When Women Were Warriors by Catherine WilsonThis is a good fantasy novel about a young girl growing up in a sisterhood of warriors. There is war, romance, bickering, jealousy, loss, and loyalty

Winner, 2010 EPIC Ebook Award for fiction in the Mainstream category.

When she was a child, the author of When Women Were Warriors happily identified with all the male heroes she read about in stories that began, “Once upon a time, a young man went out to seek his fortune.” But she would have been delighted to discover even one story like that with a female protagonist. Since she never did find the story she was looking for all those years ago, she decided to write it.

In Book I of the trilogy, Tamras arrives in Merin’s house to begin her apprenticeship as a warrior, but her small stature causes many, including Tamras herself, to doubt that she will ever become a competent swordswoman. To make matters worse, the Lady Merin assigns her the position of companion, little more than a personal servant, to a woman who came to Merin’s house, seemingly out of nowhere, the previous winter, and this stranger wants nothing to do with Tamras.

“…Both men and women of all persuasions seem to love these books… Very rare. Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!”
–from a review by T. T. Thomas on Amazon.com

“Think Beowulf–only comprehensible and with girls.”
–from a review on the blog, The Rainbow Reader, by Baxter Clare Trautman, author of The River Within