way of life. Or so I’ve heard.

Lucy Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis)
For now, let’s set aside poor Susan Pevensie, forever denied access to Narnia/Heaven for the crime of getting too interested in boys and lipstick. Yes, it has been pointed out that where Father Christmas gifted Peter a sword and shield, he gave Susan a freaking hunting horn to call for help, but don’t forget that Lucy, at least, got a dagger (and Susan a bow and arrows to go with her horn). Lucy’s the first Pevensie to discover Narnia, and the only Pevensie to travel to the end of the world with King Caspian. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my personal favorite among the Narnia Chronicles, she’s brave and game and utterly fierce, facing not just magical threats in a brave new world, but the almost equally deadly pain of what she sees in the Magician’s Book, on the Island of the Voices: an enchanted page that allows her to see and hear a distant classmate slagging her off in a moment of social-climbing weakness. In that moment, Lucy grows up just as much as she does in any battle, learning the perils of too much knowledge and the pain of learning things you can’t forget. It’s a small but lovely scene that proves again that Lewis’s aims far overreached parable…even if some of that Aslan stuff got a bit rich.

Sunny (Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor)
In a newer story you may have discovered as an adult, Sunny is an outsider even before she discovers she’s a witch. She’s also a girl of often painful contradictions: she’s African, but has light, albino skin. She’s a killer soccer player, but can’t withstand playing in direct sunlight. And she is, she learns, a powerful Akata witch, who immediately finds herself in mortal danger despite her newfound abilities. Okorafor’s book stirs together African myth, wholly invented magic, and coming of age tropes in a story headed up by a heroine who refuses to be crushed by her difference and the cruelty of her classmates, and who seizes her magical heritage with both hands.