girls disguised as boys

Girls Disguised as Boys

Contributor's Form (list #225)

· BANDIT'S MOON by Sid Flesichman has an orphaned girl dressing up as a boy to ride with the notorious California legend Joaquin Murieta. She does dress as a girl when it benefits him, but is one of the gang most of the time.
· Caroline_ by Willo Davis Roberts , which concerns a girl who runs away from home to follow her brothers to California during the Gold Rush and falls in love with another member of the wagon train
· Cue For Treason Geoffrey Trease (1941) In the novel Kit dresses as a boy to escape an unwanted marriage and becomes a theatrical apprentice on the Renaissance stage. Shakespeare picks this "boy" himself to play Juliet in his new play. One of her fellow apprentices discovers her secret and after assorted adventures, including foiling an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth, the two fall in love. If you think you hear echoes of Shakespeare in Love in this one, you're right!
· Cutting Loose, Mike Lewin's - a girl dresses as a boy, then, as that boy she begins to fall in love with a man (he doesn't sense her feelings). To get out of one pinch, she then dresses up as a man dressing up as a girl -- with more twists and turns after that. She and the man she starts to have a crush on do not meet again until just after the end of the book, so we don't know how he will take the final disclosure.
· I'm Deborah Sampson by Patricia Clapp, and at least one other book about Deborah Sampson, a real person who disguised herself as a boy and fought and was wounded in the American Revolution. What struck me most strongly in these books was the extreme anger and outrage of the men when the person they'd thought of as their buddy was discovered to be female.
· In DRAGONSONG and DRAGONSINGER by Anne McCaffrey, the girl whose name I can't remember is mistaken for a boy several times, but doesn't consciously dress like one.
· Lena_ by Jacqueline Woodson.
· Mulan story - nice version of which was done recently by Robert San Souci (and was the source material for the Disney animation movie)
· Riding Freedom by Pam Ryan is one where a girl dresses like a boy to be a stable hand.
· Seven daughters & seven sons, Barbara Cohen
· Song of the lioness series, Tamora Pierce
· The Black Arrow, Robert Louis Stevenson
· The Folk Keeper, Franny Billingsley's new book, the narrator is a girl disguised as a boy.
· THE GENTLEMAN OUTLAW AND ME ELI by Mary Downing Hahn also has a young girl dressing as a boy to make her way across the old west.
· The Last Silk Dress Ann Rinaldi - the main character, Susan Dobson Chilmark, dresses as a boy to roam the streets in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. Richmond is the capitol of the Confederacy so the book's setting is during turbulent times.
· The Root Cellar, Janet Lunn (1981), a past-time fantasy, Rose Larkin travels back in time to the 1860s and meets Susan and Will, both of whom assume she is a boy at first. Later, Rose does dress as a boy of the period, when she and Susan travel to find and rescue Will, who has gone off to fight in the American Civil War. Rose does find she loves Will, but his time is not her time, and she must return to the present.
· THE WOMAN WHO RIDES LIKE A MAN by Tamora Pierce, isn't Alanna dressed as a boy?
· Yentl the Yeshiva Boy"? Isaac Bashevis Singer

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