Books With Awesome Moms

Guess what! It’s my mom’s birthday today!!! Since she (and my dad) got me into reading, I thought I’d celebrate by dedicating a post to books with awesome mom characters. There are quite a few books where there are moms as side characters. However, I wanted to highlight books where the mom is the main character! Half of my choices are books that I’ve read, and the other half are ones that I’m really excited to read. These books are all adult fiction – I guess it’s natural that young adult books would center, well, young adults, who tend to not have become mothers yet.

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Books I’ve Read

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Saga is a graphic novel series that focuses on two main characters, Alana and Marko. They are on opposing sides of a war, but they fall in love – and have a baby! They are on the run from both governments who want to kill them. Alana is such a wonderful character! I miss her – it’s been a while since I read Saga. I’m waiting eagerly for it to come back from hiatus!

Ship of Magic is the first book in Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy. Ships made out of magical wood!! There are a few different character POVs in the series, and we get to see two different mother perspectives – Ronica and Keffria. Hobb is an absolute master at creating interesting characters. I highly recommend trying her books if you haven’t yet.

I’ve talked about Burning Roses quite a few times now. I guess that just shows you how much I love it haha. So the basics: interweaves European fairytales and Chinese mythology, it’s sapphic, both protagonists are moms! I like seeing how the two main characters deal with having children who are somewhat grown, and the consequences of their choices and how it relates to their families.

The Reluctant Queen is the second book in the Queens of Renthia trilogy. One of the main characters of this novel is Naelin, who is a mother of two young children. It’s lovely to see a mother in a high fantasy novel. All of her actions are guided by her being a mother, and I love that so much.

Me? Including a Seanan McGuire book? Shocking. But yes, Toby, the main character of the October Daye series, is in fact a mother! She is estranged from her daughter (who is a teenager). However, the experience of being a mother still colors her actions and experiences. Toby is a badass, and one of my favorite characters of all time. I love her so so much.

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Books on My TBR

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I’ll just put the Goodreads synopsis for these books here, as I haven’t read them yet!

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro

“I murdered a man and made my husband leave the night before they crowned me.”

Born under the crumbling towers of Oren-yaro, Queen Talyien was the shining jewel and legacy of the bloody War of the Wolves that nearly tore her nation apart. Her upcoming marriage to the son of her father’s rival heralds peaceful days to come.

But his sudden departure before their reign begins fractures the kingdom beyond repair.

Years later, Talyien receives a message, urging her to attend a meeting across the sea. It’s meant to be an effort at reconciliation, but an assassination attempt leaves the queen stranded and desperate to survive in a dangerous land. With no idea who she can trust, she’s on her own as she struggles to fight her way home.

Boneshaker

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.

The Fifth Season

This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

The Sword of Kaigen

A mother struggling to repress her violent past,
A son struggling to grasp his violent future,
A father blind to the danger that threatens them all.

When the winds of war reach their peninsula, will the Matsuda family have the strength to defend their empire? Or will they tear each other apart before the true enemies even reach their shores?

High on a mountainside at the edge of the Kaigenese Empire live the most powerful warriors in the world, superhumans capable of raising the sea and wielding blades of ice. For hundreds of years, the fighters of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the Empire’s enemies at bay, earning their frozen spit of land the name ‘The Sword of Kaigen.’

Born into Kusanagi’s legendary Matsuda family, fourteen-year-old Mamoru has always known his purpose: to master his family’s fighting techniques and defend his homeland. But when an outsider arrives and pulls back the curtain on Kaigen’s alleged age of peace, Mamoru realizes that he might not have much time to become the fighter he was bred to be. Worse, the empire he was bred to defend may stand on a foundation of lies.

Misaki told herself that she left the passions of her youth behind when she married into the Matsuda house. Determined to be a good housewife and mother, she hid away her sword, along with everything from her days as a fighter in a faraway country. But with her growing son asking questions about the outside world, the threat of an impending invasion looming across the sea, and her frigid husband grating on her nerves, Misaki finds the fighter in her clawing its way back to the surface. 

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Who are some of your favorite fictional moms?