This was a good read and validated some of the adjustments I already make to the Heroes Journey process I use in planning and plotting a story. I do recommend for the technical aspects, especially if you like the Heroes Journey and find that it doesn't always suit your needs. I still use the Heroes Journey the way it is, but I'm more confident in softening or changing its parameters.

A deeply satisfying craft book, especially so because there is so little of this narrative represented in nonfiction -- being roundly in favor of the Hero's Journey as a "standard" of good stories.

The Heroine's Journey is a subversion of this standard, in many ways, with its emphasis on community and compromise as strength, rather than isolation and vengeance. (By design the book I have written is a Heroine's Journey, without having the academic framework to call it such.)

Carriger explains the devices of the Heroine's Journey, provides literary examples, and offers a strong case for its appeal to audiences. I did not find her voice meandering; in my experience it cut to the chase more readily than other craft books.

I appreciated how it's established from the beginning that the narrative hallmarks of the Heroine's Journey can apply to any gender, and the model itself isn't always exact. I thoroughly enjoyed her observations on the nature of storytelling taking shape, including describing the transference of mythological narratives throughout history as a game of Telephone.

(CW: discussion of assault)
Carriger cautions against certain messaging in writing fiction that could have a detrimental impact, and examines the author's responsibility to an audience. While this is important, a few of these examinations fell a bit short to me. The use of sexual assault, for example, is dismissed as a mistake when it's written to motivate the heroine into action. This absolutely makes sense when it's the sole inciting event of the heroine's character progression, used as a plot device. But I hoped for a mention that there do exist humanizing ways of portraying assault when it's an important part of character development within a violent culture. Sometimes assault is written to give survivors (both authors and readers) a voice and a journey into healing, and it seems invalidating to call its narrative inclusion a mistake out of hand. Similarly, in an examination of the use of the "rival lovers" trope, its potential for harm isn't discussed, and I hoped for more expansion there too.

However, taken together this is a concise and brilliantly researched primer for writers of this narrative. I'm so glad it exists and will reference it many times over.

Ah well ... I think this could have been condensed quite a bit and then it would have made a nice zine. From a book, however, I want a little more substance and a little less repetition. From a writer's perspective her advice could certainly be quite useful, but I find the set up of isolationist hero's journey vs connective heroine's journey frustratingly reductive. And neither of them inherently challenges the main frustration I often experience with the fiction I read: that systemic issues do not get challenged. They may pay lip service to equality and inclusion or whatever, but in the end, the way their stories play out, both the hero and the heroine usually preserve or restore a status quo and do nothing to address systemic issues that may have let to whatever crisis they were in, otherwise precipitated their journey or exasperated their struggle. Both of them may end up in a better and/or elevated place within that system, but they will rarely do anything to change it. And I do not just mean the big game political systems of SciFi and Fantasy but also traditional family structures, relationship hierarchies, work cultures and so on. You know, the kind of bedrock that political systems are build upon.

Carriger's one of my favorite writers and an absolute expert on the heroine's journey. Lessons in writing this journey by her are a gift. As a writer, I'll be coming back to these lessons over and over.
This is a book I've been seeking for years and I'm so grateful for it.

Fair warning, a lot of the comparisons in this book reference the story structure in the Potterverse, so if that will bother you despite Carriger's inclusiveness in all of her writing, maybe this isn't for you. Just pass on it.

I was really looking forward to reading Carriger's foray into nonfiction, especially as her book focuses on both literary analysis and writing craft. But the book itself turned out to be rather disappointing. It reads like the notes to several conference presentations/talks, rather than the more in-depth exploration I was expecting from a book-length work. The tone is breezy and jokey, the information often repetitive, and the framework applied to everything, whether it fits or no. Perhaps because I was expecting a more serious book, I was majorly underwhelmed.

Carriger's key insight, though, is vitally important. An alternative to the archetypal masculine hero's journey, as theorized by Joseph Campbell, certainly exists in popular culture, in the form of what she has chosen to call the "heroine's journey," a narrative framework that is not about solitary achievement through violent struggle but rather group achievement, through networking and connecting and sharing the workload. And said archetypal journey has been traditionally disparaged and denigrated by those inculcated into the universality of the hero's journey (can you say "patriarchy"?). So those who, like Carriger, write the "heroine's journey" should stand up and be proud feminists, not cower in embarrassment because our protagonists aren't "heroic" enough.

I think my annoyances with the content of the book stem from the fact that I taught college classes on the Fantasy genre, so I'm familiar with both the Campbellian hero's journey, as well as feminist responses to it. Feminist literary critics have been writing about the heroine's journey for a while now: see Annis Pratt's 1981 book, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction [b:Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction|1255043|Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction|Annis Pratt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383166884l/1255043._SX50_.jpg|1243821], or Clarissa Pinkola Estés' 1992 Women Who Run with the Wolves [b:Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype|241823|Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype|Clarissa Pinkola Estés|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500974527l/241823._SY75_.jpg|981745] for two examples. So Carriger's argument won't be as novel to literary critics as it may be to those outside the academy.

I was annoyed by the fact that Carriger decided to call this framework the "heroine's" journey; it required her to have to keep reminding readers that despite its name, a "heroine's journey" could be made by a man, or a woman, or a nonbinary person. Over and over again. Obviously, she was responding to Campbell's far more famous "hero's journey," but if she was going to be subversive, she might have renamed them both to de-couple these patterns from gender. Or at least talked more about what is at stake when we label one pattern the "hero's journey," and the other the "heroine's journey."

I was also annoyed that Carriger doesn't work very closely with Campbell's monomyth, but more with a bastardized popularization of it (or, the way she sees it playing out in popular culture). Campbell's monomyth, unlike the more simplified hero's journey Carriger describes, does not end in isolation. Campbell's hero returns from his journey able to use the wisdom he learned on his quest, and often shares his wisdom or boon with his society. But in order for her message of hero's journey = male working alone, heroine's journey = woman working with others, Campbell's more nuanced framework has to fall by the wayside.

I also felt that many of the books she uses to explain the heroine's journey could just have easily be analyzed using the hero's journey, depending on which aspects of a book one emphasized, and which ones one ignored (Harry Potter, for example). The limits of such an overly broad framework, perhaps? Archetypal criticism fell out of favor in academic circles in the 1990s, if not earlier, as it was seen as too limiting, too totalizing, too willing to ignore the historically specific.

Finally, from a writer's standpoint, the book was rather lacking in a discussion of HOW to apply the beats of a heroine's story to one's own writing. Or how to combine the two. One chapter with 10 pretty basic techniques, techniques that seemed best suited to writing fantasy than to any other fiction subgenre, did not satisfy me as a writer of romance.

Still, despite all my annoyances with the book, I think it will be helpful and energizing for many writers who are unfamiliar with archetypal literary criticism beyond pop cultural understandings of the hero's quest, and who would rather write about building community than fighting the battles before community can be created.

A fantastic addition to any writer's or reader's toolbox. Simultaneously informative and engaging, this guide to the Heroine's Journey is something I'll keep in mind whenever I set out to write something new. It's already helped me figure out how one story is broken and I'm so looking forward to using what I've learnt in my writing moving forward.