Fight Like A Girl: Volume 2’ by Roz Clarke & Joanne Hall

Book Review

Robin CM Duncan

Funny things, anthologies. Were they ever as popular as they are right now? Arguably, the form has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, and rightly so. This format is the ideal vehicle to explore ideas around a highly nuanced theme, and undoubtedly there are many important topics that should be exercising us these days, as genre readers and human beings. Fight Like A Girl, Volume 2 is a superb example of the breadth and variety of genre fiction that can be created by bringing writers together around a single, poetically succinct yet richly diverse idea.

2016’s inaugural FLAG anthology brought together “some of the best women writers of genre fiction”, collecting “tales of female strength”, the editors specifying “These are not pinup girls fighting in heels”. The reader’s card was well and truly marked. No doubt if not for a global pandemic – a disproportionate burden of which fell upon women in any number of ways – we might have had this second anthology sooner. But we have it now, and that’s a great and valuable thing.

Editors Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall confirm FLAG: Volume 1 “was produced in response to accusations that stories of women warriors were somehow unrealistic and anachronistic”, expressing sadness that “the need to counter such narratives still exists.”

Seven authors return for Volume 2: Danie Ware, Gaie Sebold, Dolly Garland, Juliet McKenna, K.R. Green, KT Davies, and Lou Morgan; joined by Cheryl Morgan, Julia Hawkes-Reed, S. Naomi Scott, and Anna Smith Spark to address the editors’ aim “to broaden the types of women in the stories, and the ways in which they fight”. That goal is ably achieved by this impressive collection of 11 tales featuring female protagonist as combatant. As Charlotte Bond’s introduction eloquently states, the change in perceptions is slow, yet it is steady, and powerful works like this will advance the change promoted by the likes of Emma Peel, Buffy, Eleven, and a platoon of Doctor Who companions.

Arms are taken up in terrific seaside story style by Danie Ware’s enticingly titled opener, “The God of Lost Things Or Ethel, Dragonslayer”.

“Were I a younger woman,” [Ethel confides] “I might term myself a ‘private investigator’. But such conjures images of smoky offices and femmes fatales […] I’m too old for any of that.”

Advanced in years, Ethel may be, but she possesses steely resolve, and is not to be trifled with. Yet she faces grim supernatural doings lurking beneath this off-season riviera’s flaking paintwork.

A sucker for a good train story, Gaie Sebold’s fantastical “Ambition’s Engine” quickly engaged, portraying the machinations of a de facto minister for transport in a troubled empire in which women and slaves are seen not heard, and speak when spoken to. Still, rebellion bubbles.

Perhaps not coincidently, the story involving a train crossing a troubled empire is followed by Dolly Garland’s “A Human Response”, centring on the critical assignment of an Indian woman amidst an alien invasion.

“There was nowhere to run. We had a day. Just one day. But that was enough for my mission. I had to kill my mother.”

Cheryl Morgan’s SF story “More Trouble Than She’s Worth?” also collides the elite with the plebs as a pregnant princess winds up on the wrong spaceship during a war. Doctor Who Does Call the Midwife this is not.

Every tale – terrifically varied in style and genre as they are – offers engagement and entertainment. Inevitably, readers will have their favourites, and one of mine is Juliet McKenna’s superb “Civil War”: featuring political scheming in a fantasy kingdom. It is marvellously intricate, deftly plotted, and deliciously deceptive.

Anna Smith Spark’s darkly grim “Lady Cona” is another standout, even for a Smith Spark devotee: remarkable in its vivid imagery and luscious, spiky poetics. And if you happen to be jaded with characters swinging swords at each other, this story takes the battle scene somewhere very different.

I found “Ready for Combat” encouraging, the characters and their anger sympathetic and relatable, their courage under attack convincing and laudable. However, I felt I lacked some context to the extent that it hampered my engagement with the story.

Julia Hawkes-Reed’s “We Have Always Been Here” is a delightfully punchy weaving of WW2 military history and ancient supernatural mythos on the Home Front, blending in a trans protagonist with highly effective understatement. Not only fighty, this girl, but geeky as all get-out.

“Tea was served from a vast brown pot which rested on a weathered GPO cable drum.”

Wonderful stuff: stiff upper lips at dawn, and hallucinogens for luncheon.

Gearing up for the final push, K T Davies’ “The Seamstress, the Hound, the Cook, and Her Brother” (pleasingly evoking the Peter Greenaway art-house classic*) comes out elbows flailing in a rollicking fantasy heist. Gritty, sweary and stylishly cinematic; another three hundred pages in the company of these skilful, mouthy, brave characters would be no hardship at all.

“A Way Out” by S. Naomi Scott evokes comparison with Iain M. Banks seminal Culture series (1987-2021). While this tale of a ship mind in combat is involving, for me, the flashbacks impacted the pacing.

Lou Morgan’s “Amplify” takes us out in style, planting the reader in a claustrophobic SF combat scenario in the style of Aliens or Terminator Salvation (bear with me!), no less in the balance than the survival/annihilation of humanity. Commander Sarah Pale is in charge and leads one last mission against impossible odds. This pacy and exciting story is a highly satisfying closer.

Fight Like A Girl: Volume 2 is a rollercoaster ride, whether careening into the abyss barely holding the tracks, or hauling the reader in ‘our girl’s’ wake to the heights of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Yes, there is plenty of fighting; weapons of choice, ranging from spears, swords, guns and nukes, to spirit power, magic, death rays, and dragons. Repeatedly though, it is courage, insight, empathy, and invention that win the day, and are we not entertained? We most certainly are.

(* – The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 1989)