The best Canadian novels featuring intriguing female characters

I fell in love with the protagonist, Molly Black. Molly has autism, which gives her a different perspective on life and the murder that occurs in the hotel where she works as a maid. I grew to cheerlead Molly as she negotiated unfriendly staff and challenging social and employment crises.

I was simultaneously impressed by her ethics and intelligence and worried about her naivete. Happily, Molly navigates her way to solving the crime while figuring out life’s rules and finding friendship and community along the way.

This book sticks the reader in the middle of a maternity ward in poverty and flu-stricken Dublin circa 1918. I was totally rooting for nurse Julia Powers, an experienced maternity nurse who works long, thankless shifts trying to keep women and their babies alive.

The lack of medicine, staffing, and money is appalling as women enter the hospital to give birth. Yet through empathy, determinism, and quick thinking, Julia, her trainee, and her patients find ways to help each other. It’s a tour de force in female friendship, intelligence, and problem-solving and an indictment of the medical incompetency of male physicians.

It illuminates a cross-section of Dublin citizens struggling with poverty, the Great Flu, and the aftermath of a horrendous war. I found the story moving, gripping, and somehow hopeful.

I love that the main character, journalist Whitney Chase, is not only an unreliable narrator but also unreliable herself. She confesses she has problems with the “creep.” She adds fake information and lies to get more eyeballs on her writing. I was totally engaged in watching Whitney make poor choices and try to wiggle out of her responsibilities and the consequences of her actions.

It’s like being a voyeur to the train wreck of her life. Yet Whitney is funny, hard-working, tough, and a champion of the vulnerable. She is such an incomplete, contradictory, and frustrating character that I was compelled to turn the page to see if she somehow landed on top. 

I like that a female teenager and an old woman are the heartbeat of this book. In a post-apocalyptic world, an Anishinabek tribe is cut off from humanity, unaware if others are alive after a blackout has destroyed the world. As the tribe scouts their way to a new location, it is a young woman, Nangohns, a skilled hunter, who becomes the quiet leader of the group.

I like how the tribe honors the experience of the old but encourages the young to find the gift they can offer the world. I really enjoyed watching the tribe reconnect with the land and their heritage. It was touching to see the respect they had for the environment and each other despite many harsh conditions and losses. And the female elder adds hilarity laced with wisdom as the group's matriarch, leading them into an unknown future.

From its first publication, this was my favorite book—a post-apocalyptic look at a world where women have lost their rights and are siloed into specific gender roles. I held my breath when the protagonist, Offred, finds ways to rebel, despite the risk of any visible state protest.

I love the complexity of the plot, where women sometimes help each other and other times join the persecution of women for self-survival. And I couldn’t read fast enough to see if Offred, riddled with fear yet finding her core of strength, finds a way out.

It’s a scary read, as it foretells of a totalitarian world, but I felt compassion for all the players as victims of this terrible world. And I knew from the start that Offred was a compelling protagonist whose deep compassion and strength would lead the way.