Fiction

A Galentine’s Day Reading List

Books about female friendships for Galentine's Day!

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Raych Krueger

Staff Writer

Raych has so many kids (like, two, but they’re super young, which makes it seem like there are more of them) and this really cuts into her reading time. She’s using her degrees in Early Childhood Education and English Literature to teach the toddler to read to the baby so she can get back to her trashy Victorian sensation novel, or whatever. She’s also teaching her kids to travel and eat broadly, mostly through example (Do As I Do is super important, you guys), and hasn’t gone a year without hopping on a plane since she was a teenager. She recently moved from the Canadian coast to the Canadian prairies, where it gets hella cold, and if not for the internet, she’d surely be dead. Blog: Books I Done Read Twitter: @raychraych

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Happy Gaaaaaaaaalentine’s Day!

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I was that girl in her early 20s “with mostly guy friends I dunno I just jive with them better there’s no drama” because I had fully bought into the idea that dudes and dude things are inherently better than ladies and shit. HA HA HA WHAT A TOOOOOOOOL anyway I have seen the error of my ways. I’m in my mid 30s and I got kids and the world is garbage and my field of fucks left to give about what makes me look cool is pretty barren. Which is maybe why books celebrating strong female friendships are what is cranking my chain these days. #persisters doin’ it for themselves.

There are some excellent books featuring friends, where the ladies go on about their various ways fighting in the Israeli forces FOR EXAMPLE (The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu) or navigating the complications of being young and marriageable in Saudi Arabia (Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh) and the friendships are what tie the disparate stories together. Or there are books or series like Anne of Green Gables, where a best friend serves to bolster the activities of the main character.

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You’re a side character at best.

But what gets me in the gullet is books specifically about the friendship between two or more women. To wit:

Attachments – Rainbow Rowell

This is always the first one that springs to my mind, because while it is OSTENSIBLY about the burgeoning romance between Lincoln and one of the two women whose personal email conversations he creeps while doing some routine surveillance (when…when I say it like that, it sounds weird. It’s less weird than it sounds), the meat of the novel lies in the email exchanges themselves. The relationship between Beth and Jennifer is hilarious and uplifting and heartwarming and hilarious.

Sula— Toni Morrison

“[T]hey found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for” but all the best things in life are complicated, so THINGS GET COMPLICATED in this classic tale of two girls grown up inseparable in small town Ohio who then, oh shit, separate over some shit. Not all galentineships end in waffles, in fiction as in life.

Code Name Verity – Elizabeth Wein

This is the one I recommend for if you want to read about badass WWII lady pilots and ladyspies and COURAGE and UNRELIABLE NARRATORS and also do you want to cry a lot? I BET YOU DO you are gonna cry so much I’m crying right now

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No hey it’s ok I already said I was crying.

These are the kinds of ovaries before brovaries, uteruses before duderuses relationships that Galentine’s Day was made for.

So get out there and share some waffles with your ladyfriends, and also rec me some more friendfiction plz because I’m so into this.