This month’s theme is Women in Literature. I am glad I extended the deadline, because I ended up receiving lots of interesting posts. I spend a good time reading them, finding new blogs, adding books to my wishlist. And I even got to expand my vocabulary thanks to Darcie!

Let’s start off with some classics. Eva at A Striped Armchair tells us here why Jane Austen’s Persuasion is one of her all-time favorite books. Melissa at Book Nut tells here how she was converted and actually liked Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey when she read it the second time.

John Mutford over at The Book Mine Set also reviews a classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. And no, John, you are not the last person on earth to have this book: I have never read it either, but I do want to!

At Becky’s Book Reviews, Becky shares with us a review of a classic that happens to be one of her all-time favorite books, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale-Hurston.

Charlotte at Charlotte’s Web gives a glowing review of Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel set in Africa during the Biafra war of 1967-70. She thinks this will one day become a classic.

One of the themes that came out of the submissions I received, was Italy. Eva at A Striped Armchair explains here why she loved Donna Leon’s Death at La Fenice, the first in a series of mysteries set in Italy with Inspector Brunetti as the leading character.

Another book set in Italy. Puss Reboots reviews Immortal by Traci L. Slatton about a man in Renaissance Italy who goes in search of the secret behind his eternal youth.

Ravenous Reader also takes us to Italy, where four women who don’t know each other spend a month together in a small castle on the Mediterranean. To find out what happens, read Ravenous Reader’s review of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.

From Italy we travel to Japan. In her review of The Budding Tree - Six Stories of Love in Edo by Aiko Kitahara, Diane at carp(e) libris reviews takes us into Japan’s past and gives us a glimpse in the lives of six women who did things their way instead of the socially accepted way.

Corinne at Littlest Bird takes us to India, as she reviews Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a novel set in India about two sisters coming of age.

Our final stop on our quick around-the-world tour is in Ukraine. At The Indextrious Reader Melanie discusses The Spirit of the Times, a collection of stories by two female Ukrainian writers, Olena Pchilka and Nataliya Kobrynska.

Melanie also reviews another collection of short stories, The Gipsy’s Baby by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a collection of six stories centering around “the lives of young girls and of mature women, all struggling to make sense of a world of disappointment and struggle, both socially and romantically.”

Raych over at Books I Done Read gives us a critical review of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad that made me laugh.

BookGal at Books, Memes, and Musings discusses Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, a novel about how the leukemia of one of the children affects the entire family. She discusses another book by a female writer as well, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore. This is a story about a girl who spends every Saturday at Dairy Queen planning how she will leave the small town where she lives as soon as she turns eighteen.

Scooter at Scooter Chronicles reviews Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. After a colleague recommended the book to him, he was initially hesitant to pick it up, because it sounded a bit like chick-lit. But it turned out to be anything but. Instead a gripping and well-written tale kept him hooked.

Valentina at Valentina’s Room reviews A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, a YA novel about a girl trying to escape her life on a farm in the early 1900s intertwined with the story of the murder of another girl.

Darcie at Reading Derby reviewed Five Fortunes by Beth Gutcheon, a novel about five women who meet at a fatfarm. A fatfarm? This was the first time I heard that word, but I think I can guess the meaning. My Google and WordPress spelling control didn’t know the word either, but then again: they don’t recognize the word ‘blog’ either. Go figure for a blogging platform!

Viva la Feminista reviews Wendy Walker’s Four Wives about four housewives from Connecticut and their secrets. In another post she reviews The Baby Lottery by Kathryn Trueblood, a novel about the influence one woman’s abortion has on her circle of long-time friends.

On to non-review posts. Heather at Errant Dreams discusses how heroines in erotic romances have changed over the years and are more and more resembling real women (scroll down a bit for this part, or read the rest of Heather’s post as well - it makes an excellent point about cooking books!).

J.C. Montgomery at The Biblio Brat describes her favorite female character without actually naming any name in particular.

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room discusses the work of poet Beth Janzen, who according to Litlove “is wonderful at mixing domestic and daily experience in with archetypal female figures.”

Bonus Links
There were a couple of entries that formally didn’t fit in this month’s topic, as it is women in literature, but I decided to mention them anyway, because they discuss such important issues or books that deserve attention or they were just plain good posts.

Gautamy at My Own Little Reading Room discusses The Last Single Woman in America, a collection of essays by Cindy Guidry about, you guessed it, being female and single in the US.

Over at Margaret’s Wanderings, Margaret writes about fear after reading A. Papatya Bucak’s I Cannot Explain My Fear. She also discusses a non-fiction book written by a home-care worker who assists people living with and dying of AIDS, The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown.

The last link of this carnival goes to Dewey’s raving review of Body Drama by Nancy Amanda Redd over at The Hidden Side of a Leave. This is a book for teenage girls that discusses the female body in a down-to-earth way with lots of pictures of real women’s bodies, not of “airbrushed pseudo-people”.

Have fun reading!

The next Bookworms Carnival will be hosted by Reading in the Louvre. The theme is authors and literature from Latin-America. The deadline for your submissions is April 13. You can send them to admin [at] inthelouvre [dot] org.

Finally, a word of “thanks”. This carnival was written with the “help” of my (male) cat Archy, who loves to stand on my keyboard and prefers to lie on it, rather than next to it. Any remaining typos resembling no known language (hjwuryblBGLArtttttt for example) are his doing.