Books like Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea

I was absolutely blown away by the sheer, unfiltered female rage in this novel.

I love how the protagonist, Zetian, completely obliterates the patriarchal systems designed to crush her, refusing to conform to the role of a sacrificial, obedient woman. I felt an exhilarating rush watching her weaponize the expectations placed upon her to rise to absolute power.

It is a fierce, relentless, and wildly unapologetic story that resonated deeply with my belief that women shouldn’t have to play nice to win. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to watch a woman burn the world down to rebuild it on her own terms.

This is a story that challenges our understanding of identity–Zhu is a girl, and she is a male novice in a monastery. Zhu wears her dead brother’s name like armor and schemes to make his fate hers as well. Zhu is as unapologetically callous as the world that discarded her. Zhu lives as a man and never wishes to live as a woman, but her pronouns never change.

Her story forces the reader to confront the heavy hand of circumstance in our lives and our definition of self. Zhu performs gender without regret or longing, it is a tool of her survival; instead, she defines herself in her ambition. And even though the person that Zhu ultimately chooses to become isn’t one we might admire, her relationship to gender speaks to those of us who sit between the boundaries of gender, who move between, or who fill more than one… show more.

From the very first page, I fell in love with this book and the female lead, Shan. Mistress opens strong with willful, unrepentant patricide as Shan ascends to her place at the head of her family, prepared to kill and claw her way to the top of an empire that quite literally runs on blood.

In this house, I support women’s rights and women’s wrongs. I love an unrepentant spymaster, and this one more than delivers with its magnificent web of blood, politics, and amorous entanglements that will either topple an empire or ruin the character’s lives, maybe both.

From patricide to unethical blood magic experiments I was cheering Shan on the whole way.

I love this book because the Bitch Queen had me in tears on page two as she exiled her king with her hands still covered in a traitor’s blood and refused to run after him or beg for his forgiveness with the simple words, “A Wolf of Oren-yaro suffers in silence. A wolf of Oren-Yaro does not beg.”

Queen Talyien is so prideful and unbending that I was instantly captivated. She will kill or break her own spine before she bows her head to the gendered expectations put upon her. Talyien’s refusal to compromise for anyone, not even for love, was such a refreshing change from so many fantasy heroines who remake themselves for the sake of love.

Pirates. Who can resist the romanticized, swashbuckling Golden Age of piracy? (I know I can’t – my own created fictional character is a pirate!) Perhaps the most famous pirates of all are Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Calico Jack Rackham. James L. Nelson’s novel about their scurrilous lives is based on the few historical records that exist, and he weaves a highly credible tale about their dastardly seafaring deeds – and how they came to be pirates in the first place. The author himself has a talent for writing exciting adventures and his knowledge of sailing a tall ship is unsurpassed – he actually worked aboard a replica tall ship, so he knows his stuff from stem to stern. This is an adult read with adult content of sex and violence, but then, these characters were pirates...

Dian Murray spent ten years in Taiwan and mainland China in the 1970s and 1980s doing groundbreaking research into the early 19th century pirates, which became her PhD dissertation, later expanded into this book. This is the first attempt in any language to put together the full story of these pirates. Being an academic, her interest was less on the wider narrative and personalities, and more on various issues of historical development, sociology, weaponry, and more. By far the most important book for anyone researching these pirates. Sadly out of print.

I taught courses on Atlantic piracy in the early-modern era and always included this lively, authoritative survey of piracy (and anti-piracy). It is a go-to volume for the newcomer to pirate history as well as for the specialist, and my students consistently praised it.

Peter Earle brings his mastery of maritime history to each page and is never boring! 

This is another great picture book about the death of a non-dog/cat pet––in this Mem Fox classic, the pirate Tough Boris loses his dear pet parrot.

This book is especially wonderful though because it shows how even the toughest of tough guys––and Tough Boris is a tough pirate––can absolutely fall to pieces when a pet dies. It’s okay to cry about an animal dying––even if you are a pirate!

The really beautiful thing about this story though is seeing how Tough Boris copes with the loss through making friends with a stowaway boy on his ship, because if I’ve learned one thing from my pets dying, it’s that you need the support and love of other people to help you through the loss.

I can’t help it, I am an absolute sucker for a girl dressing up as a boy. It’s a classic trope in lesbian fiction, and while it’s reminiscent of trans masculine narratives, it’s also a fantastical reflection of butch/femme dynamics, and these two things can co-exist in the literary world. Flora/Florian is a really special protagonist, and her relationship with Evelyn is as exciting as the overall story. Tokuda-Hall has clearly had so much fun weaving in a variety of fantasy elements, throwing us mermaids, witches, pirates, and, of course, the Sea. 

Pirates…in space! Maybe you weren’t expecting space pirates on this list, but they’re just as cool as sea pirates. With a mix of Star Wars and the movie Overboard vibes, this story follows a down-on-her-luck Solara as she bargains for passage to another world and another life. However, some risks are bigger than others. So are some cons. And Solara might just have to team up with the last person she wants to in order to survive. I love the “found family” trope in this one and how you learn there’s more to people than you ever thought.