Abstract
Svenja Hohenstein’s 2019 Girl Warriors: Feminist Revisions of the Hero’s Quest in Contemporary Popular Culture is a timely, readable, and well-researched intervention into ongoing conversations about adaptation, representation, and characterization in literature and films about young heroines embarking on quests. Hohenstein focuses on the heroines of three texts –Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, and Merida of Brave – as examples of the “feminist quest heroine” (14) and reads primary, secondary, and tertiary texts about them in order to assert that “retellings of quest stories can reflect upon and offer insights into changing gender norms and concepts of heroism” (30).
