As we honor Women’s History Month, we at Bookstr want to highlight some of the best books to feature female protagonists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These protagonists come from a wide variety of genres, but they all have a searing ambition to pursue the sciences.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
In Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel, we follow Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant scientist working at the Hastings Research Institute with an all-male team in the early 1960s. Her team isn’t so thrilled about her contributions, except for one Calvin Evans, a fellow scientist who falls in love with her. Several years later, Elizabeth is a single mother and star of America’s favorite cooking show, Supper at Six. Her blend of cooking and science proves to be quite subversive in defying the status quo.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zavin
The book people won’t stop raving about, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about two college students at Harvard, Sam and Sadie, who develop a video game together, Ichigo, that makes them rich and famous beyond their wildest dreams. But with fame and fortune comes more deception, joy, and tragedy in this 30-year journey. It’s a love story you’ve never read before. Its stellar reviews only serve to prove it’s worth the hype!
Slay by Brittney Morris
By day, Kiera Johnson is a 17-year-old college student. Secretly, she is one of the few black students at Jefferson Academy battling others in the worldwide video game SLAY that she developed herself. When a teen ends up murdered over a dispute in SLAY, public outcry against the video game threatens to destroy the community Keira created. Coincidentally, this is also about a female video game developer, but YA.
My Mechanical Romance by Alexene Farol Follmuth
Opposites attract in Follmuth’s YA novel, My Mechanical Romance. Her book explores the challenges young girls in STEM face through Bel, a young girl just trying to get into high school when she unexpectedly reveals an engineering talent that fast-tracks her to join the robotics club. There, she meets Meteo Luna, captain of the club, who knows Bel could be a real asset if only they could stop butting heads. Can they put aside their differences, and can Bel prove that women do belong in STEM? Alexene Farol Follmuth is a pseudonym for Olivie Blake, author of the New York Times bestselling book The Atlas Six.
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
This novel weaves together three stories inhabiting the small struggling farms of Southern Appalachia. Lusa Maluf Landowski is a bookish girl-turned-farmer’s wife who finds herself stranded in a strange place. Several miles down the road from Lusa is Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist observing a den of coyotes until a hunter arrives and disrupts her solitary life. A pair of elderly people down the road find themselves feuding with each other over God and pesticides.
The Rose Code by Kate Quinn
Set in 1940 during WWII, The Rose Code follows three women coders, Osla, Mab, and Beth. Osla is the ultimate socialite. She’s got beauty, money, and a prince who sends her roses. But she risks it all to be more than her reputation and uses her fluency in German to translate enemy secrets. Mab works the code-breaking machines while concealing her darker past, and both women find Beth, a shy spinster in the local village who soon becomes one of the few female cryptanalysts. Seven years later, the trio’s friendship has dissolved, leaving one of the women trapped in an asylum until an encrypted letter brings them back together.
While these books cover various topics and genres, the heart of them is the same. The passion and dedication of women to pursuing STEM prove that all women deserve a seat at the table.
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