What if Vlad the Impaler had been a young woman? This is the question that sparked Kiersten White’s bestselling young adult trilogy, The Conqueror's Saga. In this alternate history, the Wallachian "girl prince" Lada Dracul pursues power by any means. Here, White explores the importance of allowing YA heroines to be flawed, ambitious, and even a little cruel—in other words, fully human.
Sugar and spice and everything nice—that’s what little girls are made of. We’re taught that from infancy. There’s a song I love by Snow Patrol called "Empress" that starts with the line "You’re angry, but you don’t know how to be that yet." And that resonates with me, because for a lot of years I didn’t know how to be angry. Or, more specifically, I didn’t know how to allow myself to be angry.
In one of my earlier books, The Chaos of Stars, the main character is an angry girl. She’s mad at her family. She’s mad at the world. And even though she eventually begins to heal, a lot of readers responded very negatively to her.
I carried that feedback with me for a long time. Here was a character with every right to be angry, and I was being told she shouldn’t have felt that way. If she had been a boy, would that criticism have existed? Would she have been so hated for being flawed? I didn’t think so.
In the meantime, I discovered Melina Marchetta’s Lumatere Chronicles and the incomparably, masterfully unlikable Quintana in Quintana of Charyn. Then I was given Robin LaFevers’ Dark Triumph and the fiercely livid Sybella, who was allowed vengeance and love without ever softening. And then Marie Lu, who is one of the kindest people I know, gave us the horrifying Adelina in The Young Elites. Lu made a villain her hero, turning what made Adelina awful into what made her great.
I used this inspiration like armor. When I began writing Lada Dracul in And I Darken, I was fully prepared to channel all the rage I had never been allowed. I thought it would be fun. It surprised me because it was terrifying. I worried that people wouldn’t respond well to Lada, that they’d hate her, that she would repulse them. But every time I found myself looking for ways to soften her, to make her more likable, I siphoned some of her strength, steeled myself, and wrote angrier.
And much to my shock and delight, people loved her. Readers needed to read an unapologetically ruthless and brutal girl as much as I needed to write one. Even the final book, Bright We Burn, changed over the course of drafting as I found myself unwilling to "punish" Lada for what she wanted and how she got it. The world does that enough to ambitious, powerful women.
There is tremendous strength in kindness, in femininity, in gentleness. But giving anger its rightful place in girls' lives is long overdue. Screw likable. I want my heroines determined, relentless, even vicious. I want them to claim the portions of the world that have been denied them. I want them to have the same agency and the full range of emotions that we give to male characters. I want our heroines to need no one’s permission to be human.
>Bright We Burn, the final installment of The Conquerer's Saga, will be available on July 10. Don’t forget to add it to your Want to Read shelf!
posted by Marie on July, 05
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