9 Books Featuring Female Friendship
One of my favorite themes in books is the portrayal of female friendships, so I compiled a list of some of my favorite female friends in literature.
I made a YouTube video of these books which you can watch. This list is in alphabetical order by book title.
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
One of my favorite books and series from my adolescence, A Great and Terrible Beauty is a classic early-2000s young adult fantasy book. Gemma Doyle lives in India in the 1890s when her mother is mysteriously murdered. Immediately afterward, her family moves back to England where Gemma is sent to the moldering boarding school, Spence Academy. While there, Gemma makes friends with a powerful clique of girls and together they open a portal to a magical world.
The main plot is Gemma and her friends scrambling to wield the powerful magic and restore the balance to the magical realm, but in my opinion, the real story is of their friendship. Gemma, Ann, Pippa, and Felicity work together and sometimes fight and it feels very relatable to real friendships between teenage girls. The Gemma Doyle series is great and I have read it multiple times.
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Another Libba Bray book! In my defense, she is a queen. A beauty queen. See, it’s funny.
This book got me through the 2020 presidential election cycle. I read it for the first time when it came out, but this was the top of my list when I decided on doing a Libba Bray re-read.
All Libba Bray books have strong themes of female friendships and found family, but this one is almost entirely about teen girls connecting in a high-stress situation. This book is Lord of the Flies but with teen Miss USA pageant contestants with biting satirical commentary. When their plane crashes on a seemingly uninhabited island, the beauty queens need to work together to survive, and of course, practice their pageant routines. None of them trust each other, as they see each other as competition for the pageant, but they come together despite their differences.
“Being a beauty queen is like being a marine, only harder. Marines do not fight in four-inch heels.”
Circe by Madeleine Miller
Again, the main plot of this book is not about friendship, but it is an important part of Circe’s story. Madeleine Miller endeavors to give the Greek mythical figure Circe a retelling that truly centers Circe, instead of the men around her.
Circe is cursed by the gods to live in solitude on the island Aeaea, where she has occasional visitors. Her time on the island is mostly filled with self-reflection and cultivating plants, but some famous figures from the Greek myths stop by for her help, including Medea, Jason, and Odysseus. Eventually, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, comes to Aeaea and she and Circe forge a friendship, even though they are first wary of each other. It’s through the friendship that they both heal from their traumatic pasts and ready themselves to move on to the next phase of their lives. This book is beautifully written and was one of my favorite reads of 2019.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
One of the most wholesome books I have ever read and a classic for a reason, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe has several wonderful relationships in it. The main relationship is between Ruth and Idgie, the women who run the Whistle Stop Cafe, but in my opinion, they have a romantic relationship, and not a friendship.
I find that Mrs. Threadgoode and Evelyn have a beautiful and underrated friendship in this book. Evelyn is on a learning curve in her relationship with herself now that she is a middle-aged empty-nester with a husband she’s not sure she likes anymore. She goes to visit her mother-in-law in a nursing home where she comes across Mrs. Threadgoode, an incessant chatterbox. Evelyn keeps seeking out Mrs. Threadgoode when she visits the home because Mrs. Threadgoode’s stories of her youth in Whistle Stop, Alabama are so engrossing and eventually they grow a friendship of their own. I have read this book twice and I will read it again in the future. It is the literary equivalent of having a sleepover with good friends.
Frog Music by Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue is an author that I immediately put on my to-read list whenever I see that she has a book out. I read Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins when I was a teenager and was immediately hooked on her wonderful writing style. Frog Music is set in San Francisco in the 1870s and follows a French dancer investigating the murder of her friend Jenny, a gender norm-defying woman with many enemies.
The very beginning of this book starts with Jenny’s murder and the book goes forward in time with the main character’s investigation and has flashbacks to the beginning and growth of the friendship. Their relationship feels very realistic because the two women do not always agree and sometimes fight and fall out temporarily. They are very different women, but become essential to each other in their lives and death.
Scenes of a Graphic Nature by Caroline O’Donoghue
This was one of my favorite books of 2020 and Caroline O’Donoghue is one of my favorite authors. Two friends, Charlie and Laura, travel to Ireland to screen a film they made together. While they are there, they go to Charlie’s father’s hometown to find out more about the tragic explosion of the school in the 1960s.
Charlie and Laura became friends in their early twenties and even lived together in “starving artist” squalor. However, Laura is beginning to drift away from the authentic artist life and has decided to join the “normal” workforce. Charlie sees this as a betrayal of her because they had previously agreed that they would never sell out and would be in the film business grind together. This trip to Ireland is a huge turning point in their friendship, now that they are in their late twenties and navigating what “real adulthood” means to them. I have gone through similar growing pains with my own friends and this aspect of the book feels just as important as the “main” plot of investigating the explosion.
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
The central relationship in this book is between Asya, a young Turkish woman, and Armanoush, her Armenian-American step-cousin who comes to visit her in Istanbul. I have previously written about this book and how much I love it, so I will keep it short. Asya and Armanoush are two very different young women and have different ideas on what “Turkish history,” means and should mean, but they support each other in their search for the truth and find common ground. They challenge each other and commiserate over tragedy. This book is also beautifully written.
The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper
I read the e-arc of this before it came out, and it is one of the best books I have read thus far in 2021. This book revolves around Amara and her life as a sex worker in bondage in ancient Pompeii. The main plot of The Wolf Den is Amara’s quest to create a better life for herself and buy her freedom from her abusive boss and owner, Felix.
In her life in the brothel, the Wolf Den, she lives with several other enslaved women. Because they are in close quarters, there is a lot of friction, especially because there are some strong personalities involved, however they do their best to support each other through though time. Because none of them are there of their own will and are abused by Felix, all their times are tough. The camaraderie is what helps Amara and her colleagues get through their often horrendous lives in the Wolf Den.
Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak
Another Elif Shafak book! I just can’t help myself. Peri is a Turkish woman living in upper middle class safety in Istanbul. Her purse gets stolen out of the back seat of her car, and she decides to chase down the thief. In the tussle, a picture of Peri and her two friends, Mona and Shirin, from their university days floats out. Over the rest of the evening, Peri reflects on their friendship and the dramatic events that tear them apart.
This book is essentially a philosophical thought experiment based on three archetypal women “the believer, the sinner, and the confused.” The story is told in flashbacks throughout Peri’s evening at a dinner party where the other guests debate feminism and other relevant politics. This is not a happy book, but it does portray friendship between young women very well.
