Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood

Leah Phillips’ Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction (2023) presents an innovative and incredibly important interpretation of how gender and young adult (YA) literature intersect. For teachers and educators looking at ways to expand their understanding of how literature influences readers, Phillips’ offers powerful possibilities. Through a reframing of well understood and oft taught plotlines, she explains how popular texts can convey crucial messages, a project that many literature educators will be familiar with.

In seeking to ‘reframe’ how YA girlhood is understood in children’s literature studies, Phillips revisits heroic archetypes (Hourihan, 2005) to argue that the female-hero disrupts the original myth by having to accept the embodied reality of adolescent girlhood (xviii). In introducing concepts of relation, ambiguity and liminality to the ‘heroic romance,’ mythopoeic YA literature, Phillip’s presents an opportunity to alter narratives that limit options for girlhood. Mythopoeic fantasy refers to fantasy that is about the creation of myth or stories that build entire worlds, belief systems, and ideas into a created, secondary world (the fantasy world). As an example, Phillips focuses her argument largely around Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books (Pierce, 2023), making for a compelling and consistent literary basis for her theoretical analysis.

The structure of Female Heroes centres different roles the female-heroes can occupy in the examined texts. Phillips starts with a classic of ‘heroic romance,’ examining how Bella Swan (Twilight, Meyer, 2005) and Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games, Collins, 2008) are both positioned as a hero’s bride rather than independent heroes, especially focusing on the role of ‘sparkle,’ or makeovers, in their heroic narratives (10). Using these two famous heroines, who are already well known to many young readers in the twenty first century, Phillips argues persuasively that ‘replacing a male hero with an ostensibly girl hero is not enough, especially when the hegemonic expectations around [the female protagonist’s] appearance remain and intensify’ (17). With this argument established, Phillips launches into the most compelling part of her book with an in-depth examination of mythopoeic YA novels.

Defining mythopoeic YA as fiction that ‘draws on the Creative, world-shaping power of myth and YA’s liminal potential to envision and articulate new ways of living and being an adolescent girl’ (23), Female Heroes’ four central chapters explore the ways in which this specific genre of YA speculative fiction engage the ‘possibilities of the liminal’ (42). Using the second chapter to establish theoretical foundations, Phillips focuses the third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Female Heroes on presenting the possibilities for this boundary defining genre. For readers looking to understand her thinking or engage with the texts she mentions, these chapters offer the best in-depth close reading, as well as offering educators creative ways to present these texts to adolescent readers. These sections also show how ingeniously Phillips approaches fantasy theory, reworking common assumptions around the story in speculative fiction to explain exactly why mythopoeic YA fantasy is different and why that matters. Beyond simply offering a clever critical framework, the central portion of this book shows ways to engage the theory of female-heroes in literary practice.

Phillips’ powerful conclusion does not shy away from examining the importance of reframing the ‘dominant myth’ that has ‘privileged one story’ (139). Weaving together her arguments from the previous three chapters, Phillips presents the idea of ‘the Pack,’ which offers ‘collectivity’ instead of the binaries that often define heroic romances (148). In essence, rather than solitary victory over evil, Female Heroes demonstrates the alternative possibility presented in mythopoeic YA – that there is a ‘relational model of the self’ that rejects isolation in favour of community. Perhaps most significantly, Phillips uses this idea to explain why this genre is often so inclusive and progressive, as, she explains, ‘challenges’ to dominant narratives or heroism, binaries, and solitude ‘must come from the periphery’ (149).

In my own working life, I will recommend this book to students who are interested in gender in literature to encourage a reframing that allows new voices to enter the picture. Perhaps even more importantly, Phillips’ book feels like an invaluable resource for thinking about how to choose, promote, and celebrate texts in a classroom setting. I’m convinced that Phillips’ ideas will be helpful for literature teachers and Children’s Literature scholars examining how meaning is created in the stories we study. As this genre of fantasy fiction continues to be popular with young readers, Phillips’ new lens on how these stories work can offer readers, educators, and publishers greater insight into how and why these stories appeal. In my own research, I look forward to thinking about how young (especially female) readers might particularly appreciate books like Pierce’s Tortall series. I also hope that Phillips’ work will provide further evidence to persuade others that taking popular genre fiction seriously in a classroom can benefit and engage young readers.