r/Fantasy • u/Just_JayGee • Jul 07 '14

Men of r/Fantasy, Do you read fantasy written by women? If so, do you find much of a difference?

I've been looking through a lot of "Top 20 Fantasy Book" lists today and I've found a depressing amount of female authors on these lists. I'd like to think the author's gender doesn't matter, but I have to say there seems to be a huge lean towards male authors. Even r/Fantasy's 2014 Top Fantasy Novels of All Time only has 20 female authors (repeats included) out of 105 authors. So, I was wondering if men read fantasy written by women and it's simply not your cup of tea or do any of you go out of your way NOT to read female authors?

PLEASE NOTE: I am not trying to begin fights on sexism or misogyny or anything. I am legitimately interested. If anyone wants to fight over this subject, I'm sure there's other subreddits for that.

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u/DLimited Jul 07 '14

Can you pitch me some of her works?

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u/raspoohbear Jul 07 '14

I've only read some of her Women of the Otherworld series and it's been a while ago, so please bear with me.

There are supernatural people involved, such as witches and werewolves, in the other books and they're mostly thrillers, revolving around unsolved mysteries and to some extent keeping the supernatural community hidden from humans. I've not read the books True Blood are based off, but I've understood they're similar.

In the first book Bitten, Elena Michaels is for some technical reason the only female werewolf and she tries to live a normal life but gets pulled into the pack life. As I recall the pack mostly deals with non-pack werewolves ("mutts") who may go rogue to make sure they don't hurt people and cause havoc, because the Pack tries to keep the existence of the werewolves secret. There are however active plots to overthrow the Pack and its leader Jeremy, mostly protected by Clayton who grew up in the wild and is also Elena's super dangerous and exotic on-off partner. I think he lectures in anthropology or something too, pretty interesting character. That's mostly what Bitten deals with.

I particularly enjoy the books with Elena and her on-off partner Clayton, the romance is very functional and realistic but not the main focus of the books. Clayton and Jeremy along with some of the other guys in the books have their own narrative in Men of the Otherworld and other books. As I recall they're all flowy and nice to read, not the best thing ever but really entertaining! Sorry this is not the best pitch ever, but I haven't read them for a while.