Fantasy has always been a genre about power—who has it, who wants it, and what people will do to get it. But for too long, women in fantasy were prizes to be won or damsels to be saved. These ten books flip that script entirely. They feature women who wield magic, lead armies, topple empires, and refuse to play by rules designed to keep them small.
What makes these books feminist isn't just that they have female protagonists. It's that they interrogate power structures, question assumptions about gender, and give us heroines whose journeys feel revolutionary rather than incidental. Some of these women are warriors. Some are witches. Some are monsters. All of them are unforgettable.
1. Circe
By Madeline Miller
In Greek mythology, Circe is a footnote—the witch who turned Odysseus's men into pigs before he outsmarted her. Miller makes her the whole story. Banished to a deserted island by her father (the sun god Helios), Circe spends millennia honing her witchcraft, crossing paths with Daedalus, the Minotaur, Medea, and eventually Odysseus himself. Miller reframes Circe's isolation not as punishment but as freedom—space to become herself without the constant interference of gods and men. The prose is gorgeous without being overwrought, and Circe's evolution from overlooked goddess to powerful witch to protective mother spans the kind of emotional territory most fantasy doesn't attempt. If you loved our epic fantasy series, this offers something different: intimate rather than sprawling, but equally powerful.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
2. The Priory of the Orange Tree
By Samantha Shannon
At 800+ pages, this standalone epic doesn't mess around. Shannon weaves together multiple POV characters across different kingdoms, all building toward a world-ending dragon threat. Ead Duryan is a secret mage protecting a queen she's grown to love. Tané is a dragonrider in an Eastern-inspired kingdom built on different dragon mythology than the West. Queen Sabran must produce an heir to maintain a spell keeping an ancient evil at bay. The sapphic romance between Ead and Sabran develops alongside political intrigue rather than replacing it. Shannon builds a world where women rule, fight, and make the hard choices usually reserved for male characters—and she does it without making it feel like a gimmick. This is just how her world works, and it's better for it.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
3. The Poppy War
By R.F. Kuang
Rin is a war orphan who tests her way into the most elite military academy in the empire. She discovers she has shamanic powers tied to an angry god, and when war comes, she becomes a weapon. Kuang's debut draws on the history of 20th-century China—the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Rape of Nanking, Mao's revolution—and refuses to flinch from any of it. Rin isn't a hero in any comfortable sense. She makes choices that feel inevitable and horrifying. The book asks what it costs to become powerful enough to protect your people, and whether that cost is ever worth paying. This is grimdark fantasy at its sharpest, with a protagonist who embodies both righteous fury and the darkness that fury can become. Not for readers who want easy answers.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
4. The Fifth Season
By N.K. Jemisin
The Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award three years running—unprecedented in the award's history. On a continent called the Stillness, civilization-ending earthquakes happen regularly enough to have a name: Fifth Seasons. Essun is an orogene, someone born with the power to control seismic activity. Her people are feared, enslaved, and killed by a society that depends on them. Jemisin writes in second person, which sounds gimmicky until you understand why. The worldbuilding is simultaneously scientific and mythological. The anger is righteous. Essun's journey from grieving mother to world-shaker redefines what feminist fantasy can accomplish—it's not just about individual empowerment but about dismantling systems of oppression. The trilogy finale will wreck you in the best way.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
5. Gideon the Ninth
By Tamsyn Muir
"Lesbian necromancers in space" is how most people pitch this book, and they're not wrong. Gideon Nav is a sword-wielding warrior stuck serving the Ninth House—a crumbling necromantic order run by people who hate her. When she's dragged along as a cavalier to a mysterious trial that could make her master immortal, she expects violence and resentment. She gets both, plus a locked-room murder mystery, bone magic that's genuinely creepy, and a relationship with Harrowhark that defies easy categorization. Muir's voice is unlike anything else in fantasy—sardonic, profane, oddly tender. Gideon herself is a perfect protagonist: all bravado masking desperate loneliness, built for fighting but craving something more. The series gets stranger and more ambitious from here.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
6. Spinning Silver
By Naomi Novik
Novik reimagines Rumpelstiltskin in a medieval Eastern European setting, and the result is better than any fairy tale retelling has a right to be. Miryem is a moneylender's daughter who takes over her father's business when his kindness nearly bankrupts them. Her talent for turning silver into gold catches the attention of the Staryk king, a fae lord who demands she perform the feat for real or die. Meanwhile, Wanda is a peasant girl bound to Miryem's household, and Irina is a duke's daughter with a mirror that shows uncomfortable truths. Novik braids their stories together into something about survival, bargains, and what women owe to the men who claim to own them. The answer, consistently, is nothing. Each protagonist finds her own form of power and uses it to reshape her fate.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
7. Uprooted
By Naomi Novik
Agnieszka lives in a valley threatened by the Wood, a malevolent forest that corrupts everything it touches. Every ten years, the local wizard (called the Dragon) takes a young woman from the village to serve him. Everyone knows it will be Agnieszka's beautiful best friend Kasia. It isn't. Novik subverts expectations from the first chapter and keeps subverting them. The relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon avoids the typical romance beats—he's not secretly kind, and she doesn't fix him. What develops is something more interesting: a partnership between two people who approach magic completely differently. The real love story, though, is between Agnieszka and Kasia, a friendship that survives corruption, war, and the weight of being chosen. Fans of our romantasy picks will find this hits different notes but satisfies in similar ways.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
8. The Once and Future Witches
By Alix E. Harrow
In an alternate 1893, witchcraft was burned out of women centuries ago, reduced to nursery rhymes and folk remedies. The Eastwood sisters—Beatrice, Agnes, and Juniper—reunite in New Salem just as the suffrage movement reaches its peak. When Juniper accidentally speaks a spell that shouldn't exist anymore, the sisters discover that the old magic isn't gone, just hidden. Harrow braids women's suffrage with witchcraft recovery, making explicit what's always been implicit: the accusation of "witch" was always about controlling women who wanted too much. The sisters are distinct and complicated, their relationships damaged by a violent father and years of separation. The book is angry in the best way—angry about history, about what was taken, about what women had to do to survive. It's also genuinely hopeful about solidarity and reclamation.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
9. The Bear and the Nightingale
By Katherine Arden
Vasilisa Petrovna can see the household spirits that protect her family's estate in medieval Russia—the domovoi who guards the hearth, the vazila who tends the horses. When her father remarries and her new stepmother invites a zealous priest to stamp out the old ways, the protective spirits begin to fade. Only Vasya stands between her village and the dark forces waiting in the winter forest. Arden's debut is steeped in Russian folklore and rendered with the vividness of a fairy tale told around a fire. Vasya herself is a perfect heroine—wild, stubborn, and unwilling to accept the choices her society offers women (marriage or the convent). She carves out a third path, and the Winternight trilogy that follows expands her world without losing its intimacy.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
10. The Gilded Ones
By Namina Forna
In Deka's world, girls undergo a blood ceremony at sixteen to determine their purity. Most bleed red and become wives. Some bleed gold and are killed as demons. Deka bleeds gold—but instead of dying, she's recruited into an army of alaki, immortal warrior women who serve the emperor against monstrous creatures called deathshrieks. The twist, when it comes, reframes everything. Forna draws on West African mythology to build a world that feels genuinely fresh, and she doesn't shy away from depicting the violence of patriarchy or the rage it produces. Deka's journey from believing herself cursed to understanding the truth about her society mirrors the consciousness-raising that all feminist fantasy does at its best. The Deathless series continues with The Merciless Ones and The Eternal Ones.
View on ShelfHop • Buy on Amazon
These ten books share a common thread: they take women's anger seriously. Whether that anger is directed at gods, empires, or the mundane tyrannies of everyday life, these heroines channel it into power. They're not Strong Female Characters in the reductive sense—they're complicated people navigating systems that weren't built for them and refusing to accept the limits those systems impose.
Ready for more recommendations that match your taste? Add your favorites to ShelfHop and we'll find your next obsession.