Bad time management, fatigue, and other duties kept me from doing everything I wanted to with this. But at a certain point, I’d spent too much time on it to just let it go without posting. So…in all its half-baked glory:
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The topic for this week’s Top Ten Tuesdays is Favorite Heroines.

I kept slipping up and putting favorite female protagonists on this list, and had to keep reminding myself that I was looking for heroes. There were a couple of names I thought about putting on the list, but their series are too new for me to be sure they were Top 10 material, too. But I think in the end, I’m okay with this list.

I typically go with an alphabetic organization with these lists, but I’m going with something different today. I’m going to start off in the order I encountered them.
Favorite Heroines

1 Sally Kimball
from the Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald J. Sobel

Sally Kimball is the best athlete in Encyclopedia Brown’s school, and becomes his partner, bodyguard, and best friend. She’s able to pick up on things he misses, too—I loved all these stories as a kid, but the ones where Sally proved more clever or resourceful than her partner were always more entertaining. When you consider that Sally was introduced in 1963, she seems all the more remarkable.
2 Princess Eilonwy of the House of Llyr, daughter of Angharad, daughter of Regat
from The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander

From the moment we meet her in Spiral Castle, Eilonwy shows more wits and fighting spirit than almost any of her male companions. Also the shortest temper. Taran may be the central character and hero of the series—but it’s the Princess who drives him, often shows him the way to go, and commits some of the greatest acts of heroism.
3 Tabitha-Ruth “Turtle” Wexler (aka “Ruth”)
from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

Turtle is too smart for her own good, and shows very little wisdom or tact at the beginning of the novel. By the end, she’s grown. She’s not only sensitive and considerate, but she’s subtle and sly. A lot of her heroism is seen in what she doesn’t do—and what she does under the radar both during the novel’s main events and afterward.

These three are the proto-heroines in my mind, everything I think about heroines come from these three. There’s a line to be drawn from all three of them to the rest of these names (that are in alphabetical order).

4 October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, Hero of the Realm
from the series by Seanan McGuire

“Hero” is literally one of her titles, she has to go here, right? Toby is one of those reliable heroes, always ready to put the lives, safety, and welfare of others (including some enemies) before her own. She’s taken on beings with much greater power than her own—or her allies—and has found ways to come out on top. Not unscathed (sometimes very scathed), but with some sort of victory nonetheless.
5 Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter
from The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon

I’m afraid I’m going back to this well too often in lists like this, but she was literally the second name that came to mind for this list.
6 Kinsey Millhone
from the Alphabet Mysteries by Sue Grafton

She’s so great they literally had to change the alphabet for her. The variety of mysteries Millhone tackled was wider than most of her (fictional) peers, which definitely sets her apart. One of the best in the tradition.
7 Karrin Murphy
from The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Murph is a non-powered human who is fairly skeptical about magic when we meet her—and can’t even see some of the most dangerous threats to her. But she’s now faced off against supernatural forces that have brought down nations. She never loses her essential humanity and compassion throughout—nor her commitment to justice and doing the right thing.
8 Kitty Norville
from the series by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty just wants to live her life and do her job—but her curiosity and perspective as a werewolf push her to pull back the curtain on supernatural beings in the US (and the world). She follows that up by bringing down a vampire who’s been plotting for centuries to become the most powerful being on the planet. Not bad for a gal who did call-in radio.
9 Clarice Starling
from The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (not Hannibal)

Clarice is thrown far into the deep end before she’s even an agent, basically as bait. But she goes rises to the occasion and does things that people with experience, age, and training far above hers can’t.
10 Mercy Thompson
from the series by Patricia Briggs

Mercy is an agent of chaos, she’s an idealist, she has more guts than brains sometimes (and she’s pretty smart), and like so many of these heroes, she stands up to beings who dwarf her power on a regular basis without thinking about it because it’s the right thing to do to protect her city, her pack, or her family.