Season 2, Episode 12: In Praise of Difficult Women ft. Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Genre fiction is full of strong, independent women, badass heroines, brave Final Girls, and virginal princesses. Frankly, we’re getting a little sick of it? For our season finale, with us to discuss difficult women is the queen of messy, complicated, and antiheroic female protagonists herself, the legendary Silvia Moreno-Garcia!

Show Notes

• Silvia’s website
• Silvia’s Instagram and Threads
• Signal To Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (find out why Rachel is correct and all of the Goodreads reviewers are wrong)
• Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Countess by Susan Palumbo
• Unknown Number: The High School Catfish

Rachel’s Problematic Faves

• Bellis Coldwine (The Scar by China Miéville)
• Baru Cormorant (The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickson)
• Essun (The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin)
• Catra (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power by Nate Stevenson)

David’s Problematic Faves

• Morgan Le Fay (Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory)
• Cersei Lannister (A Song Of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin)
• Jadis (The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis)

Silvia’s Problematic Faves

• Eleanor and Theodora (The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson)
• Constance and Merricat (We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson)
• Everything by Tanith Lee
• Rebecca and Rachel (Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier)
• Emma Bovary (Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert)

Are they genre? Nah, but we still love them

• Cass Neary novels by Elizabeth Hand
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Washington Square by Henry James
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy