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6 Alberta Books for Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month and Read Alberta is highlighting 6 Alberta-published books that are written by female authors and feature strong female characters.

The Definition of Beautiful by Charlotte Bellows

In 2020, fourteen-year-old Charlotte’s lifelong drive to achieve ‘perfection’ distorted into an all-encompassing obsession. In the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia, she wrote The Definition of Beautiful, a memoir that moves between our world and uncanny dreamscapes, pushing through society’s constraints on the bodies and minds of women and girls. This coming-of-age story of a young gay and artistic woman is both achingly familiar and powerfully new.

The Definition of Beautiful: A Memoir

Charlotte Bellows

Published: Sep 01, 2023 by Freehand Books
ISBN: 9781990601460

Available as an accessible eBook, Available as an accessible Audiobook

Moon Honey by Suzette Mayr

In this modern, magical tale, Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are goofy, head-over-heels in love. When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic. But Carmen’s transformation means trouble for Griffin’s racist mother, already struggling with a new lover and a husband nicknamed God. The question is, can love be relied on to save the day?

Moon Honey

Suzette Mayr

Published: Oct 15, 2024 by NeWest Press
ISBN: 9781774391044

Belle Canadienne by Juliet Waldron and Jay Lang

Before the filles du roi…Desperate to escape her past, Jeanne, a poor widow, accompanies a richer woman to Quebec. The sea voyage is long, one of privation and danger. In 1640, the decision to emigrate takes raw courage, but the struggling colony of Quebec, so far a collection of rough soldiers and fur traders, needs French women if it is ever to take firm root in the wilderness.

Belle Canadienne

Juliet Waldron and Jay Lang

Published: Dec 13, 2024 by BWL Publishing
ISBN: 9780228632740

The Extraordinary Lives of Ukrainian-Canadian Women, compiled and edited by Iroida Wynnyckyj

This book contains the life stories of ten Ukrainian-Canadian women who survived the turbulent events of twentieth-century Europe. Some women were shared by their experiences during the First World War and the revolutionary years of 1917–21, while others were profoundly affected, if not traumatized, by the trials and tribulations of interwar Polish or Soviet rule, the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Western Ukraine during the Second World War, or their deportation and forced labour in the Third Reich. This collection is a valuable contribution to the oral history of Ukrainian women, twentieth-century Ukraine, and Ukrainians in Canada.

The Extraordinary Lives of Ukrainian-Canadian Women: Oral Histories of the Twentieth Century

Published: Jun 16, 2022 by CIUS Press
ISBN: 9781894865654

I (Athena) by Ruth DyckFehderau

When Athena was a young girl in the 60s, she lost her hearing to a childhood fever but was misdiagnosed as “profoundly retarded” and institutionalized for thirty years. Now she’s out of the institution, awkward and bookish, and learning to integrate with mainstream society where nothing works quite like she thinks it should. Athena researches her past, trying to understand why she was institutionalized in the first place and why the people looking after her made such a huge mistake. At the same time, she tries to find a way to live with the man who was her lover in the institution, uncovering all sorts of surprises along the way.

I (Athena)

Ruth DyckFehderau

Published: Apr 01, 2023 by NeWest Press
ISBN: 9781774390672

Available as an accessible eBook

My Life in Propaganda by Magda Stroinska

My Life in Propaganda is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up as a woman under the influence of communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school, the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings, socialist realist art and film, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world. She also observes post-communist societies through the lens of gender oppression and empowerment.

My Life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes

Magda Stroinska

Published: Oct 01, 2023 by Durvile Publications
ISBN: 9781990735332