Time for another Good Shit Vs. Shit To Avoid, this time prompted by Amanda, who is searching for books with strong female friendships:
I am looking for a book to read. I’ve been a little bored with the romance
novel offerings and here’s why: Why doesn’t anybody ever have a friend?
None of the women ever have any friends! I mean, sometimes they have a
convenient “This is my friend, sometimes I see her in a park, a ballroom
(if historical), or in yoga class (if contemporary). We talk for five
minutes and then we don’t think about each other for weeks.”In fact, the only romance novel I’ve ever read with a strong female
friendship right at the center is “Bet Me” by Jennifer Crusie. I’d love
to read more books about women who not only have moving relationships but
great friendships with other women. Can the bitchery help?
It’s a tricky balance, since the friendships that contain those friends known as Sequel Bait must be heroine-potential but not overshadowing the heroine herself. Yet the friends must also be strong characters that reveal more about the hero or heroine—surely heroes can have female friends, right? The first books that pop into my head are the Wallflower Quartet stories by Lisa Kleypas, which are centered on four women friends in London. There are some where the friends are in the background – The Devil in Winter only has a few scenes of the quartet being themselves, for example – but the characters as a group serving as the focus point of all four (or wait, aren’t there five now?) books seemed startling and new to me at the time of publication.
Another book with a very strong and I thought believable friendship – though not between a man and a woman – is in Julie James’ Something About You. l liked the heroine’s friends (of both genders!) as much as I liked the heroine herself.
What about you? What books do you adore that feature strong friendships among characters who aren’t the hero and heroine? Amanda specifically asked for friendships between women, but I’m also open to your suggestions for friendships that cross gender lines.
I agree with the recommendations for Nora Roberts boos, especially her Three Sisters Island trilogy. It’s about three women who are friends and witches so there’s a paranormal aspect. This also makes the friendships between the women very important to the books.
Julie Garwood is also very good.
size65? Oh my!!
It’s YA, but in the Cat Royal books, she seems to have friends of both genders and many ages. By circumstance, and sometimes choice, she’s frequently isolated, but her friends seem to turn up when she needs them.
In Mary Jo Putney’s Fallen Angels (etc) series, Maggie and Robin are platonic friends, although they were lovers at one point. They both have their own books, but the friendship is showcased in her story “Petals on the Wind”, although it’s also present in “Angel Rogue”. Clare, from Thunder and Roses, also has close friends.
Summer in Sonoma by Robyn Carr. Four strong women who are close friends.
Gotta second the poster who spoke about introversion. And bitchslap Ebony whoever uptop who said that women with no friends are pathetic.
Look, honeybun—I’ve tried the female friendship thing. Really, I have. But women are—get this—annoying. Like, I want to remove my eyeball with a spork annoying.
I don’t do malls, or lunch with the ladies, or Tupperware/Pampered Chef/Cookie Lee/Passion Parties. I don’t watch soap operas. I don’t watch SATC at all, much less while glued to my phone with my bestie on the other end. I certainly don’t kiss and tell. My love life is nobody’s business but my own (and that of the guy I’m dating.) And when you don’t like to hang out or talk on the phone, most women find that really offensive. Unlike guys, who really can talk on the phone for five minutes once every six months and still consider each other friends.
I have chosen, therefore, to quit pining for a female friend who doesn’t completely drive me up the wall and who isn’t totally neeeeeeeeedy (Oh, Jesus God, I’m getting stabby thinking about some of my aborted friendships) and who doesn’t require a level of constant connection that I won’t even give to my boyfriend or a child if I had one.
Yes, there are probably women out there who don’t make me want to wrap their heads in duct tape to get them to *shut up*, but just as some women accept the idea that they are happier being single, I’ve accepted the idea that I’m happier without a BFF. I’m not opposed to the idea, just not looking and very picky.
Now, ladies, I know you are all just itching to tell me what a huge bitch I must be (nope, I’m the world’s nicest person—thus making me into the world’s biggest needy-monster magnet). How bout all of you look inward and ask yourselves whether or not you actually like your female friends? Do you really like the ladies in your book clubs? The girls you’ve known since junior high and still hang out with out of safety and tradition? Do you come home and bitch to your SO about all the draaaaammmmmaaaaa that your so called friends bring into your lives? Because if you were really honest with yourselves I think you’ll find you actually agree with me. And no, that doesn’t make you a terrible person. Because I’m a pretty damn fine human being.
The first one that popped into my head was “P.S., I Love You” by Cecelia Ahern (although it isn’t so much a traditional romance novel by a long shot.)
The second one I came up with was Julie Garwood’s “The Secret.”
Also, a lot of Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s characters don’t start out with strong friendships, but they develop them within the story (My favorite is ‘Kiss an Angel’)
I’m going to 3rd to recomendation for Gail’s Parasol Protectorate series.
We recently had her speak at Literary Orange and she talked about how annoyed she was about how people view ‘strong females” as women with no friends – and how women need a support network, that’s what makes them strong. (She called these characters “Skinned” – describing them as men who’s pensies have been taken away and given breasts. She also said that “Harry Potter is skinned in the other direction.”) Alexia has a wonderful friendship with Ivy and her terrible hats. When she needs advice on the supernatural she runs to Lord Akeldama. She’s even friends with her werewolf husband’s beta wolf.
@Tinyninja – On one hand, I can agree with you – some women are so airheaded I want to smack them. I hate Sex In The City with a fiery passion. Don’t give a flying fig for Paris fashion. Some of them are so stupid I want to cry. But I miss having a close friend. My best friend, Erin, died in 2005 after a lifetime of battling with cystic fibrosis. She was incredibly smart, down to earth, sweet. I miss her a lot. Haven’t had a close female friend – or even a male friend – since. And I could really use a friend right now. There’s some family things going on that really give me the need for a shoulder to cry on. I don’t have that and I feel – weak and pathetic.
I’m a bit late, but Marian Keyes does great friendships – try The Last Chance Saloon. The friend circle is as much of a focus as the romance(s).
Maybe someone already mentioned this but I gotta say, Julie Ortolon. Her Perfect Trilogy has a great friendship base. I believe the first one is Almost Perfect.
Goodness, what a lot of anger, Tinyninja. You have been really unlucky if all the women you have ever known (other than yourself, of course) have turned out to be stupid, ignorant, needy, clinging, nosey, superficial airheads with a regrettably naff taste in entertainment.
I am assuming that you are female. But whether you are male or female, your characterisation of all women as ‘annoying’ is the kind of stereotyping that most people now regard as unacceptable. It is also untrue.
I thought there was a really good friendship in Marta Acosta’s series (Happy Hour at Casa Dracula and sequels).
How bout all of you look inward and ask yourselves whether or not you actually like your female friends?
More than like, I love them (in a totally platonic way, of course :). They’re not needy or dramatic, but they’ll always be there for me if I need someone to pick up my kids in an emergency, or if I just want to go see a chick flick. We exercise together, we carpool, we pick things up from the store for each other, and we never forget each others’ birthdays. In fact I’ve never had a male friend or romantic partner who was as consistently supportive as my 3 closest female friends.
I feel the same way Alpha Lyra!
I really like the (few) long term women friends I have. I enjoy the more casual friendships. If I don’t like the women or men I am associating with, I limit the contact to work/group/whatever. I mean, if you don’t like them, they are not friends. I will say that people I truly click with are few and far between but why go for volume over quality.
I also do enjoy reading books that include the friendships, not necessarily in detail, but enough to show that side of the hero/heroine. I do not enjoy the books where the heroine is taken advantage of by someone she doesn’t like but can’t set limits on.
So, in some ways, I know where tinyninja is coming from. I love the friends I do have but am often alone for long periods when I am not working near them and that’s OK for me. Better than a pretend friendship with someone I don’t enjoy.
I do wonder whether Tinyninja’s apparent contempt for women as a sex is based on being forced by circumstances to associate with many women with whom she has little in common. In the workplace, for example, it is necessary to be on quite close terms with colleagues, without necessarily liking all of them, while in small towns, neighbours may be loosely classed as ‘friends’, simply because you see them often and have known them a long time. In relatively static rural communities, it is still quite common to know some of the same people all one’s life, from the first day at primary school till death. This does not happen much in large cities.
Long-term acquaintances of this kind are not necessarily what I would call ‘friends’; like family, they are simply people who are in one’s life by default. One can like some of them very much, and others not at all, but they have been wished upon one, not actively chosen.
Friends are those individuals who are actively drawn together because they have many interests and attitudes in common, because they see life in the same way, and have similar strategies for dealing with it. Their background may be very different from one’s own, but one can be relaxed and natural in their company.
To me, to describe as a ‘friend’ a person whom one dislikes or despises in the way that Tinyninja so graphically sets out, is a contradiction, a complete misuse of the word. Friends are by definition people whom one likes, respects and wants to spend time with.
GS vs STA is my favorite segment that Smart Bitches does. Here’s my two cents.
Christie Craig’s
Divorced Desperate series.
Linda Howard’s
Mr. Perfect
Emma Holly’s
Personal Assets
Patricia Cabot’s
Boy Series
Prince Charming by Julie Garwood has an important female friendship in the middle, albeit a fresh new one from after they met the hero.
My women friends are gifts. Over the years I’ve had a number of friendships based on common interests—work, children, school, judo, band boosting—and though many of those friendships have faded with the associated interests, a few special relationships have survived. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the value of a friend doesn’t lie in common interests, it lies in the character of the friend. i don’t have a lot of close friends, but what there is is “cherce.” As I approach sixty, I’ve learned that the best friendships—the ones based on a shared sense of humor, mutual affection, emotional support, and the ability to pick up an intriguing conversation after six months of silence—are worth all the nurturing and care that you can put into them.
@Tinyninja—I would never say that a woman without friends is pathetic, but I have to wonder why someone with such a blanket contempt for women is hanging about on this website. Smart Bitches may be virtual, but I would have thought it was firmly rooted in the dynamics of women and their friendships.
I’d like to suggest Madeline Hunter’s Rarest Blooms series. (Ravishing in Red, Sinful in Satin, Provocative in Pearls, soon to be released Dangerous in Diamonds) Beautifully written with great female relationships.
How bout all of you look inward and ask yourselves whether or not you actually like your female friends? … Because if you were really honest with yourselves I think you’ll find you actually agree with me.
Speaking honestly, I love my sisterfriends.
Wow, Tinyninja. I’m really sorry. That sounds truly awful. Other than the crazy resentful bitter tone, your interests sound like they align closely with me and my friends. We don’t do any of those things together. None of us are particularly “girly.” We speak truths freely, even when they are difficult and drama gets called out quickly. God I don’t know what I would do without them in my life.
I’m wondering if it’s an age thing? Are you young? I can remember friendships being a little tougher for me when I was in my 20’s, but in my mid 30’s they turned rock solid. Now that I’m about to enter my 40’s I am thrilled to have them in my life. Even though I honestly did marry my best friend from high school, boy can these ladies make me laugh and lift me up when I cry.
I hope you can find that at some point in your life. Because it truly does add a whole other dimension to your life. GOOD female friendships are amazing. But, it sounds like you have already decided that the rest of us women (other than yourself, of course, who is apparently perfect and non-dramatic.) are annoying idiots who don’t deserve your time or energy. So, yes. That sounds really lonely to be the sole member of your gender that meets your standards.
Pam, I wondered about that, too. I think that the responses to Tinyninja’s rant have been admirably restrained and thoughtful, considering the offensiveness of the insult. All of us are accustomed to dealing with sexism in some shape or form, but rarely is it so blatantly expressed these days.
I just finished My Gigolo: The Care and Feeding of a Male Prostitute by Molly Burkhart. The heroine there has a lot of friends, as does the hero—although most friendships cross gender boundaries. The heroine has… one female friend, two male friends, and she’s best friends with her sister (does that count?). The hero has only one, female friend (and others who’re referenced but don’t appear, so they don’t count), but there’s a point made that he feels like he doesn’t have enough friends. I’m still deciding how much I liked the book, but I smiled all the way through it and dropped all my commitments for a day to read it, so that has to say something, right?
It counts. If one defines ‘friend’ as being someone with whom one shares a bond of mutual affection, a person one trusts, relies upon and enjoys spending time with, then blood relationship actually makes no difference one way or the other. As I said somewhere above, the mere fact of knowing someone well, seeing them often, and not actively disliking them still does not necessarily make them a friend.
Try Julia Quinn’s Splendid, Dancing at Midnight, and Minx. The books are a trilogy following three friends: two female cousins (who are the respective heroines of the first two books) and a completely platonic male friend (the hero of the third book). They’re Quinn’s first three books, and I do think that her talents have matured over the years, but they are still very good.
I agree. Actually, I think that this is a deficiency in the English language—we need a word that implies more than acquaintance, but less than friend. I recently used the term “Facebook friend” in a conversation, when describing someone I have known for years and with whom I am friends on Facebook, but whom I never really talk or hang out with, and haven’t seen since we had classes together in high school. I’m hoping to find a better word, for the future.
I have certainly met women like those described by Tinyninja, but I would never call them friends.
I think a woman without close friends(aside from family) in a contempory is odd. Because that’s the way we live now. But for a historical romance, it’s probably more historically accurate if their best friends are their sisters and sisters-in-law. Women did socialize more based on familial ties rather than relationships formed at school or at work, for a lot of reasons (and they still do in non-Western cultures where women are not often in the workplace) #1 bigger family size-you were more likely to have sisters, #2 women did not attend school, if they got any education it was usually at home, and #3 upper class women(who are usually the ones featured in romances) did not have paying jobs outside the home. Think about “Little Women” and the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen’s books-their family members were their closest friends. Mary Balogh’s “Simply” series is unusual because they all have to work for a living. Some good examples of sister friends are Kleypas’s Hathaway series, Balogh’s Huxtable series, Anne Gracie’s “Perfect” series, and the sisters-in-law that become friends in Lauren’s Cynster books.
I would suggest paranormals by Nalini Singh ( in the archangel series the heroine is besties with her boss, in the psy-changeling Sacha and Tamsyn) and GA Aiken
I am going to say Eloisa James’s “Duchess” series, and will second the suggestions for Julie James (loooove!) and the Lisa Kleypas “Wallflowers” series. Those were also the first ones that came into my mind.
I’d like to add that although it’s not a great example of a healthy friendship, Susan Mallery’s “Best of Friends” book features two female best friends whose relationship is strong, if not precisely in a good way. For all of it’s faults (and a large part of the novel is directed at those faults, so it isn’t as if the author was just being lazy), that friendship, for all its slightly toxic undertones, was just as interesting to me as the good friendships that are in the other books by the Jameses and Kleypas. (Also, I loved that the hero in this book wasn’t just another broody, sullen alpha male – don’t get me wrong, those guys are fun, and this hero had his “down” moments, but it was nice to get a different type of guy who knew how to crack a joke without resulting in half a page of shocked reactions from the other characters because it’s so rare.)
All my recs have been said: Jenny Crusie, Julia Quinn, Nora Roberts, Lisa Kleypas, JD Robb, Victoria Dahl, Julie James.
Oh! I did read Simply Irresistable by Jill Shalvis. The heroine begins forming a friendship with her estranged sisters. I quiet liked that book.
I think essentially if they aren’t Toothpaste Friends (always coming through in a tight squeeze) I don’t believe it. Or enjoy it.
@Tinyninja
It’s early and I’m sorta-kinda watching tv, while on the phone to my bff so possibly I’ve got this wrong but wasn’t EbonyMcKenna saying that it was a little “pathetic” for someone to have no friends at all? She was never gender specific. As someone who has a core group of amazing friends I’ll admit that I feel sorry for people who don’t have that. While I’m sure that puts me in the same category as “Smug Married Couples” BUT really I deserve to feel smug considering the aweseomeness of my friends.
Even though there is a good chance the person asking will never see my comment since I’m commenting so late and there is a good chance she’ll find this book anyway if she takes two other commentors’ advice on Victoria Dahl, still, I’m commenting anyway. The first book I thought of was Dahl’s most recent contemporary “Crazy for Love” where in the opening scene it is two girlfriends getting away from the chaos that is the one friend’s life. The friendship is a big thing throughout the story.
Given that you like Crusie, ‘Agnes and the Hitman’ has a good female friendship between women who had gone to school together.
I like the Wallflower series, overall I’d give it a B. It’s not groundbreaking and it’s often trite, but given a healthy suspension of disbelief it’s enjoyable. A good summer read to check out from the library. Kleypas writes engaging prose and rarely do I ever get jarred out of the moment in reading. [Being an engineer, the short description of probabilities/statistics in Devil in Winter was painful to read, but again a rarity.]
The only other book that strikes me with it’s female relationships is Slow Hands by Leslie Kelly. In this situation they’re sisters but they have a really close friendly bond which plays a part in the Big Misunderstanding.