7 Awesome Heroines Who Know “Girly” Doesn’t Mean “Weak”

Lainey (The Art of Lainey, by Paula Stokes)
One of the best things about watching girl’s girl Lainey fall in love with seemingly wrong-for-her Micah is the way Stokes doesn’t lean on silly misunderstandings or manufactured angst to up the drama. Lainey has a thick skin and a head on her shoulders, and she can give as good as she gets. She’s bubbly, she’s loud, and she enjoys being a girl, dammit. She gets flack for it from her goth boss and from some of Micah’s more bitchy associates, but she doesn’t care. She’s an athlete, she’s a friend, she can be a bit of a princess, but one thing she isn’t is one-dimensional. It’s a pleasure to watch her surprise people—including herself—with her own emotional growth.

Weetzie Bat (Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat books, by Francesca Lia Block)
As soon as I met Weetzie, she was the coolest girl I knew. She wears dresses made of bedsheets, drinks pink champagne, and does a spot-on Jayne Mansfield impression. She’s deeply romantic, full of dreams about My Secret Agent Lover Man, her fantasy crush turned dour life mate. She makes mistakes, falls in love too fast, and wants life to be a string of bright, beautiful moments—Weetzie was curating before curation was a thing. She’s super feminine and super resilient. Raised by a selfish mom and a beloved but often absent dad, she has the courage as a young adult to build the stardust-and-jacaranda life she wants from scratch, and to fight to keep it.

Etta (Not Otherwise Specified, by Hannah Moskowitz)
Etta’s a girly girl, and she’s not. She’s a ballerina who doesn’t do ballet, a recovering anorexic whose numbers never added up to a clear diagnosis, and a messed-up girl who’s also, despite everything—lost friends, eating issues, dropped dance dreams, painful ex situation—a happy person. She does pirouettes and wears sexy pink shirts and loves to kiss boys and girls. She’s a moving target, female and ballsy and complex. She’d be fine with you calling her girly, but she knows that’s just part of the story.

Viv (Tear You Apart, by Sarah Cross)
Princesses tend to get a bad rap, and Viv is the next-best thing to a literal fairy-tale princess, prone to wearing bikinis and lipstick and leaning on her on again, off again boyfriend when her car breaks down. But in Tear You Apart, book two in Cross’s Beau Rivage series, she proves she has a core of steel. Like many people in her tiny town, Viv is afflicted with a fairy-tale curse, in her case, a Snow White curse, dooming her to death by Huntsman or salvation by prince. But when her prince proves to be less than worthy, she has to do the unthinkable to survive: rewrite her fairy-tale fate, through sheer force of intellect, courage, and will.

Anna (Prep School Confidential, by Kara Taylor)
Anna could be written off as a trouble-making queen bee, always in the wrong place at the wrong time—and, to be fair, she is kicked out of her schmancy prep school for, erm, lighting part of it on fire. She’s equally comfortable dealing with breakouts and breaking and entering, lets crushes lead her down dangerous paths, and is a sucker for Juicy Couture and well-conditioned lips. She’s also smart as hell, tenacious, and loyal, proving to be the only person at her new boarding school who doesn’t leave well enough alone after a murder occurs.

Kestrel (The Winner’s Curse, by Marie Rutkoski)
In Rutkoski’s gorgeous fantasy series, Kestrel is the daughter of a proud, hawkish Valorian general. Like all Valorian women, she wears knives over her dresses, and is free to fight in the military, duel to the death, and opt out of marriage—and as her father’s only child, she’s expected to do those things as ruthlessly as he would. “Girly” doesn’t exist in Kestrel’s world, nor would it be a mold she fits in, exactly, but she’s an undercover pacifist, whose compassion and distaste for conquest make her an eccentric in her place and time. Despite her gentle heart, she’s able to use fierce intellect and a strategic mind to keep herself afloat, even when forbidden love threatens to drown her.

Sierra (Shadowshaper, by Daniel José Older)
In between painting murals in her Brooklyn neighborhood, running from beasties, and unraveling the rules of an ancient supernatural order, Sierra sits down for a makeover from her BFF, worries (just a little) about her belly ponch, and dances around the possibility of a boy who might be worth her while. She’s feminine and strong, confident and unsure, resourceful and afraid. Her reflection doesn’t always show her what she wants to see, but she remains dauntless—even when she has to talk herself into it.