Eight novels exploring the transgressions of young women

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Her debut novel, The Nobodies, is now out from Blackstone.

She was named a NYC Emerging Writers Fellow with the Center for Fiction in 2019, and a Fellow in Fiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2015. Her short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, and more, and she has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Schubach teaches fiction and non-fiction for the Gotham Writers Workshop and privately mentors students in creative writing.

At CrimeReads Schubach tagged eight favorite "tales of young women overstepping boundaries, not only committing crimes in the traditional sense, but also transgressing against expectations in other ways, as well." One title on the list:

The Power, by Naomi Alderman

Who hasn’t heard the (dubious) claim that if women were in charge, the world would be a more peaceful place? This novel delivers a jolting refutation to that idea in its depiction of a world in which the power is suddenly awakened in nearly every girl to deliver fatal electric shocks through touch. Soon all the familiar scripts are flipped: it is boys, not girls, who must be wary of walking home alone at night; it is women who form rebel groups and violently overthrow governments; it is women who maraud, assault, and silence men. Through these reversals of fortune Alderman suggests that whoever holds the power will be twisted and rendered sadistic by it, whether male or female. A fascinating framing device hints at how far-ranging such upheaval could be.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue