Where are the girls? Finding books with strong girl characters for 5-7 year olds

Who are your daughters’ book character heroes? I wondered the same thing a few World Book Days ago as I scanned the mass of fictional characters running around my children’s school playground. Amid all the Asterixes and Tintins and Alex Riders, the Young Bonds and Young Sherlock Holmeses, the Eric the Smalls and Fantastic Mr Foxes, I tried to pick out a few iconic girl characters that had inspired costumes. The type of girl characters whose lives you longed to live, whose feelings were your feelings, whose adventures you were suddenly able to share. There was Alice and Pippi and… a brilliant Matilda and the best Worst Witch… And then I ran out of hope, too exhausted from trying to peer between the wings of fairies and under the tiaras of princesses to hunt any further.

But it concerned me. So I went back to the children’s bookshop that I own in Herne Hill in South London and I scoured the shelves for strong girl characters. I found plenty in the classics, quite a few in the teen section, there were a couple more on the 9 -12 year old shelves…
But when I reached the 5-8 bookcase, my heart sank.

As the mother of a six year old daughter, I wondered what the children’s book world was telling her about being a girl. It seemed to give her four options:
1.    whiny American schoolgirl
2.    a kisser of kittens and a bandager of puppies
3.    a fairy (at least with this one she’d get her choice of being any colour of the rainbow)… Or (the final option):
4.    someone who gets rescued by a boy character who was off having great adventures.

So I looked at my daughter – who plays football on a Saturday and dances on a Sunday after a couple of hours in the adventure playground inventing dangerous games – and wondered which of these might suit her best. Then I looked at her friends, in case I had raised an anomaly in the world of girls, and found that they were all very like my daughter. Where were the characters that they would be interested in?

In fact, it turned out that I had missed one, but as I started on a Polly costume from the Mr Gum books for my daughter, I resolved to write a series of books about a strong girl character. A girl who was physically able and resilient. A girl who drove the narrative and created her own adventures, a girl who saved the day rather than needed to be saved…’Amazing Esme‘ was published by Hodder on the 1st of September, the second book is out in May.

While I was writing, the brilliant ‘Ottoline’ by Chris Ridell came out, and the charming Mme Pamplemousse books too; I think that character spotting in the playground will be a lot more interesting next year.By the way, if anyone has any recommendations of other strong girl characters for this age group, I would love to hear about them.

Tamara is a former art and literacy co-ordinator, published children’s book author and founder of award winning children’s bookshop: Tales on Moon Lane in Herne Hill, South London.