Well my specialty is children's books and middle-grade fiction, so I'll just go with that, if it's okay. There's a great book that came out like three years ago called The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone. It's about a ten-year-old girl who is informed her adventuring parents have died, and in their magic-bound will, force her to go on adventures herself, having to deliver presents to her ten aunts. In the process she does things like save a baby, play detective to free one aunt from prison, and then magic gets involved and she finds out the truth of what happens to her parents. It's a very cute quirky story (I can accept the argument that it tries too hard in that regard, but I liked it,) and even though some aunts were single and some were married, it's never implied that even one was lesbian. The aunts have different personalities (from strict to playful to stoic to businesslike to depressed) so it's got good values. It's very much a reluctant hero story, and Bronte isn't perfect (at one point she learns the hard way what the definition of "bribery" is, but at least the police chief gives her a chance to retract her offer,) but for girls with good attention spans, I couldn't recommend it highly enough.
Well my specialty is children's books and middle-grade fiction, so I'll just go with that, if it's okay. There's a great book that came out like three years ago called The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone. It's about a ten-year-old girl who is informed her adventuring parents have died, and in their magic-bound will, force her to go on adventures herself, having to deliver presents to her ten aunts. In the process she does things like save a baby, play detective to free one aunt from prison, and then magic gets involved and she finds out the truth of what happens to her parents. It's a very cute quirky story (I can accept the argument that it tries too hard in that regard, but I liked it,) and even though some aunts were single and some were married, it's never implied that even one was lesbian. The aunts have different personalities (from strict to playful to stoic to businesslike to depressed) so it's got good values. It's very much a reluctant hero story, and Bronte isn't perfect (at one point she learns the hard way what the definition of "bribery" is, but at least the police chief gives her a chance to retract her offer,) but for girls with good attention spans, I couldn't recommend it highly enough.